Friday 19th April

Ever since the economic collapse of 2008/2009 the right wing has been a bit shamefaced.  Here was a debacle brought about by greed and manipulation of the so-called ‘free market’, and no-one could really defend it.  But slowly bit by bit the blame has been shifted to the regulators, even though everyone in the City was crying out for ‘light touch’ and self-regulation in the years since the ‘Big Bang’ in the mid-eighties when most restrictions on trading and capital controls were lifted.   The other excuse for the current deficit and ever-increasing debt was that Labour spent too much under Blair and Brown, even though George Osborne and Cameron in opposition promised to maintain public spending at the same levels.  In fact of course it was Labour saving at least three banks from collapse, and incidentally, our whole economy crashing, that caused the deficit.  Not over-spending but a drastic fall in revenue caused by the global crash.

And now of course, the situation is so dire that hardly anyone can defend it, let alone praise the current policies.

So, how beneficial was Margaret Thatcher’s death to the right wing.  They could treat the whole thing as a huge and protracted party political broadcast, reminding people – or actually telling lies, about how wonderful she was, how her policies saved Britain.

And true, the economy was miraculously altered in 1990 from that in 1979.   The strange thing is that this miraculous change also happened in America, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and in fact all over the Western world.  And of course in most of those countries they didn’t have the class warfare and destruction of manufacturing and mass unemployment that we had here.  The truth is that the economic turnaround was a result of factors completely outside any Governments control.   Thatcher was not a genius, just a nasty woman in the right place at the right time.

I wonder though, now that the dust may be allowed to settle, whether History will eventually tell a different story than this party political broadcast on behalf of the right wing.