Schrödinger’s Thatcherism

Barely a week goes by without some politician attempting to invoke Margaret Thatcher as a kind of bête noire for the state we’re in. Conservative wets, Novara Media types, post-liberals, and a smorgasbord of other rent-a-gobs thunder away against Reform UK or the Conservative Right while warning darkly of “reheated Thatcherism”.

It’s an airy bromide, not helped by Liz Truss’s brief tax-cutting experiment, which is endlessly wheeled out as proof positive that “Thatcherism” means incompetence, bond-market collapse, and the underfunding of the energy price guarantee. Back on Planet Earth, Liz Truss’s programme bore almost no resemblance to Thatcherism at all. In fact, it didn’t bear resemblance to anything. By this time the Conservative Party had long since ceased to have anything so vulgar as an ideology. Consequently, beyond a marginal cut to the top rate of tax, there was no serious commitment to building, no meaningful deregulation, and parts of it depended on higher levels of immigration than even the Boris-era surge. Her planned £150 billion bung to households over spiking energy bills was hardly a typical Thatcherite measure.

Our political class “officially” disagrees about many things. But don’t be fooled by the adversarial theatre of the dispatch box, famously two rapier-lengths apart. It is a Potemkin disagreement; in the same way the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea has different parties. The theatre conceals the one assumption that is almost universal — Thatcherism was bad, an aberration, and any attempt to revive it, and by extension the general entrepreneurial spirit of the 1980s, is a fool’s errand. It can only be “reheated”.

Even those who style themselves as today’s radicals – groups claiming to offer a serious counter to British decline – can’t quite bring themselves to escape this mental plantation. They’ll talk up planning reform and growth, perhaps even tougher enforcement against fare-dodgers or tube graffiti, but any suggestion that we might have something to learn from her premiership is strictly verboten.

A recent example comes from Shiv Malik (not picking on him especially), of Looking for Growth, currently trying to interest investors (and presumably politicians) in a “forest city” east of Cambridge (as detailed by Andrew Orlowski in the Sceptic Ep.61). Malik recycled the familiar myth that Margaret Thatcher somehow “wasted” Britain’s North Sea oil, contrasting this with Gro Brundtland’s (Norway’s prime minister) supposedly farsighted stewardship of Norway’s resources.

In this telling, Norway’s political class heroically ring-fenced oil revenues in a sovereign wealth fund, patiently compounding interest for decades, while Britain frittered its windfall on tax cuts and consumerism, leaving “little tangible to show for it”. Had Britain simply copied Norway, the argument goes, we would now be far richer.

It’s a neat morality tale that originated on the Left, likely because it provides socialists with a convenient excuse for the remarkable economic growth that followed Thatcher’s reforms. She got lucky, the argument goes, and instead of saving that windfall for a rainy day she spent it on “consumerism”.

This, of course, is deeply misleading. Thatcher was not choosing “consumerism” over a sovereign wealth fund; she was dealing with a busted, over-taxed, capital-fleeing economy, with punitive marginal rates that actively discouraged work and investment. Sound familiar?

In any case, this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The UK didn’t “fail to think long term”. It had a far larger population, an ageing welfare state, collapsing heavy industry, and legacy debts Norway never had to carry. To pretend the difference comes down to moral fibre or national impatience is, to use a technical phrase, bollocks.

One reason why Thatcherism is so relentlessly attacked is because it’s no longer around to defend itself. In any case, even if Margaret Thatcher had magicked up a British sovereign wealth fund, it would not have been guarded by Viking runes and Fenrir. No Parliament can bind a successor. The idea that a vast, liquid pot of oil cash would have sat untouched for decades is adolescent. It would have been raided within five minutes of a New Labour government taking office. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would have approached it like Alastair Campbell at a free bar: identity cards, crap overpaid Labour mayors, “borrow to invest”, regional development agencies, and whatever other managerial baubles were fashionable that week. Brown would have given a sanctimonious lecture about prudence while emptying the till with both hands.

But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, it was a missed opportunity. The same people now wailing about “what Thatcher should have done with the oil” would never have drilled it in the first place. They would have left it in the ground, and we know this because that is precisely what successive governments have done. As Daily Sceptic readers know, Labour and Conservative administrations alike have effectively regulated out of existence new exploratory drilling for much of the last 15 years in their deranged campaign for “Net Zero”.

Then, in an Olympic-level exercise in gaslighting, they turn around and argue that North Sea extraction is “unviable” anyway. This is Schrödinger’s Thatcherism: damned for what she did, damned for what she supposedly failed to do, but never allowed to open the box and test the counterfactual — because that, inconveniently, might expose the whole story as bunk.

If this tendency were limited to a bunch of harmless saddo policy wonks terrified of being aired by their dates from Clapham, it probably wouldn’t be worth this article. But what makes this misreading genuinely harmful is that the Thatcher government was confronting crises in the 1970s that look uncomfortably familiar today: uncontrolled immigration, vast public spending, sclerotic and dying industries (universities, to name one), and near-terminal political dysfunction.

Rather than a taboo, Margaret Thatcher should be a lodestar for the bright, ‘build things’ tendency on the Right. Nowhere is this clearer than the regeneration of the Docklands — a genuinely fascinating episode in modern British statecraft. Under Reg Ward, head of the London Docklands Development Corporation, a hollowed-out stretch of industrial scrubland was transformed by deliberately outflanking a declinist Civil Service.

Some 85% of the Docklands was developed with private capital. The state set the conditions, facilitated business where it could, and then, having done its job, quietly abolished the corporation in 1998. That is what competent public-private partnership actually looks like.

Britain’s problems today are not obscure, nor are they hidden beneath a surface of “not great, but fine”. We no longer have a reserve currency or a sterling area masking liability. We have no sprawling overseas commitments demanding constant geopolitical attention. What we lack is a set of balls.

Ward turned derelict dockland into a new financial district full of global banks, repurposed a disused industrial railway into what we now know as the Docklands Light Railway, and built an airport for good measure. That didn’t require sermons about values or endless consultations, just deregulation, out-of-the-box thinking, and a willingness to tell the bureaucrats to get out of the way.

Do that again, and the growth everyone claims to want will not need to be summoned. It will appear on its own.

Felix Hardinge is a writer who works in financial services. Follow him on X here.