THE THATCHER BUBBLE has burst. The long pretence that Margaret Thatcher and her ministers would bring new hope to the British people is at last exposed. The opinion polls show an astonishing swing to the Labour Party. A Labour government, which so recently seemed impossible, is now a real prospect.
The polls reflect a deep and angry shift of mood. The anger has flared up over the hated poll tax, which attacks everyone except the rich and has succeeded in uniting opposition to the Thatcher government for the first time. From the north of Scotland to the Isle of Wight, the biggest movement of civil disobedience in Britain this century has persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to resist the tax by not paving it. Their mood was summed up by a woman who defied a court summons for not paying her tax in terms which echoed the great protests of the poor, homeless and unemployed a hundred years ago:
You’re asking us for more money – us, the scum or rebels as you call us, who work hard for every penny. I want food in my stomach and clothes on my child’s back.
In sudden disarray, the government tries to back off the poll tax. Huge sums of public money are sought as ‘sweeteners’ to bring the level of the tax down. But the new anger does not stop at the poll tax. It has become the symbol of all the other Tory plans and policies.
The huge privatisations which were meant to sweep away bureaucracy and bring down prices have set up new bureaucracies even more offensive and remote than their predecessors. Basic utilities such as water, electricity and gas have been delivered into the hands of greedy businesses which go about their profit-making without even a glance in the direction of parliament. The obsession with home ownership has resulted in a catastrophic fall in housebuilding and the steepest rise in homelessness in any decade for the past 60 years. The ‘virtuous cycle’ which Thatcher’s chancellors have trumpeted ever since 1981 – the idea that under new Tory guidance the economy would settle down to permanent and ‘virtuous’ growth – has been exposed as the same old stop-go, inspired by the same old virtues of squeeze and cut and grab. If workers in the early and mid-1980s were afraid to go on strike because of their mortgages, they are now afraid not to go on strike because of their mortgages. The great new property-owning democracy is revealed as a hoax: a transfer of ownership and power from landlords to moneylenders.
The poll tax completes the picture of a government hell-bent on further enriching the class which it represents at the expense of the people who create the wealth.
Margaret Thatcher herself has not been ashamed to describe her economic system as capitalism. Capitalism was a dirty word in the heydays of the ‘fair-minded’ Tories like Harold Macmillan and even Edward Heath. Thatcher, Ridley, Major and the others have dusted it down and pushed it out again. So the new fury against the Tory government is also a fury against capitalism. People do not want any more privatisation, any more high interest rates, any more homelessness, any more unemployment, any more ruthlessness and greed in high places. They don’t want any more capitalism.
But what do they want? The traditional alternative to capitalism is socialism. Here people drawback, bemused. Capitalism is obviously detestable – but is not socialism detestable too? Is it not socialism that the people of Eastern Europe have just rejected in a series of political convulsions the like of which has not been seen in Europe since the kings departed after the First World War? Was it not socialism in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that plunged the common people of Russia into the most unspeakable poverty and deprivation? Is not socialism, on this evidence, a system of society which is even more bureaucratic, unfair and irresponsible than capitalism?
If so, is the best we can hope for just a muddled re-hash of what we have already? If socialism is what the people of Eastern Europe have overthrown in favour of capitalism, should we not accept that capitalism is here to stay, and try to reform it a little?
The point of this book is to rescue socialism from the awful caricature which has been made of it in Russia and Eastern Europe; to remember what the point of socialism was when it was first put forward; to restore to it its democratic essence; and to hold out a real socialist alternative to the defeatist apathy that now paralyses the left.
Forty years ago, George Orwell wrote a book about the future. It was titled 1984. One feature of the terrifying society he imagined was that words were used by governments to mean their opposites. The chief purpose of the Ministry of Truth was to tell lies; of the Ministry of Love to erase even the slightest affection between human beings. Orwell’s 1984 was and is a magnificent denunciation of a government which calls itself socialist while pursuing the most relentless campaign against socialism. But there is in the book no hope of change. Orwell’s nightmare apparently goes on forever. There seems no possibility of resistance to the awful dictatorship he outlines.
The real 1984 has come and gone, and although things are bad they are nothing like as bad as Orwell suggested they might be. The regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, which as a socialist he detested, have been overthrown by their own subjects. In the period immediately after the overthrow, of course, socialism is a hated word. It represents everything horrible about the old society. In the same way, if Orwell’s 1984 society had been overthrown, words such as ‘truth’ and ‘love’ would have been hated words too. Gradually, however, words come back to their real meanings. Truth is the opposite of lies; love is the opposite of hate. And socialism is the opposite of capitalism and therefore entirely different from what it has been held up to be for 50 years and more.
The argument in this book is that socialism, real socialism, is the only alternative to capitalism; and it is still worth fighting for.
Last updated on 5.2.2005