And while all this was going on, soft-speaking and kindly-looking Reagan was somehow able to convince his people it was morning in America and the future would only get better. He also helped ensure that his legacy would be forever burnished by right-wing media channels by eliminating the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Thanks to Reagan, TV and radio news in America no longer had to present a diversity of viewpoints or to be fair or balanced. So we got unfair and unbalanced right-wing channels. And unreality TV. And all that that brought with it. Reagan may have told us it was morning. But really he was marching us into the night.
* And it was also later revealed that he had been secretly passing on names to the FBI.
† Reagan would eventually deny he took advice from astrologers. But as Governor of California in the 1960s he told the press he read Righter’s column every morning and he even issued an official proclamation of appreciation to Righter. At the press conference where Reagan claimed ‘no policy or decision in my mind has ever been influenced by astrology’, a White House spokesman was also forced to admit that Nancy Reagan’s interest in astrology had at the very least influenced Ronald’s scheduling of speeches and trips.
‡ ‘Milton Friedman I love,’ said Laffer. ‘How can you not love Milton Friedman?’
Date of birth/death: 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013
In a nutshell: The wicked witch of Western capitalism
Connected to: Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, David Cameron
According to popular mythology, Margaret Thatcher invented Mr Whippy soft-serve ice cream. The story goes that when she worked for Joe Lyons towards the end of the 1940s, this clever young industrial chemist developed emulsifiers that enabled her employer to pump air into the cream and more easily transport and sell it across the country. It isn’t true. Like many of the ideas attributed to Mrs T, this one actually originated in America. Soft-serve has been around since at least the 1930s. But it’s easy to see why the image has stuck. It symbolises so much about her. It was a way of giving customers less of the good stuff, at less cost and for more profit, while telling them to like it.
Also, Mr Whippy ice cream is cold. Freezing cold.
But the metaphor breaks down at the final stages. Soft-scoop ice cream remains popular with the punters. It’s still a successful recipe. Most of the other things Margaret Thatcher worked on have ended in disaster.
A typical Iron Lady soft-scoop scheme was her Milton Friedman-inspired decision to privatise energy companies like British Gas. The wheeze was that she would allow members of the public to buy a few shares. She thereby suggested that she was letting them take a stake in the industry, rather than just selling them back something they already owned – and which their taxes had already paid for. After a huge advertising campaign and profitable launch, the scheme worked out in typical fashion: the chairman and major shareholders quickly gave themselves huge pay rises, prices steadily increased – and the service got steadily worse. There was a gradual descent into the rip-off* culture we are left with today.
And so it went, through all her major initiatives. There was the sell-off of council housing: initially pleasing those who were able to buy their own homes, eventually a major contributor to the ongoing UK property crisis and also the suffering of the younger generation, largely unable to afford their own homes. There was privatising ICI: causing over 15,000 job losses in the North East. There was the sell off of British water providers: bigger bills, more leaks, ever more sewerage pumped into our rivers.
The pattern is clear. But Thatcher’s legacy is as much about the psychological as well as the economic and environmental changes she caused. The lasting scars also come from the way she brutally crushed unions in industrial disputes like the miners’ strike. The way she used the police as a political army, sending mounted coppers to smash into peaceful protesters at flashpoints like the notorious Battle of Orgreave. The way she tore the heart out of communities around the UK.
Talking of hearts, meanwhile, she taught us to be mean. She told us: ‘There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women and there are families.’ Following this unfriendly precept, she supported notorious dictators like Augusto Pinochet and secretly sold arms to Saddam Hussein (while publicly condemning his gassing of his own people). She also lied and deceived. She claimed to be cutting taxes, but actually increased the tax burden for all but the top-rate of income tax payers – and ensured the UK’s wealth gap grew ever larger. Finally, she opened us up to economic adventurism. Madsen Pirie, the chair of one of Thatcher’s favourite free-market think tanks, the Adam Smith Institute, once gloated: ‘We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.’
One of the Institute’s proposals was the Poll Tax in 1990 – a single flat rate per capita tax on every adult in the UK. Under this system, pensioners in tiny houses suddenly found themselves expected to pay more than rich people in huge houses – and its gross inequalities provoked riots and civil disobedience. Thatcher’s reign was soon over.
When she came into office, she had famously said: ‘I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”’
She failed us all, on all counts. Which explains why the other big myth that grew up around Mrs Thatcher was that they were going to bury her on Ibiza. Why? Because so many people wanted to dance on her grave.
* ‘Ripping off’ was a term used by a cross-party investigation into energy companies in the UK in March 2017. A report commissioned by David Cameron had discovered that between 2012 and 2015, customers had been made to pay at least £1.4bn a year in ‘excessive prices’.
Date of birth/death: c. 1028 – 9 September 1087
In a nutshell: Thug got lucky
Connected to: The Queen,