For the many: tackling left-wing myths around Thatcher’s Britain.

The Daily Mirror and other assorted left-wing publications, particularly after her death in 2013, like to paint Mrs. Thatcher as a saviour of the rich and the enemy of the poor – but that completely ignores what really happened in the eleven years she held this country’s reins. At a time when the Conservatives of today seem to like nothing more than to look back on the leadership style of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, it would be more useful to look back at the people she aimed to drive forwards in her time in office – to look at what was done, rather than how it was done.

The key pillars of Mrs. Thatcher’s relationship with the skilled, working class of Britain during the 1980s surround two key areas – ownership and trade union legislation. The choice of these two in particular may appear either obvious or strange depending on you, the reader, yet they are all connected around that idea of short term gains for long term losses – another of those damaging and misleading myths around the Britain that Thatcher created.

Right to Buy – a policy which provokes quite controversial debate in modern day Britain (then again, pretty much every part of the Thatcher legacy – or just politics in general – does now). It’s billed as being responsible for housing shortages across local authorities in Britain and denounced as one of the biggest electoral bribes by a British government in generations. The Labour Campaign for Council Housing, last year, called on the Labour Party to commit to ending the scheme altogether – following Scotland and Wales’s example.

But these are just classic examples of the failure to grasp the facts of how Thatcher and Thatcherism has helped working class people to integrate further into society over the years. Home ownership in Britain soared from 55% in 1979 and continued to rise throughout the Blair years to its 71% peak in 2003. Even though, there has been a slight decrease to 63% by 2017 – that’s still a net positive from when the Thatcher Revolution began. Within her eleven years in office alone, the proportion of people who owned their own home rose some 15%. Those figures represent people, people that had – thanks to the Attlee government’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act – thought themselves to be imprisoned within the web of the socialist state for life, with little to leave their children after death. The Thatcher government took the concept of home ownership, a pipe dream for millions of working-class people in our country before 1979 and turned that dream into a reality. No other government has the same claim to the enfranchisement and upwards mobility that Mrs. Thatcher’s has from Right to Buy. As for the housing shortage, figures from Shelter England (sourced from the MHCLG) demonstrate that the trends in the construction of social housing are very similar to the level of private houses being built. It’s not unreasonable to claim that NIMBY-ism, rather than Thatcherism, is at the root of the social housing shortage.

It wasn’t just their homes that people could now have a decent chance of calling their own thanks to Thatcher’s Britain, but also having a say in their place of work thanks to the discounted process of privatisation that took the country by storm, especially in the mid-1980s. More often the arguments for privatisation surround their effects on service, choice, and competition in Britain – quite rightly, but there’s less on the effect it had for those who owned those shares. Employees at state bastions such as British Telecom acquired a voice that the trade union movement simply couldn’t provide them – a voice they could use themselves, rather than a representative with a Marxist chip on their shoulder.

Privatisation is often portrayed by the left as a process of growing elitism, but it was the opposition to privatisation at the time which is most telling. Harold Macmillan – not a leftist, but a very useful example nonetheless – famously called it a “selling of the family silver”, the financial community of the day fought the government tooth and nail against privatisation – they didn’t want the “wrong” sort of people owning shares in their companies. Yet it was Thatcher and her administration that wanted the wrong sort of people to own shares – normal people, normal workers, who had just as much right to ownership as any other man or woman in our country. The left were infuriated. “Why?” you ask. Because Thatcher had given their target audience something they could never hope (or ideologically want) to do – she gave them a place in our country, and the ability to improve their lot and have a say in the system. Popular capitalism was frustrating to the left because it was just that – popular, after all, the rise in share ownership from 7% to 25% was no mean feat.

The miner’s strike of 1984-5 is, rightly, regarded as the clash which saw the transformation of industrial relations in Britain. The trade unions had made Britain virtually unmanageable in the late 1970s and Thatcher was forever haunted by the downfall of the Heath government some five years before she took office herself. The reforms to trade union power in the Eighties often surround a narrative of destruction – the destruction of their autonomy, their membership, and – most damagingly for union bosses themselves – their bank account balances. The left see Thatcher pressing her handbag against the open wounds of the NUM and other unions hard enough to bleed them dry and claim their carcasses as the trophies of her success.

But what happened was far more sensible than that group would ever let on. The Employment Acts of 1980, 1982, and 1990 as well as the Trade Union Act of 1984 are often vilified by radical factions of the trade union movement as evidence of the uncaring element of Thatcherism which condemned striking miners to starvation and union members to the clutches of the state. Actually, it ensured that those caught up under Labour’s archaic closed shop rules were compensated (before it was finally banned in 1990) so that eventually – regardless of union membership – people could work where they wished without any obligation to join. It also increased accountability amongst the membership of trade unions by requiring a secret ballot before strike action. Given the traditions of intimidation within trade unions and the societal shame that came with being a “scab”, ballots that weren’t secret could often have their results decided and ensured before the first hand of the vote was raised. Finally, union bosses could no longer do as they wish – they actually had to follow the rules of their union and take care of their membership! Rather than acting as useful tools of the state to curb strikes, these pillars of industrial relations law ensured greater freedom and transparency. Of course, one should expect such things in a democracy anyway. This was no destruction of the trade union movement, but rather the dawn of a new, and sensible era – one in which unions, employers, and governments could work with one another in a reasonable fashion. This is what Labour and Conservative governments had been trying to achieve for decades, but it was Thatcher and her team who actually achieved it, the presence of envy is noticeable amongst critics.

So you see, as much as the left wishes to carp and cry shame at these elements of the Thatcher Revolution, their displeasure has a reasonable explanation. Envy. Envy at the conversion of millions of ordinary, working people in Britain to the Thatcher cause, those who had been amongst the Labour Party’s natural supporters were now voting Conservative. The 1987 election saw the lowest share of the middle-class vote going to the Conservatives since the First World War, yet Thatcher still won by a landslide. How? Well, with the support of her new following – her working class following. Those who felt proud to be British again, those who now had the real chance of owning their own homes and having a say in the place in which they worked. Those who could now depend on their trade union following the rules on which they were established and listening to their membership on whether they wished to strike or not. Thatcher created a new Britain of accountability, freedom, ownership, and democracy which the working class could buy into – and for that, the left shall never forgive her.

Shay Stone (The Communications Director, Regent’s Park) is a second year undergraduate reading History.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, under licence