1. Introduction
A few weeks have passed since Thatcher’s death, and so I thought it would be appropriate to write something on her from a nationalist perspective. This article, however, aims to offer something different from the usual ‘Thatcher tricked Britons into not voting for the National Front’ line peddled by so many British commentators.
In times of great crisis – such as in the white Western countries in the 1930s, or in the 1970s – economics becomes crucial in politics. A politician will stand or fall on ‘the economy’. So, in the middle of this essay, the economics of the Thatcher era is discussed at great length and detail, simply because of the importance of the subject. Yockey wrote, in Imperium (1948), that British intellectuals of the 19th century (and he counts Marx as being of the British intellectual tradition) were obsessed by economics, and that now, in the 20th century – the century of fascism – the ‘old’ British Idea, of liberalism in politics and in economics, has passed. Or so he declares. At any rate, Thatcher, certainly, was part of that British tradition decried by Yockey, and part of the Thatcher mythos was that her government, and influence, would revive the old, Victorian morality, economics, politics.
Another reason why I have devoted such a great deal of space here to the economic question is that an account is needed of what actually happened in Thatcher’s Britain and the other Anglo-Saxon countries (the US, Australia) in her time. There’s a great deal of economic illiteracy on the subject, both in nationalist commentary and in the mainstream media. Often this sort of commentary takes refuge in vagueness and abstraction: ‘Free markets’, ‘Neoliberalism’, ‘Individualism’, ‘Socialism’, ‘There is no such thing as society’ – all of these terms and phrases don’t mean very much. It’s only when we look at the dominant economic ideas of the time- supply-sideism, monetarism (and Thatcher was, in the first half of her career, a devout monetarist) – that we seem to get anywhere with our analysis.
The opening and closing sections of this essay cover more conventional terrain, i.e., subjects which are more conducive to nationalists, so those who don’t have an interest in monetarism versus supply-side can skip the middle section and read the other two.
2. The anti-Thatcher Left, the National Front, Doctor Who
The British Left hates Britain,and the British working-classes. Which is why their behavior after Thatcher’s death, and their attacks, were so hypocritical.
During the 1980s, Thatcher closed some loss-making state-owned mines (which were costing the British taxpayer what would be billions in today’s pounds) and threw thousands of miners out of work. This destroyed the mining communities, the Left say. They Thatcher for this reason. But they don’t have a word for the British working-classes in British towns such as Leicester, Dagenham, Barking, which have been thrust out and reduced to a minority by Indian and Muslim immigration; they wouldn’t throw celebration parties for the deaths of Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson and the other New Labour types who helped bring about the mass ethnic-cleansing of the British in the past ten years.
(The Left controls British political discourse today, and they police it rigorously. They set the rules of engagement, and one of those rules is that attacks on a politician for their economic policies or industrial relations policies is perfectly acceptable, attacks on a politician for their immigration policies aren’t).
The Left doesn’t mention the fate of these working-class towns because the Left, in actual fact, wants to kill off all the white British in Britain and replace them with a multi-culti mix of Africans, Indians, Muslims. They are succeeding in doing this, and succeeding brilliantly: so why would they attack New Labour’s immigration policy? Socialism and anarchism, in fact, don’t lead to a sense of loyalty towards, or a desire to protect, the British working-classes. It’s naïve to think otherwise.
It’s ironic that Thatcher is denounced for encouraging an ethic of “greed” and “individualism”: many of the immigrants who have flocked to the UK in the past fifteen years are among the greediest people on the planet – for example, the Afghan asylum-seeker who lives in a £GBP1.2 million pound house, paid for by the local council, or the Roma immigrant who earns a vast fortune from selling copies of The Big Issue, pickpocketing and stealing copper wire, and who then remits the proceeds back to Romania or Bulgaria. In general, the hordes of African, Indian and Pakistani immigrants who have swarmed to the UK are out to take all they can get; they don’t care what impact they have on Britain – if they take British jobs (nine out of ten British jobs created under New Labour went to immigrants) or British welfare, public housing, health and hospital services, etc. These selfish and greedy individuals have done far more damage to the British body politic than, say, some (largely fictional) Thatcherite Cockney share trader who works in the City of London.
We know that Thatcher was relentlessly attacked by the Left in her lifetime, particularly in popular culture (I know of plenty of negative depictions and satires of Thatcher from the British comic books of that time, also the TV shows – and who could forget the send-up of Thatcher and her husband at the end of the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only (1981)?). Much of this was because of the differences of attitudes between generations: 99% of the artists, writers, comedians, pop singers were liberal baby-boomers who hated Thatcher because, in part, she was the same age as their parents, and Thatcher reflected their parents’ values and attitudes like no other politician.
In regard to those attitudes, the degree to which things have changed since then is astonishing. Thatcher once denounced a children’s book called Heather Has Two Mommies (1989), about a girl raised by two lesbian “mothers”: Thatcher regarded the book as being a symptom of the insanity of the ‘Loony Left’. Well, now the lunatics are running the asylum, and Thatcher’s attitudes towards Heather and her two mommies are out of date – and, worse, homophobic and hateful. Very few politicians today have the courage to go up against the homosexual agenda – certainly today’s British conservatives don’t – and, according to the British tabloids, British schoolchildren are taught about the wonders of gay sex as part of their school sex education from an early age.
I myself felt some sadness when Margaret Thatcher died: not because I am a neoliberal or New Right conservative (by New Right, I mean the 1980s-era New Right of Thatcher, Reagan, Friedman, Hayek, et al.) – no, it was because Thatcher was the same age as my grandmother and the same type of person; both their ideologies – on conservatism, immigration, drugs, promiscuity, crime, homosexuality and the rest – were a reflection of the times they lived in (WWII, and then the post-war boom period), the experiences which shaped their characters. (It’s a curious thing that the Left always blames the environment when it comes to, say, explaining away the bad behavior of an Afro-American murderer in Chicago or Montgomery, Alabama (‘He couldn’t help it, he was raised that way’) but won’t make that exception for someone like Thatcher). The death of Thatcher represents an end of an era: simply put, the generation of our grandparents is passing away, and so are their values. Thatcher’s generation, almost to a man and a woman, was – on a subconscious or unconscious level – racialist, and wouldn’t have approved of what’s happened to Britain today: the colonization of major population centers, like London, by immigrants from Africa, India and the Middle East. Which isn’t to say that they fought against this colonization: they didn’t. In fact, it was certain liberal members of Thatcher’s generation – Edward Heath in Britain, Lyndon Johnson and Teddy Kennedy in the USA, Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam in Australia – who got the ball rolling when it came to mass non-white immigration in the West, and it was these liberals of Thatcher’s generation who, probably more than anyone else, are to blame for our present predicament. But, on the whole, most of Thatcher’s generation was anti-immigrant, but, instead of acting, they looked on helplessly, while their countries were subjected to changes – wrought from the outside – which they didn’t understand.
Among nationalist commentators, Thatcher is always blamed for stealing votes from the National Front in the 1979 general election. As we know, the National Front (it’s hard to believe today) was the third-biggest party in Britain by the late 1970s, and doing well in the polls; then Thatcher went on TV in 1978, made some off-hand comments as to their being too many immigrants (‘People feel as though they are being swamped in their homes’, ‘We are a British nation with British characteristics’) and then went to win the election the next year in a landslide. The National Front’s vote never recovered, and, according to legend (nationalist legend), non-white immigration went up and up.
It’s hard to get statistics on immigration into Britain before the 1990s, but I did find this graph:
We can use statistics: what about another source? I think one can get a good idea of the level of whiteness in British culture from looking at the history of one of Britain’s longest-running serials, Doctor Who, which began in 1963. The show is a British institution – like the monarchy or the House of Lords – and gives a good insight into Britain and race. If we look at the episodes of Doctor Who from the Thatcher period (starring Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) we see hardly any Afro-Caribbean or Indian actors. In fact, having just about seen all the episodes from that period, I can’t recall any. (No doubt a Doctor Who fanatic can challenge me on this point, and cite such-and-such a storyline with a non-white actor; but the exception proves the rule). If we flash-forward, however, to the present series from 2005, penned by the homosexual Russell T. Davies, the very first scene is of a young white woman character (Rose, played by the popular singer Billy Piper) tongue-kissing a black actor (Mickey, played by the embarrassingly bad actor Noel Clarke). Russell – who also penned the British version of the TV series Queer as Folk (1999-2000) – obviously intended to make a statement: ‘Up yours, Britain! My Doctor Who is about the hip, new, trendy New Labour Britain, where young white British aren’t averse to a bit of coal-burning and mud-sharking’. (The actress Billy Piper, I recall, was married to a black in real life at one time). As can be expected, the new series then went on to gratuitously cast black and Indian actors at every conceivable point – something the old one never did. One episode had the doctor and his companion (a young black woman) go back in time to the Elizabethan era, where they encountered some black people in Elizabethan dress walking down the London streets. The Doctor then turns to his companion and reassures her, ‘You see, things aren’t so different here’. (Those who are familiar with British television will know that this is a typical tactic: depicting the Britain of the past as being at least partly non-white. Often, the British television producers and writers will go to ridiculous lengths to do this: e.g., they made a series of Robin Hood where Friar Tuck was played by a black actor skilled in Kung Fu).
In terms of racial homogeneity, I make the argument that Thatcher’s Britain, or Reagan’s America, or Bob Hawke’s Australia, were much better than the Britain, America and Australia today: and, not coincidentally, the level of national pride in those countries back then was greater (or at least, Thatcher, Reagan and Hawke made a conscious effort to boost levels of national pride).
Did Thatcher steal the National Front by making false promises, and why did the Far Right in Britain struggle in the 1980s? As the American journalist and supply-side economics publicist Jude Wanniski said, during an election, voters are faced with a bundle of issues, and some are more important than others. The issues in 1979 were: industrial mayhem, high unemployment, high inflation, stagnant growth, socialism – and immigration. The latter was important to British voters, then as in now, but simply not as important as the other issues. It’s only now that immigration in Britain seems to be moving to the forefront of the timid British voter’s consciousness, and this is expressed through an increasing vote for UKIP – which is a moderate, anti-EU and non-racialist, non-Far Right party.
3. Advanced Master Class in Thatchernomics
But let’s backtrack to the economy of the 1970s and the 1980s. Why did Britain (along with the rest of the West) enjoy a boom from about 1949 to 1971, and why did it collapse afterwards?
The supply-side analysis is, to me, the most compelling. To the supply-siders, it was sudden hikes in taxes and tariffs which led to the Great Depression; monetary policy (most countries were on the gold standard and fixed exchange rates) had little to nothing to do with it. After the war, Britain, along with the West, signed on to the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, which meant that the pound was fixed to the US dollar, which in turn was fixed to gold. The Depression-era trade barriers were torn down, and the high tax rates from the period of the war were gradually lessened. (In fact, tax rates stayed high on paper – the top rate of income tax in the US was 90% – but hardly anyone paid it. Plenty of tax loopholes were put in place, and the working-class taxpayer received generous credits and rebates – e.g., the US paid a rebate of $USD600 to families with dependent children, which was a handsome sum at the time). British tax rates were sharply progressive, but this only became a problem when Britain periodically devalued the pound (to ‘boost exports’ and ‘create jobs’), which had the effect of bringing about inflation and pushing British workers into higher and higher progressive rates.
The entire system exploded when Nixon took the US – and the world – off gold in August 1971. Nixon had become convinced – under the influence of Jewish-American economists such as Milton Friedman and Ben Stein – that US economic growth could be increased, and unemployment reduced, if the US Federal Reserve were to print more money and create inflation (this is the Bernanke and Obama doctrine of today – today it is called ‘quantitative easing’). The gold standard was an obstacle to this, and so had to be removed. The Fed stopped exchanging gold for US dollars (and vice versa) in 1967, suspended the gold standard ‘temporarily’ in 1971, and then announced that the suspension would be permanent in 1973. The value of the US dollar – and all the currencies fixed to it, including the pound – fell dramatically afterwards, and the price of gold, along with oil, land and other commodities – shot up into the stratosphere. The great inflation and stagnation of the 1970s was underway. (When a currency loses value in terms of gold – that is, it takes more of a currency to buy an ounce of gold – this is inflation. E.g., if the gold price goes from $USD35 an ounce to $USD850 an ounce, the US dollar has lost value, and so buys less goods. Prices in dollars go up – which is inflation).
We can see, from the following chart, what happened to the British pound in terms of gold in the 1970s:
Jude Wanniski wrote an amusing editorial for the Wall Street Journal in 1975, describing the Britain of that period:
Britain, it is regularly noted, always seems to somehow “muddle through” despite the best efforts of its government. One reason has been that, in their imperfect understanding of economics, the income redistributors have always overlooked a few opportunities to confiscate wealth. Through these tiny cracks in the tax laws, otherwise known as “loopholes,” the private economy has always been able to spy enough incentive to keep producing. As a result of the current economic crisis, however, the Labor government made a determined search for these tiny cracks and has found most of them.Incidentally, Doctor Who ran a story called ‘The Sunmakers’ in 1977, which satirised the Labour government, and the confiscatory British tax rates, of that period.
Because most of what businesses pay their managers in increased wages is taken away by the government in taxes, there have been exotic schemes to permit managers to live off business perquisites. These are being closed up. A year from now, employers will be taxed on any private medical insurance cover they receive, the government having determined that private medical treatment is a great incentive to keep producing. Mr. Healey also promises to tighten up on capital-gains taxation, and has already closed an accounting loophole whereby corporations could avoid some taxation by selling shares they owned and taking the loss, and buying them back the next day.
The British government is now so clearly headed toward a policy of total confiscation that anyone who has any wealth left is discounting furiously at any chance to get it out of the country. Mr. Healey wisely halted the importing of gold coins, which could be rather easily smuggled out, and he’s slapped a 25% value-added tax on jewelry, along with radios, televisions and electrical appliances. The result of all this is of course, to bring investment to a screeching halt by drying up both available funds and potential returns. The price can only be still slower economic growth, and still lower living standards for all the British, rich and poor.
Goodbye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you. Since we’re following down the same road, perhaps we’ll meet again.
http://www.polyconomics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1740:manic-keynesianism&catid=50:2001
What was the solution to Britain’s – and the West’s – economic problems in this time? The answer – according to the supply-side economic model – was simple enough: cut those tax rates and go back to gold. As we know, in the 1980s, we saw a dramatic cut in those rates, but no return to the gold standard. At the time, a return to gold wasn’t politically feasible. (Now, after fifteen years of bad monetary policy, a return to gold is at least being discussed, which is an improvement of sorts).
The price of gold, and inflation, went up and up until 1980, but thereafter both fell, and fell sharply. From the chart above, we see a sharp appreciation of the British pound in the early 1980s: gold goes from over £GPB600 an ounce to £GPB400 an ounce – a revaluation of at least 66%. Prices for oil and other commodities also went down and the value of the pound went up; the same happened in the US, where the gold price dropped from $USD600 an ounce to $USD300. This led to the disastrous early 1980s recession in the US and UK which, at the time, was the worst since the end of WWII. (Australia experienced it as well – the Australian dollar was fixed to the US). An appreciating currency, and falling commodity prices, leads to falling prices elsewhere throughout the economy: this is deflation, which can be every bit as detrimental as inflation. (Australia’s economy – which then, as now, depends on exporting commodities – was wrecked by the sudden collapse in commodity prices).
What happened? According to Wanniski, the Reagan and Thatcher tax cuts (Reagan cut the top rate from 70% to 50%, Thatcher, 83% to 60%) led to a revival of economic activity and consequently, a huge demand for dollars and pounds. Unfortunately, neither the Fed or the Bank of England were willing or able to supply currency in the quantities demanded; so demand for pounds and dollars outstripped the supply. When that happens, the value of the pound and the dollar went up, up, up. An increased value of a currency, such as the pound, means that prices in terms of pounds drop. Hence deflation…
This wouldn’t have been a problem under the gold standard: if dollars were in short supply, gold could have been presented to the Fed and exchanged for dollars, and the Fed would have been able to supply the US economy with all the dollars needed. But this wasn’t the case in the early 1980s. So both the US and the UK – and Australia – experienced a brutal deflation. These countries only experienced recovery when their central banks eased up and began providing sufficient quantities of currency. As we can see from the above chart, the UK gold price rose again after that deflationary spell.
The supply-siders opined that the UK recovery wasn’t as quick as it could have been, because, even though Thatcher had cut income tax rates substantially, she had nearly doubled the VAT (value-added tax) from 8% to 15% to ‘make up for lost revenue’. Certainly, the UK economy was quite weak in the 1980s, even in comparison to now, and it was in this period – of the early 1980s recession – that Thatcher gained her reputation as a devotee of harsh austerity.
At the time, the doctrine of monetarism dominated monetary policy in the UK, Britain and Australia. Milton Friedman’s theory was that inflation and economic growth go together, and that inflation can be controlled by controlling the money supply – which is an aggregate measuring the total sum of a currency in circulation. If a central bank increases the money supply, it will increase inflation, economic growth and employment; if a central bank decreases it, it brings about deflation, recession, unemployment. (On the surface of it, this looks like the supply-side doctrine sketched out above, but it isn’t. The supply-siders don’t believe that the amount of money in circulation can be measured with accuracy, and it’s gold and commodity prices which provide the best indication of how much ‘liquid’ – that is, currency – there is in circulation. What’s more, the monetarists believe that you can’t have economic growth without inflation, while the supply-siders do). Britain in the early 1980s had high unemployment, a recession, falling prices and a central bank doctrine of targeting the money supply: a perfect fit for the monetarist economic model. Thatcher saw it and believed that it was good. Her opponents – on the Left and within the British Conservative Party – didn’t agree; a catastrophic recession was too high a price to pay for lower CPI figures. But Thatcher was of the type who relished confrontation, and, what’s more, was not the sort of person to yield to pressure – ‘You turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning’ – no matter how unpopular that made her. (It was around this time that the Thatcherite slogan was coined – ‘There Is No Other Way’). Even so, monetarism as a stated policy was quietly abandoned by the mid-1980s – the Australian Reserve Bank, for example, gave it up by 1985 – and Thatcher even declared, by then, that she had never believed in such a thing.
By 1983, as we can see from the above chart, the Bank of England had relented, and Thatcher won re-election that year. She enjoyed a number of policy successes – the campaign in the Falklands and the defeat of the miner’s strike of 1984 among them – and went on to become Britain’s longest-serving prime minister: so why did she fall?
The answer for that lies in America. Reagan, by 1986, had cut the top rate of income tax from 50% to 28%, the top rate of corporate tax from 46% to 34%, but, as a compromise, raised the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 28%. A supply-side analysis would have predicted that a sharp increase in the capital gains rate would have led a slowdown in growth: capital gains are growth, and the more one taxes of something (in supply-side theory), the less one gets of it. But income tax rates in the US were incredibly low – the lowest since the 1920s – and this carried the US economy along. Bush Sr., however, raised the top rate to 31% and at the same time hiked property taxes sharply. Given that the US recovery was at a delicate stage, this was enough to tip the US into a brief recession and unfortunately, the UK and Australia followed the American lead. In 1989, the top rate of income tax in the UK was cut from 60% to 40%, but the capital gains tax was raised from 30% to 40%, and property taxes were raised too. In Australia the same year, income tax was cut from 60% to 49%, but substantial loopholes in the capital gains tax – which had only been introduced in 1985 – were assiduously hunted down and closed up, as were loopholes in property tax. The result was the death of the 1980s economic recovery, and the end of the careers of both Thatcher and Bob Hawke, both of whom were deposed in coups by their own parties.
What are the political lessons of all this? In general, the economy doesn’t have that great effect on politics – witness the re-election of Obama in 2012, after four years of stagnant economic growth, high unemployment and high (concealed) inflation – unless a country is at rock bottom. It’s then that politics becomes a precarious balancing act. Thatcher and Reagan were nearly destroyed, politically, by the savage recession and deflation of the early 1980s, but fortunately for Thatcher, monetary policy eased by 1983. The conservative Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was not so lucky: deflation hit hard in 1982-1983, and his successor – Bob Hawke, Australia’s answer to Reagan and Thatcher – was elected in early 1983 just before the Reserve Bank of Australia began easing its monetary policy. The electorates of Australia and the UK weren’t willing to tolerate austerity (this time fiscal austerity) at the end of the 1980s. Thatcher’s and Hawke’s respective parties understood this and so threw their leaders overboard. Since then, elections in the US, UK and Australia have been decided mainly on non-economic issues.
(We do see, however, an echo of eighties politics today, insofar as that the Cameron Tory government has become unpopular because of austerity – cuts to welfare and public services, and also hikes in the rate of income tax and VAT. It’s quite possible that Cameron may lose the next election).
4. Evaluating Thatcher and the Eighties
Quite a few commentators in the media have mused on the question, ‘If Thatcher were prime minister now, what would she do?’. It’s an almost impossible question to answer. Thatcher and Reagan were of their time – not only as individuals, with their having lived through (what were by today’s standards) a tumultuous set of life experiences – but also politically. That is, their ideas and approaches just wouldn’t have suited today, any more than Hitler’s or Mosley’s (despite the fact that many German nationalists view Hitler as a saviour, I think Hitler would be deeply confused and disoriented by today’s Germany, had he been brought into the future by a time machine). But I can say with confidence that Thatcher would not have tolerated the Roma sellers of stolen copper wire, or the Afghan asylum seekers on British welfare, or the mass influx of Polish immigrants taking British working-class jobs… The same goes for the gay marriage business, and today’s obsessive, totalitarian British political correctness, which leads to people being arrested for drunken comments made on trains.
There were many bad things about the 1980s: something people don’t remember much was the incredible fear that pervaded the popular culture and politics of the time – the fear of nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union; another thing was the level of casual political violence at the time (e.g., the Brighton Hotel bombing of 1984, which missed Thatcher by inches, and would have been headline news for years were it to happen today, but, at the time, was taken quite lightly, as something that happened every day). Overall, though, I remember it as being a splendid time, especially for British popular culture: the pop music, the comic books, the films and TV shows from Britain were mostly terrific. It was a time of joyous innocence: that’s the message conveyed by the popular songs of that period (although, of course, the time wasn’t so innocent, or joyous, in reality). Thatcher was, in large part, responsible for this – which is to say, she brought about the conditions for this resurgence in British creativity.
The bottom line is, however, that her political problems – industrial mayhem, impotence in the face of Soviet power, double-digit inflation, a weak pound, confiscatory tax rates, loss-making nationalised industries – are not our problems, that is, not the problems of our age. There is only one political problem from her era which has endured and has not been solved: British Trotskyite and liberal trade unionists, teachers, public servants, journalists (especially in the BBC), priests and Labour Party and Liberal Democrat members. It is this class of people who are bent on destroying Britain, and so far, have been doing so successfully.
One can speculate and come up with an alternative scenario: suppose that Thatcher had never come to power and conservative, right-wing Britain had followed the example of Argentina’s much-despised junta of 1976-1983 and launched a ‘Dirty War’ against Britain’s Left? A few thousand ‘disappeared’ British leftists by the mid-1980s would have made the rise of New Labour in the 1990s impossible. (This is the nightmare scenario sketched out in Alan Moore’s dystopian comic book series V for Vendetta (1982-1989): Moore is a baby boomer, a Thatcher-hater and a self-proclaimed “anarchist”). I myself would lament, severely, the passing of the Tariq Alis, Tony Blairs, the staff of the Guardian and the rest, and perhaps, every year, I would light a candle in the memory of all these fine upstanding British men and women who were killed by the evil British junta. But, looking at it from a cold, logical, inhuman perspective, it follows, as a matter of course, that because of the lack of such a ‘Dirty War’, the British may be on the verge of losing their country.
It goes without saying that a Thatcher would never have done such thing, because Thatcher, like her mentor Enoch Powell, was a liberal democrat and a parliamentarian; secondly, because neither she nor anyone else could have foreseen how powerful the Left in Britain would become – and how dangerous.
