PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, reflects on the Margaret Thatcher Centre's Academic Symposium which David Starkey and he spoke at.
The ongoing impact of Margaret Thatcher on British politics is truly remarkable. When you consider she was born a century ago, left office thirty-five years ago and died over a decade ago, the phenomenon is unprecedented in the modern era.
A wide range of activists, academics and thinkers gathered at Churchill College, Cambridge earlier this week to consider her legacy, evaluate (and maybe even re-evaluate) her impact and attempt to apply her thinking to Britain’s current plight.
A full day of discussion, analysis and debate certainly helped me to order my thoughts about the Iron Lady and even to change some of them.
By the end of the day, I concluded that Thatcherism isn’t an ideology as such (and neither, really, is conservatism).
In a captivating lecture (which yielded a standing ovation), David Starkey put forward the idea that conservatism often faces the dilemma of whether to embrace change or seek to restore a previous prevailing order.
The Conservative Party as we now know it came into existence in 1835 with Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto. Peel – who Starkey suggested was perhaps Britain’s most talented Prime Minister ever – fully embraced the 1832 Reform Act. The Tories were not going to attempt to unravel it in any way whatsoever.
This was a wise and necessary move. Although Starkey questioned whether the same was true of the party accepting the post-war welfare state settlement when Churchill returned to power in the 1950s.
By the 1970s, the Conservatives again faced a choice. To accept the economic managerialism (the man in Whitehall knows best) or to reject it and return to a more buccaneering free market economy. Margaret Thatcher decisively chose the latter path and thereby saved Britain.
Although Thatcher is commonly associated with being an economic reformer – and she was – a good degree of her analysis was about governance and institutions. Industry needed to be privatised and seek profits, not be run by the state bureaucracy. Similarly, trades unions had effectively acquired a constitutional role in the running of Britain. This needed to be reversed.
We face a similar choice today. The Tory administrations from 2010 to 2024 went along with the Blairite constitutional settlement, indeed often doubled down on it. Quangos, expert committees and the judiciary were all granted an enormous extension of their powers. The Conservatives bought into this in much the same way that Macmillan et al bought in to managed economic decline six decades previously.
If conservatism is an approach towards deciding what to retain and what to restore, Thatcherism is a reminder that choosing the latter route is often a necessity and requires radicalism, courage and extensive surgery.
Today’s Thatcherites are those who believe a reset of our constitutional arrangements is an overriding necessity to bring about national renewal and are determined to follow such a path.
It won’t be an easy ride, but it’s a battle I think we can win.
Keep the flag of freedom flying.
PS. I am sending this missive from sun-kissed Majorca and am taking a few weeks off. I hope you all get the chance for some relaxation over the summer months too. The next few editions of the newsletter will be in the capable hands of my colleague, Andrew Allison (who never rests nor sleeps!)