Red-Headed

One of the things that always interested me about Maggie Poppins is that she seemed to have no sense of humour & lacked empathy. She was a science graduate. She may have been able to collect & collate data intelligently, but she seemed unimaginative & didn't appear to understand that reality actually exists outside of a test tube or a petri dish. I think that this basic, almost autistic, inability to empathise or even sympathise with the majority of the people she harmed with her failed policies was a major part of her downfall. I also believe that her clinical & scientific approach to economic theory was a great factor in why she misinterpreted Frederich Hayek & Milton Friedman's theories so badly. Science, although ostensibly empirical, can also be paradigmatic. Scientists will postulate theories & tenaciously hold onto them even after their time has passed. Einstein, genius as he was, could not accept the Copenhagen Interpretation & quantum physics of Neils Bohr. Although no one can argue with most of the theory of relativity, concepts like Bell's theorem & quantum entanglement genuinely concerned Einstein. Even Stephen Hawking believes that the Grand Unified Theory will eventually be proved & gravity, electromagnetism & the weak & strong forces at a subatomic level will be all brought together in one nice neat equation. An equation as beautifully simple as E=MC2 perhaps. Einstein, however, failed *to achieve this in his lifetime. Bohr would have probably claimed that he was barking up the wrong tree.

There was an old joke about Thatcher that she lived 'just to the right of Barking'. Barking being a suburban area of London & 'barking mad' being an English expression for someone obviously insane. Thatcher's science background probably led to her interpreting the anarcho-capitalist & monetarist ideas propounded by Milton Friedman & Frederick Hayek as being genuine scientific treatises. In fact, economics is not really an empirical science or discipline as much as it is an art form. No one would be crazy enough to reintroduce classical 19th century economics based on laissez faire principles in late 20th century Britain surely? After all, they failed the first time round.

No one until Margaret Thatcher tried to implement them anyway. The result was a disaster for Britain & we are still having to live with her failed legacy. Even Hayek claimed she had misinterpreted what he wrote. She would often cite Adam Smith, yet seemed to just cherry pick anything from him that seemed to support her own tendentious but corrupted view of Friedman & monetarism. She seemed oblivious to Smith's own caveats against deregulation & many other warnings.

This dogmatic interpretation was her downfall eventually. I believe that the primary mistake she made was in interpreting theory & speculation as scientific fact. It takes an imagination to be able to separate the two. It takes an imagination to understand suffering. It was something she so desperately lacked. If she had had her 'wits about her' as the saying goes maybe she would have understood better. Even her paraphrasings from Shakespeare (undoubtedly written for her) were not particularly witty & her delivery of them seemed stilted & artificial. It takes imagination to be witty. It takes imagination to compromise. It takes imagination to value society rather than despise it. It takes imagination to exercise cognitive dissonance.

Failure was inevitable. Unfortunately, millions have to live with her unimaginative legacy.


"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
~ Margaret Thatcher

Rich coming from someone who squandered North Sea Oil revenue on tax concessions for the wealthy.

“Divisions of society are detrimental to all classes.”

“Civilisation is the humanisation of man in society.”

“Civil society rather than immature economics of laissez faire was necessary for progress in civilisation.”

~ Matthew Arnold

According to Maggie Poppins there really was no such thing as ‘society’. She divided British society more than at any time since WWII.

“Democracy is unstable as a political system & nothing more, instead of being, as it should be, not only a form of government but a type of society & manner of life which is in harmony with that type.”

“Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows.”

“Capitalism encourages acquisitiveness & thereby corrupts everyone.”

~ R.H. Tawney (Economic Historian)

Thatcher promised less government interference & yet probably presided over the most over centralised government Britain has ever seen. She destroyed the unions so that there was no labour balance & deliberately instigated high unemployment as she knew that unemployment benefits are only a small percentage of the social security infrastructure funding. Pensions & child support being the majority. She knew high unemployment would keep inflation down & did not care about the millions of ‘moaning minnies’ whose lives she had destroyed. There is no empirical evidence that high inflation leads to low growth. Many Victorian & contemporary Pacific Rim economies have had high inflation & high growth rates. Wrong again Maggie. The acquisitiveness her policies subsequentally engendered have done nothing to create social cohesion in Britain & we now live in a more socially divided society since WWII.

“Utilitarianism claimed to be scientific & to have superseded moral casuistry; in fact it had only given a superficial cogency to a collection of moral sounding slogans”

~ J.S. Mill

The Benthamite laissez faire utilitarianism that Thatcher promoted was discredited over a hundred years ago. She didn’t actually do anything new. She claimed that social darwinism was scientific & therefore beyond any moral questioning. She didn’t care about the consequences of her actions to the majority who were destroyed by her policies. At the end of the day, her misunderstanding of monetarism & disregard for the warnings of Hayek & Adam Smith about total deregulation led to her often repeating the same old tired formulas. These so nauseated her own party eventually that they got rid of her.

"I'll pick you up in my car."
"Oh, you have a car?"
"No, I used to have a car & a chauffeur, but
I couldn't afford both, so I got rid of the car."
"What good is a chauffeur without a car?"
"I need him to drive me to work."
"How can he drive you to work without a car?"
"It's-a-okay. I don't have a job."

~ Chico & Groucho, Duck Soup

This from 'Duck Soup’ kind of says it all about Thatcherism.

I think that this Mary Poppins like analogy & perception of her descending magically out of nowhere on an umbrella to solve the economical problems of the world are a fiction invented by the right-wing in the United States. It seems that they desperately need to discredit many of Obama's policies & need something or someone to use as an example of a deus ex machina of some fashion. They seem to be fixated on Thatcher for this reason & by some desperate act of 'will to power' wish to make her mythology become an actual reality. It wasn't the fault of socialism that the Winter of Discontent happened, it was just a symptom of the economic downturn caused by the the 1973/4 oil crisis which started in the October of '73. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia) proclaimed an oil embargo. It was OAPEC's decision to 'punish' the US for its support of Israel that kick-started the economic decline among other factors. This inevitably had a knock-on effect on Europe. In the early 1970s there was even a possibility of petrol rationing & drivers were actually issued with ration books, although they were ultimately never used.

The fact is though that much of what is discussed about Thatcher really is egregious mythologising. Just as Chomsky believes that language & syntactic structures, including every sentence, can have a 'surface structure' & a 'deep structure' I believe that the same principle can be applied to mythology. Any sentence in the English language presupposes a familiarity with certain words or phrases & their cultural relativity. You only have to look at British & American idiomatic expressions & how they can be often misunderstood to see what I mean by this.

An American cyber-friend I was writing to, to my astonishment, had no idea of what the expression 'swings & roundabouts' meant to an English person. In other words, you need a cultural awareness to understand even basic concepts in language fully.

It appears that there is a certain amount of 'surface structure' mythology spoken about Thatcher in the US & this has been most probably appropriated & culturally reinterpreted by the right-wing. Thatcher has now become something in the right-wing American psyche that she actually never was in the first place. Her dogmatic single-mindedness & need to fight everyone who disagreed with her has been interpreted as a strength. When in fact her myopia & lack of empathy were weaknesses which eventually led to her downfall. A similar thing could be said about Hitler (or any other dictator like Thatcher's busom pal Pinochet) in that the dogmatism, bigotry & lack of empathy for human suffering were perceived as strengths rather than the weaknesses that they were.

Either way, the right-wing anti Obama-ites are going to have to fixate on a different mythological figure because it was game over for Maggie (Poppins) Thatcher & her failed policies in 1990.

She didn't even live happily ever after.


The writer Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) had a theory that many opinionated or dogmatic personalities get ‘fixed’ at a certain period in their lives & they find it difficult to accept new or different paradigms. He referred to it as ‘imprinting’ and believed that it normally happened when someone was relatively young and had their first peak experiences or a major life event in the manner described by the psychologist Abraham Maslow.

If Thatcher was born in 1925 it would mean that she would be about 21 when she graduated from Oxford in 1947. This was also around the time she would have started working for a living in her field of chemistry. Interestingly in 1948 she was turned down for a job at ICI for apparently being ‘headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated’. By this time she had also read Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’.

Before she even became an undergraduate British life and society was very different to what it was before the outbreak of war. The class system was much more divisive, there was no real social security infrastructure and people had to ‘know their place’ in life. Social divisions were rigid and inflexible. Life for most of the working classes was not easy and this was considered not only normal but almost divinely ordained. The social and economic divide was also maintained between the industrial north and the southern regions, the Capital and the Home Counties. This would all have seemed normal to Thatcher and she, according to Wilson, would have been 'imprinted' into this paradigmatic social order.

However, in 1947-48 things changed drastically. Clement Attlee's Labour government introduced the Transport Act and the railways were nationalised. The British House of Commons decided to nationalise mines and the Bank of England was nationalised. Attlee’s government also nationalised other transport systems including the canals, sea and shipping ports and the bus companies.

After the Second World War the idealistic Attlee government also decided to eradicate poverty and implement the ‘Welfare State’ a term coined by Archbishop Temple in 1941. It was an incredibly bold and ambitious plan and at the time had many detractors. William Beveridge proposed a system of national insurance which should be extended to all citizens “from the cradle to the grave”. This was eventually implemented by the Attlee ministries in 1948. It was the first in the world. It was dubbed ‘The New Jerusalem’ inspired by the famous line ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land’ in the introduction to Blake’s ‘From Milton’.

Thatcher would have witnessed all of this at a very important time in her life. Her way of life and the privileges that she and her middle class upbringing enjoyed would suddenly have seemed to be under threat. The parallels with what is happening in the United States with ‘Obama-care’ are too similar to be ignored.

Her subsequent need to reverse or destroy much of what Beveridge, Nye Bevan & the Attlee government achieved could be possibly explained in a need to return to a time when she originally had been ‘imprinted’, as Robert Wilson would have said, in a time before the NHS and other social improvement programs that had been instigated by the government of Clement Attlee.

She failed on so many levels that even her own party got rid of her.

She was ultimately reduced to sitting in the back of a limo crying her eyes out on national television after the Tories conspired to remove her permanently from office. The so called *'Iron Lady' crying like a big baby for the world to see. A fitting ignominious end if you ask me.