Are we the people we were?

Thatcherism might have been a blip in a long downward trend

Daniel Hannan is Director-General of the Institute of Economic Affairs

A horrible suspicion has been growing in me since the end of lockdown in 2021. What if the post-war declinists were right? What if Britain has seen its best days? What if Thatcherism was a dead cat bounce, a blip in a downward trend that started in the early twentieth century?

The earliest political memory I have is of Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. I was seven at the time, and 18 when she was ousted in 1990. I still remember Simon Hoare, now an MP, applauding in the TV room of the Oxford Union when the news came through, and repressing the urge to biff him on the nose.

Did growing up during the Thatcher Risorgimento, I now wonder, give me a false notion of our national trajectory? Were the 1980s our equivalent of the brief period in the mid-sixth century when Belisarius conquered Italy and Justinian seemed to have restored the Roman Empire to its ancient glory?

All the elements of decline seem to be in place. We can see that the state is failing at even its most basic functions, yet we keep demanding more from it. Even before lockdown, our expectations of government were becoming unrealistic; but the madness of 2020 served to convince us that there really was a magic money tree.

When the restrictions were eventually lifted, we resented the idea of going back to the office. People who had never before claimed handouts had learned how easy it was. State employees came to assume that being “at work” meant having Mondays and Fridays at home and being able to pick their children up from school every day.

Photo by Kristina Gadeikyte Gancarz on Unsplash

The growth of the state is matched by its almost comical incapacity. It can’t issue visas promptly or keep illegals out. Its regulations make it hard to open a bank account, build a house or employ staff. It spends hundreds of millions of pounds on a rigged Covid Inquiry that is working backwards from a pre-ordained pro-lockdown conclusion. It buys off public-sector strikers, and then wonders why they strike again. It incentivises adults to claim sickness benefits and children to claim personality disorders. It lets muggers out of prison early, and locks people up for posting the wrong thing online.

And We The People? We encourage it. Our first response, on encountering a problem, is to mutter that “they” should do something about it. We expect help with our energy bills, our mortgages, our childcare. We say we want growth, but we will not countenance voting for a candidate who would raise the pension age, build on the green belt, admit skilled immigrants, privatise the NHS or frack under our fields.

I try to console myself with the thought that similar things used to be said in the 1970s. Britain was held to be in terminal decline with a culture of low productivity. In the event, it turned out that that culture was a product of poor incentives, and that when those incentives were tweaked – when taxes fell and enterprise was encouraged – people’s behaviour changed.

Might such a thing happen again? It’s conceivable, I suppose. But whereas the opposition to Margaret Thatcher came mainly from trade unions, the opposition to comparable reforms today would come from within the state machine: from the civil service, the quangos and, not least, the judiciary.

A government that wanted to get the country growing again would have to take on and defeat those entrenched opponents over many years. It would need voters behind it who were both radical and patient, supportive of controversial reforms and yet understanding about the delay before those reforms yielded tangible gains.

Do we have such voters? Are we the people we were? I wish I could answer with confidence.