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Dissidents in Britain
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19120 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
4,970 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
In 1979 a political earthquake shook Britain out of a dream, which had hynotized both ruling parties since the Second World War. The 'New Jerusalem' (Fabian rhodomontade for the Welfare State) was sinking into a hideous mire of trade union tyranny, political chicanery, economic failure, and public cynicism. In a spasm of electoral revulsion, the British elected a prime minister the like of whose dominance had not been seen in peacetime since William Ewart Gladstone, who was known as the 'father of his country.' Margaret Thatcher came to office as a radical Tory whose approach to economics and political action frightened even those in her own party who, looking over their shoulders at an electorate they despised and distrusted, clung to their paternalistic version of the post-war Fabian illusion.
During the next decade Britain was transformed; after some thirty-five years of soft-centered electoral pandering, the public discovered a prime minister who, in the cant journalistic phrase, was a conviction publican, who meant what she said to the extent of acting on it and refusing to compromise. In the last century Beatrice Webb remarked that there are two kinds of Tory: the sort who are afraid of the electorate and the sort who are not. Until Mrs. Thatcher was elected, it seemed that the latter species was extinct in Britain. The discovery that it was alive and well in the person of Thatcher was a refreshing sensation, and the response was a series of landslide electoral victories.
Nostalgia for the New Jerusalem remained strong among 'Wet' Tories and that part (the greater part) of the artistic and journalistic establishment, which supported Labor. Such people loathed this acerbic woman, with her ferocious denunciations of the collectivist sentiments, which had dominated Britain for so long, her friendship for the United States, and her implacable hostility to Ulster terrorists and their Irish irredentism. The problem was that there was no political channel to express this loathing. For most of the eighties the Labour Party was crippled by internal ideological squabbling and ridiculous leaders like Michael Foot.
Toward the end of the 80s, Neil Kinnock took over as Labour's leader; the extremists who had eviscerated his party were (formally at least) expelled from the party or disarmed at the annual conference. At the same time, intractable economic and social problems and political inertia were beginning to erode public confidence in Thatcher's leadership. The peculiar British habit of winging over social imperfections deliberately magnified (above all on television) by hostile journalists and public figures like Edward
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