Posted on 04/26/2005 1:41:17 AM PDT by tjwmason
When a politician from one party starts praising one from another, start counting your spoons. Yesterday, Gordon Brown was treacly in his celebration of Margaret Thatcher. She knew something about how to run an economy, he indicated, and she "would never have countenanced" the "reckless and irresponsible" economic policies of today's Conservatives. Patricia Hewitt, another late arrival at the shrine of the Blessed Margaret, declared that the Iron Lady had always put the question of how to run the economy first whereas Michael Howard's Tories "run away from it".
I am just old enough to remember something similar in the late Seventies when Conservatives would decide to go all misty-eyed about Aneurin Bevan, the Labour founder of the National Health Service. What would "Nye" (as, with strictly posthumous familiarity, they styled him) have thought of the disgraceful way the NHS was now run by his party's heirs, they would ask. The fact that the great man had regarded the Conservatives as "lower than vermin" was not mentioned.
What is the point of the tactic? To widen your own appeal while narrowing that of your opponent. You, in Thatcherite New Labour, are hard-headed about economic matters and know how to do your sums. You, the Bevanite Conservatives, are the truly caring party, rather than the trade union wrecker who wants to "play politics with people's health". Whereas they - the post-Thatcher Tories, post-Bevan Labour - are the mere husks of a once-great party.
And when Mr Brown deploys this tactic there is what political correspondents like to call "a fresh twist". Just as it is good for him this week to praise Lady Thatcher, so it is dangerous for her own party to do so. Labour wants this election campaign to be a rerun of 2001. In that campaign, Lady T spoke up for William Hague with the declaration: "The Mummy's back!" It cheered a hall full of Tory loyalists, but it allowed Labour to play up the notion of pip-squeak Hague, the teacher's pet committed to the return of Thatcherism by other, inferior means. Labour wants to goad Mr Howard into something similar.
So the Conservatives, having learnt their lesson, will not oblige Mr Brown. They won't ask Lady Thatcher to tread the boards for them and, she, in her 80th year, will be happy not to do so. She has confined herself to acts of support for individual candidates (including, ahem, Howard Flight, before things went wrong), and a personal intervention on behalf of the Scottish regiments.
But the strength of the Chancellor is that his self-positioning as the heir to Thatcher economics is not obviously implausible. He may never have sat at her stockinged feet when she kicked off her shoes, poured whisky and debated economic theory late into the night, but he did learn a thing or two from the precept "know thine enemy".
The first thing was, ensure monetary stability. He has arguably done this better than Mrs Thatcher, by granting independence to the Bank of England. The second was the need to keep government spending and borrowing under control. She invented the Medium Term Financial Strategy. He has the "golden rule" of balancing the current budget over the economic cycle, and the "sustainable investment rule" which governs the relationship of debt to gross domestic product.
If he hadn't kept these two things in his head and - much harder - got them into the heads of his colleagues, Labour would certainly not have won more than one election, and maybe (think of the John Smith shadow Budget in 1992) not even that.
But where Gordon and Margaret differ utterly is on the question of what all this is for. For her, it is the way of reining back the power of the state to set people free. For him, it is the means of directing that power in such a way that it does not derail, but grows ever stronger. The effect of Mrs Thatcher's tight control was to reduce the government's share of the economy by an average of half a per cent a year. The effect of Mr Brown, since he threw off the shackles of the Tory spending plans in 1999, has been almost exactly the reverse. Government took 39 per cent of the economy in 1999: it takes 42 per cent today. If Labour wins again, it will take more still. The result is a structural deficit which goes against Gordon's own creed.
We pay, of course. Mrs Thatcher got the top rate of income tax down from 83 per cent to 40 per cent, and the standard rate, in the Tory years, fell from 33 per cent to 23 per cent. Mr Brown has held the top rate, dropped the standard rate by only a single percentage point in eight years, and put up almost any other tax you can imagine. Most notably, from the point of view of a property-owning democracy, he has attacked home owners through stamp duty and the council tax, and he has undermined the value of private pensions which it was Mrs Thatcher's constant effort to foster. Today, more than 55 per cent of pensioners receive means-tested benefits, a proportion which grows the whole time because the reward for saving for yourself has disappeared (savings made up 10.5 per cent of national income in 1997, 5.5 per cent today).
If the British economy were a garden, Mrs Thatcher's technique would be to clear the weeds so that a thousand flowers could bloom. Gordon Brown's method would be to force serried rows of approved vegetables into ever-greater production until the soil were exhausted.
But is erring Gordon right, all the same, that the Conservatives have rejected their own legacy in their economic policies? He is certainly wrong. The Tories are devoting two-thirds of their proposed £12 billion savings to reducing debt rather than tax cuts for classically prudent Thatcherite reasons. They have actually been bolder than Mrs Thatcher, in the only election she fought from opposition, in offering specific, costed tax cuts rather than broader aspirations. And, like her, and unlike Gordon, they will deregulate.
Why, then, do polls suggest that Labour now "owns" the economy as an issue? Two simple reasons. The first is that Mr Brown has been restrained enough to delay the economic deluge until after this election: another year, perhaps, and voters would really have noticed what is going wrong. The second is that the Conservatives are stronger in their heads than in their hearts, and so their words do not resonate. The need for a free economy is not, in the end, a technical, managerial question. It is to do with the life, the universe and everything.
Brown may have buried Lady Thatcher's legacy, but it was John Major that dug the grave.
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