Stealing the Proles
Readers who followed this recent thread on Margaret Thatcher and her critics may enjoy Martin Durkin’s documentary, available on 4oD here, Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary. Durkin’s film not only offers a useful history lesson, it’s also a nimble shredding of quite a few leftist myths.
Its highlights include contributions from Madsen Pirie, who really ought to be on TV more often, and some comically disingenuous squirming by Mary Warnock and Neil Kinnock. During the Kinnock interviews, pay close attention to Durkin’s right eyebrow. A lot can be said with an eyebrow.
Bill had to listen – with increasing anger – to a series of sneering remarks about white working-class voters in Basildon, and how stupid they were.
‘Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean — power over people, power to the State.’
Margaret Thatcher, March 15, 1986.
David
Thank you for alerting us to the Durkin film. It was an excellent polemic. I think the key moment in the film is that referred to several times here, when Kinnock is presented with an open goal: did Thatcher make Britain a worse place? And he’s quite unable to score. So this man, one of the most prominent politicians and statesmen of our time (as Joan pointed out above, he almost became Prime Minister) when given the opportunity to summarise why he has spent his entire political career – decades! – railing against this woman, finds himself unable to make even the broadest and blandest assertions.
The sweet irony, of course, is that the man who was regularly characterised as a windbag, provides the most eloquent summation of everything he stands for by giving us … silence.
I was about to say that this is a potent example of the dishonesty of the left. But I think it’s truer to say that this is a potent example of the dishonesty of the political establishment. A reminder, if one were needed, that our constitutional arrangement should be one in which we keep those bastards under our thumbs, rather than the other way around.
As Maggie’s great buddy one said: “We are a nation that has a government. Not the other way around”.
I wish.
Horace,
“We are a nation that has a government. Not the other way around.” I wish.
Given how little the electorate thinks of politicians in general, it does seem odd that quite a few people want to give those same politicians even more power over our lives, and in increasingly intimate and unaccountable ways. The promise of more “free” stuff will always seduce some people, especially those who don’t much care about who actually has to pay for it, or whether that arrangement is equitable, or even plausible. But as Thomas Sowell points out, “When politicians say, ‘spread the wealth,’ translate that as ‘concentrate the power,’ because that is the only way they can spread the wealth.” And a quick rummage through the archives will reveal any number of “wealth spreaders” – Richard Murphy, for instance – who prefer the idea of a “courageous” parental state that happens to have an electorate, preferably a compliant and dependent one.
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For readers who weren’t around during Thatcher’s time in power and have no memory of what came before, this edition of Uncommon Knowledge, in which Peter Robinson talks with the journalist and author John O’Sullivan, may also be instructive.