Stealing the Proles

John,
It was extraordinary to watch. Every time Kinnock spoke he was either transparently evasive or transparently disingenuous.

Channel 4 still had to call it a “controversial thesis”.

Jonathan,
Brilliant skewering of lefty snobbery and hypocrisy.
I think that was one of the film’s most well-made points – the sheer snobbery and presumption that was aimed at her and, more to the point, at the people who voted for her. As when Jonathan Miller sneered at suburbia, patriotism and “commuter idiocy,” which is to say, those poor idiots whose taxes pay for just about everything, including arts subsidies for loftier souls like Jonathan Miller. Meanwhile in the Guardian, the novelist Frank Cottrell Boyce tells us that “Margaret Thatcher never liked her country.” He then asks, “She may not have provided the arts with cash, but she certainly gave them plenty of material. Why didn’t this work? Why wasn’t she mocked out of power?” Which again suggests a dogged failure to comprehend the obvious.
It reminds me of Durkin’s previous film Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story – available here – about debt, public spending and the weight of the state. (It’s worth seeing just for the blathering of the TUC’s intellectual colossus Brendan Barber. Doing a Kinnock, as it were.) The Guardian didn’t like it at all, though reviewer Lucy Mangan managed to disapprove without addressing (or apparently understanding) any of the points the film actually made. Our fearless Guardianista admitted, “Obviously I have not the time, space or qualifications to consider the validity of [the economic arguments] here.” Yet despite this handicap she still managed to insinuate that those same arguments (which, remember, she didn’t address or understand) should be dismissed as improper and unimportant. Given her admission of ignorance, you can’t help wondering exactly how she knew this.

It’s funny how the left were basically saying the same thing as the old aristocracy – “Know your place”.

Steve,
My only complaint is that Durkin didn’t expose Toynbee’s snobbery / elitism as he did with Mary Warnock;
You could always console yourself with this.
I actually hoped for more of Toynbee too, and critics will of course say Durkin’s film is partial, which it is, and that it omits other less flattering details, which it does. But it conveys, quite vividly, why Thatcher was indeed both an outsider and very popular, and it reminds the viewer of just how grim and absurd the reality that faced her (and us) was. The UK’s slide into socialism had prompted Helmut Schmidt, then German Chancellor, to describe Britain as “no longer a developed country.” Given the number of people, especially younger people, who seem to regard Thatcher as some inexplicable act of vandalism, the context Durkin provides is quite timely.
[ Added: ]
As Durkin says,

The extent of nationalisation under Labour and Tory governments was breathtaking. The ports and the docks and shipbuilding were nationalised; the trains and the railways; freight transport; canals, ferries and buses were nationalised; the airports and airlines; car, bus, truck and airplane manufacturing; the coal industry, the oil industry, the gas industry, the steel industry; water and electricity were all nationalised; telecommunications were nationalised; much of the computer industry; radio and television were nationalised; the government even took over some pubs and the travel agent Thomas Cook. Britain – once the world’s leading capitalist industrial nation – became one of the most state-owned of any country outside the communist world.

And yet these state-subsidised monopolies were for the most part hopelessly inefficient, all too often unreliable and in many cases billions in debt. With no real incentive to improve and few, if any, consequences when they failed to meet even basic expectations, degradation and decline were inevitable. And this wasn’t just a matter of numbers that didn’t add up. It was also a matter of culture and mindset, a “managed decline” that was psychological too.

Editing… editing…

oh crud … the youtube vid has been yanked and the 4oD link is unavailable in my area …

Is there any other way of watching it? Youtube and 40D are not working for me either.

Every time Kinnock spoke he was either transparently evasive or transparently disingenuous.
Kinnock might have been our prime minister…

Jonathan Stuart Berkey, Darleen, Dom, jones,
What ever are us Yanks to do?
Apparently it’s not available in Canada either. If I find another upload, I’ll post a link. I’d imagine the production company Wag TV may soon release a DVD.
*goes off to hit David’s tip jar*
Your host endorses this behaviour wholeheartedly.
Nube,
Still no sign of a review in the Guardian, Observer or Independent.
Well, you can see the problem for leftist reviewers. Whatever the film’s shortcomings and omissions, it shows a pre-Thatcher world that many on the left romanticise or simply pretend didn’t happen. And it shows why a great many working class people wanted to escape it and voted for change, repeatedly. Like the excellent Tory! Tory! Tory! (available here), Durkin’s film shows where socialism – actual socialism – had taken us. A society in which the big political debate was all too often about the rate at which statism should grow and the speed with which the country would sink into destitution and irrelevance. A society in which your ability to watch a film in the cinema, or to get to work, or even to eat with the lights on, was at the mercy of a few hundred militant communists and their credulous followers. And I’d imagine quite a few student ‘radicals’, perhaps even some of those celebrating Thatcher’s death via Twitter on their smartphones, would find it rather shocking and not at all flattering.

I like the part (around 50 minutes in) about those who objected to the emergence of wealthy proles with their new cars, “loadsamoney” and social mobility, which some on the left found terribly vulgar, thereby mirroring the old landed Tories. On which point, Madsen Pirie notes how the complaints from the left could seamlessly shift from ‘Thatcher will make people poor’ to ‘Thatcher is making people flashy and materialist.’ And then Janet Daley asks an obvious question: “Is it worse to be vulgar than to be poor?” The following section is interesting too, on the demographic change in Labour Party membership from traditional working class to middle-class public sector workers. And as Durkin notes, when taxation is the reason for nearly half your wages disappearing, in order to bankroll a bloated state and middle-class lefties in the public sector, socialism looks rather less benign.
[ Added: ]
I’ve never been an unequivocal fan of Thatcher, not by any means, though my appreciation for the things she got right has increased over the years. What interests me is how the reactions of the left, especially in the arts and academia, often revealed more than intended. Much of our intellectual and cultural establishment despised Thatcher – vehemently and ostentatiously – especially if she was winning the argument of the day. There were endless jibes about her populism, “philistinism” and “anti-intellectualism” – often from people who assumed they had some proprietary claim to the term ‘intellectual’, as if it were a synonym for ‘pretentious middle-class pseudo-socialist’. Decades later, the same self-flattering jibes were still being made by much the same people. And it occurs to me that our cultural and intellectual betters sneered at her – and sneered at those who voted for her – for some reasons they couldn’t publicly admit – i.e., that they’d been made to look irrelevant. Their place in the conventional hierarchy, above thee and me, had been thrown into doubt. They simply weren’t needed onside for her to reach the electorate.

There was a rather amusing review of this in this morning’s Metro. Histrionics barely covers it.

I had to laugh at Baroness Warnock sneering at Margaret Thatcher’s taste in clothes. Warnock looked like a bag lady/hobo

Agreed, David. Rage at a blouse with a bow is just the kind of rationality one expects of a professor of moral philosophy.

@Dr Cromarty
Unfortunately, these people are now the Establishment.

T Dickinson,
Have a glass of something on me, David.
It’s that or I’m buying a copy of Giant-Size Man-Thing.

Just tweeted by Peter Tatchell: “Thatcher supported economic dictatorship of the rich.”
Oh my. And from a man who once played cheerleader for Maoism.

At what point can we describe leftism as ‘divisive’?
You’re being divisive. Stop it at once. In the interests of unanimity your views must be realigned with those of our socialist betters. Then there will be no more divisiveness, which was All Thatcher’s Fault™.

Leftism is never divisive, it is progressive. Its most excitable proponents like Mao, Stalin, Castro et al may have killed or jailed large swathes of their own populations, but True Socialism Has Never Been Tried and leftwing thinkers like Pilger and Chomsky will no doubt prove that the United States of America and neoliberals are to blame. Divisiveness, like greed and racism, is a right wing trait and the sooner we accept that the quicker the socialist Jerusalem will be built. Except not Jerusalem of course, that’s too Christian and dead white male-ey. Mecca perhaps?

Thoroughly enjoyed the documentary, David. Thanks for pointing it out. The snobbery of the Left is not a pretty sight and the last section of the Kinnock interview was comedy gold.

Richard,
The snobbery of the Left is not a pretty sight and the last section of the Kinnock interview was comedy gold.
Glad you liked. It does offer a perspective that’s shared by quite a few people yet not often explored by our betters. And yes, the Kinnock scene does have a marvellous ‘rabbit-in-headlights’ quality. Re the snobbery, Janet Daley put it well in her Telegraph column:

It is very difficult to explain to people under the age of 40 what this change [in attitudes to social class, encouraged by Thatcher] has meant… At the time of Dr Miller’s widely quoted remarks in which he likened Thatcherism and its supporters to “typhoid,” a BBC television arts producer I knew who had grown up in a lower-middle-class family said: “Hey, that’s my mum and dad he’s talking about.” But presumably it never occurred to the Left-wing aristocracy that anyone in their own professional circle might himself have risen from the respectable working class or the truly accursed one just a notch above it. That would be because the idea of “rising” at all was faintly ridiculous and contemptible.

Maybe that’s why many left-leaning academics and cultural figures despised her so. Whatever her sins, she made them look rather at odds with their own professed virtues.

sackcloth and ashes,
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.
I’ve heard similar stories and encountered similar attitudes. I suppose the snobbery and contempt fits with the self-flattering arrogance of leftist thinking generally. Say, the belief that one is entitled to confiscate even more of other people’s earnings, and that one should tell the unenlightened proles how to live and think correctly (what with their ‘false consciousness’ and all). Or better yet, do the thinking and deciding on their behalf, lefties being so much smarter and more radical than people who disagree.
Yes, smart people like the Guardian’s Giles Fraser, who attempts to shock his readers by admitting:

I voted for Margaret Thatcher. We all decided down the pub that this was the best way forward. Forget the Labour party and their pathetic version of incremental change. What was required was nothing less than a revolution. And in order to bring this about, things had to get a good deal worse. That was the logic: a Thatcher government would trigger a general uprising against the inequalities created by free-market capitalism… It was a bizarre measure of the extent to which I hated Thatcherism as a philosophy that I was prepared even to vote for Thatcher to defeat it.

And some on the left still wonder how it can be they lost to her, quite dramatically, three times.

sackcloth and ashes,
Any decision by working class voters to support the Tories, for example, or for a woman from Grantham to choose her own path towards emancipation without paying homage to Dworkin or Greer will be seen almost as an act of personal betrayal, rather than as an opportunity for some political introspection.
It helps if you don’t regard the working class electorate as victims, pets or property. [ Added: ] Over the years I’ve had several exchanges with people who were, as they put it, “amazed” that I, a gay man, low-born and a bit arty, am not a big fan of the left. On more than one occasion I mentioned the left’s history of economic idiocy, the tendency towards dogmatism, the urge to coerce, etc. I wasn’t rewarded with much of a reply, but in each case the subtext was hard to miss: “How dare you leave the plantation? You owe us your allegiance until we say otherwise.”
Not entirely unrelated, Sigillum over at Anna Raccoon:

[Thatcher] did not fit the Leftist feminist agenda at all. This still so irritates the feminist Left that it either ignores Thatcher, or demonizes her as not really a woman, but somehow a proxy man… Listening to a discussion with Thatcher’s recent biographer Gillian Shepherd today, Shepherd pointed out that in the past year or so there had been something like 60 books on feminism published in the United Kingdom. Almost none of them made reference to Margaret Thatcher, and where they did so it was in uniformly negative terms. Yet it is hard to appreciate the sheer scale of her personal breakthrough at a time when it was still unusual for a married woman to have their own bank account, single women struggled to get mortgages, and the less than 3% of university lecturers were women.

It gives you a flavour of the spite towards apostates and escapees; and in Thatcher’s case, walking rebuttals.

‘Over the years I’ve had several exchanges with people who were, as they put it, “amazed” that I, a gay man, low-born and a bit arty, am not a big fan of the left’.
Over the past ten years, I have learnt not to be surprised about this at all, because when it comes to standing up against people who would actually kill you for your sexuality, the great and good of the left will throw you to the wolves unless the threat comes from white neo-fascists. And this attitude comes from the universities, the informed commentators, and the self-professed ‘great and good’.
As is the case with the parable of the Good Samaritan, we have no shortage of Priests and Levites who will leave people in the gutter rather than help them.

Because it’s saddening and baffling when the proles think for themselves.
LOL. They’re ‘freeing’ us so that we can do exactly as they say.

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.