Thirty Years After Thatcher

TODAY LONDON Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer is a crusty curmudgeon of a columnist, the Voice of Middle England railing against a Conservative Party that isn’t conservative enough.

But in 1979, thirty years ago this weekend, Heffer was just 19, and was voting in a British general election for the first time. The satirical lefty Private Eye rubbished the moment by showing newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher bellowing at an old man: "Wake up! It’s a new dawn for Britain!"

But the young Heffer wasn’t put off.

It echoed a feeling I had at five in the morning on May 4, as I drove back in a cool misty dawn through the countryside after an election party. The collectivist nightmare was over. A Britain of endless strikes, food subsidies, third-rate products and jobbery was, suddenly, consigned to history. If there has been a better time to be 19 than in 1979, I wait to be told.

Thirty years later, the astonishing thing is that the educated elite didn’t get the message. That is the meaning of the Obama presidency. It’s back to political meddling in everything—even Air Force One! It’s back to coddling the unions with Card Check. It’s back to bailing out declining industries. It’s back to printing money to get out of a jam. It’s back to the government “backing winners” with the current fashionable notion of green jobs.

The lesson of Reagan and Thatcher is that you cannot trust the economy to politicians. That’s because they don’t have a clue about business, and don’t have a clue about finance.

But they do know how to print money and they do know how to suborn the bankers into floating their paper. Unfortunately.

The next conservative revolution will be a bigger one than the last one. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution was about freeing up the economy from the dead hand of government. It worked until the politicians got their hands back on the throat of the businessman and the consumer.

But the next conservative revolution will be bigger. Because politicians don’t know how to run “public services” either. The next conservative revolution will be a revolution of public services. It will look something like this:

We will reform government pensions so that average people save for retirement with Vanguard and Fidelity, not Social Security.
We will reform government health care so that average people direct their own health care, backed up by some sort of catastrophic insurance.
We will reform government education so that people only get the education they need to get the skills they need. Then they get out and get a job.
We will reform government welfare so that there is no government involvement except during catastrophe like war, famine, or depression.

Today, that agenda seems incredible. But it will come. It will come not because we want it but because there is no other way. There is no other way because politicians are hopeless at everything except making war. When will it come? The sooner the better. As the Fram oil filter guy said, you can pay me now, or you can pay me later.

But the moment in 1979 when a grocer’s daughter became the first woman became prime minister of Britain and ended its Winter of Discontent, that moment will live forever.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.