How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ Age a century earlier, notably in the widening gulf between a wealthy elite and the rest. As the political analyst Kevin Phillips recorded in his influential book The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), ‘no parallel upsurge of riches had been seen since the late nineteenth century, the era of the Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers’. Income tax was abolished in the United States in 1872, not to be reimposed again until the First World War, and it was during this period that the great dynasties built their fortunes – and flaunted them. An ostentatious 1980s mogul such as Donald Trump, who erected the Trump Tower as a vainglorious monument, was merely following the example of those earlier nouveaux riches who built outrageously gaudy palazzos and châteaux on Fifth Avenue. The conspicuous extravagance of late-Victorian millionaires – exemplified by Mrs Stuyvesant Fish’s famous dinner in honour of her dog, which arrived wearing a $15,000 diamond-studded collar – was more than matched by the glitzy parties chronicled and celebrated every month in Vanity Fair, relaunched under the editorship of Tina Brown in 1983 as a parish magazine for the new plutocracy.

      As in the first Gilded Age, scarcely any of the new abundance trickled down to the middle or working classes. Under Ronald Reagan, it was not until 1987 that the average family’s real income returned to the levels enjoyed in the 1970s, and even this was a misleading comparison since they were now working far harder for it: whereas in 1973 average Americans had 26.2 hours of ‘leisure time’ every week, by 1987 the figure had fallen to 16.6 hours. They were less secure, too, as short-term or temporary contracts demolished the tradition of full-time, well-paid and often unionised employment. The earnings of male blue-collar workers in manufacturing industry fell throughout the 1980s as their employers threatened to close the factory or move production overseas if American labour ‘priced itself out of a job’. There was also a revival of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, which had last been in vogue at the turn of the previous century, as right-wing triumphalists argued that government should not interfere with the ‘natural selection’ of commercial markets.

      Curiously, however, they seemed quite willing to let the government clear up any ensuing mess. In 1982 members of Congress were bribed to ‘liberalise’ the Savings & Loan industry, effectively promising that the public purse would cover any losses from bad investments made with savers’ money but also undertaking not to oversee or regulate these investments. The consequences, predictably enough, were rampant fraud, the collapse of more than 650 S&L companies – and a bill of $1.4 trillion, to be met by the taxpayer. In 1988 a report from the General Accounting Office, Sweatshops in the US, noted that another feature of the Gilded Age had returned, partly because of the official mania for deregulation: reasons cited for the reappearance of sweatshops included ‘enforcement-related factors, such as insufficient inspection staff, inadequate penalties for violations [and] weak labour laws’. But since the victims were penniless and often voteless workers, rather than middle-class mortgage-owners, the Reaganites blithely left them to the market’s tender mercies. Nor did they complain when the deregulatory zeal of Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission enabled a tiny and ever-shrinking group of large corporations to control most of the nation’s media enterprises – even though this concentration of power thwarted their professed desire for greater competition and choice.

      The trouble with the Conservatives, Evelyn Waugh once said, was that they never put the clock back, even by five minutes. He could not have made the same complaint about Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, both of whom had a single-minded mission to free the capitalist beast from the harnesses and bridles imposed upon it during the previous half-century. In January 1983, when the television interviewer Brian Walden suggested that Thatcher seemed to yearn for ‘what I would call Victorian values’, she replied: ‘Oh exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great.’ Delighted by the cries of horror her remarks elicited from the liberal intelligentsia, she returned to the theme in subsequent speeches and interviews. As she explained:

      I was brought up by a Victorian grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self-reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self-respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don’t hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.

      Margaret Thatcher had a hostility to organised labour that would have won the respect of any grim-visaged Victorian mill-owner or coalmaster – as did Ronald Reagan, even though (or perhaps because) he himself was a former president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. ‘I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air-traffic controllers,’ Reagan promised PATCO, the air-traffic controllers’ union, shortly before polling day in the autumn of 1980. But there was little evidence of this spirit when its members went on strike the following August: the new president announced that they would all be sacked unless they returned to work within forty-eight hours. More than 11,000 duly received their pink slips, their leaders went to jail and fines of $1 million a day were levied on the union.

      Margaret Thatcher waited slightly longer for her own showdown. A thirteen-week strike by steel-workers in 1980, which ended with no obvious victor, convinced her that she must remove unions’ legal immunities and outlaw secondary picketing before turning the full armoury of state power against militant labour. Besides, other preparations had to be made. The union she most dearly wished to destroy was that of the mineworkers, who had brought down the previous Tory government in 1974 and were now led by the Marxist Arthur Scargill, but a lengthy pit strike could be resisted only if coal stockpiles were high enough to keep the home fires burning for the duration. So, as her biographer Hugo Young reported, from 1981 onwards the National Coal Board was ‘given every financial and other encouragement to produce more coal than anyone could consume, and the Central Electricity Generating Board given similar inducements to pile up the stocks at power stations’. At the same time the police were equipped with new vehicles, communications equipment, weaponry and body armour. When the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike in 1984, a year after Thatcher’s re-election, the government was ready for a long and bloody war.

      With a belligerence that unnerved even some of her Cabinet colleagues, she described the miners as ‘a scar across the face of the country’ and likened them to the Argentine forces whom she had routed in the Falkland Islands two years earlier. ‘We had to fight an enemy without in the Falklands,’ she declared, in her best Churchillian style. ‘We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty … There is no week, nor day, nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.’ That autumn, when the IRA bombed a Brighton hotel where she was staying, she used the atrocity as further rhetorical ammunition: murderous terrorists and striking coal-miners were both conspiring ‘to break, defy and subvert the laws’. For Margaret Thatcher, the miners’ eventual and inevitable defeat represented nothing less than a victory of good over evil.

      The prime minister could not claim the credit which she undoubtedly felt was her due, however, since throughout the dispute she had insisted that the war against ‘the enemy within’ was being prosecuted by the National Coal Board rather than Downing Street. The pretence fooled nobody – least of all the chairman of the NCB, who after one meeting at No. 10 complained to a reporter that ‘I have weals all over my back, which I would be happy to show you’ – but she felt obliged to maintain it, having often expressed her vehement dislike for government intervention in industry, or indeed in anything else. Even those branches of the state that enjoyed almost universal acceptance, such as public education and the National Health Service, appeared to Thatcher as quasi-Soviet abominations. ‘As people prospered themselves so they gave great voluntary things,’ she said in one of her many nostalgic eulogies to Victorian England. ‘So many of the schools we replace now were voluntary schools, so many of the hospitals we replace were hospitals given by this СКАЧАТЬ