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

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      This was Margaret Thatcher’s own version of trickle-down economics. Despite her notorious comment that ‘there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families’, she had limitless faith in the social conscience of the rich and might even have endorsed the mystical credo issued by an American coal-owner, George Baer, during the 1902 miners’ strike: ‘The rights and interests of the labouring man will be protected and cared for – not by the labour agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests in this country.’ Since God, in his infinite wisdom, presumably had similar influence over those who control the White House, he must have changed his mind during the middle decades of the twentieth century: from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933, which laid the foundations of a rudimentary welfare state, through Harry Truman’s ‘Fair Deal’ to Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, the consensus was that even a prosperous capitalist nation should protect its weaker citizens – and its natural resources – against the depredations of the rich. To Thatcher this may have seemed tantamount to Communism, but it was also accepted by many conservatives. As the American author William Greider points out:

      The ideas and programmes that formed the modern welfare state originated from the values of the right as well as the left, from the conservative religious impulse to defend the domain of family, community and church against the raw, atomising effects of market economics as well as from the egalitarianism of anti-capitalist socialism. The welfare state was, in fact, an attempt to devise a fundamental compromise between society and free-market capitalism.

      It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. ‘We are all Keynesians now,’ he explained.

      By the 1980s, however, God had apparently become a champion of laissez-faire again. Whereas Margaret Thatcher’s twentieth-century predecessors mostly kept their Christianity to themselves, her own ‘crusade’ – as she often called it – was thoroughly religious in both content and style. Her father had been a Methodist lay preacher, and in her memoirs she proudly acknowledged the influence of a stern Christian upbringing: ‘I believe in “Judaeo-Christian” values: indeed my whole political philosophy is based on them.’ In 1951, as the prospective parliamentary candidate Miss Margaret Roberts, she told the Dartford Free Church Council that ‘the future of the world depended on the few men and women who were Christians and who were willing to practise and propagate that faith abroad’.

      From the moment when ‘Thatcherism’ was first articulated as a distinctive brand of Conservatism, soon after she and her intellectual mentor Sir Keith Joseph established the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974, its disciples emphasised that this was not mere materialism but an entrepreneurial theology. Sir Keith’s famous Edgbaston speech of October 1974 caused a furore by proposing that low-income women should be discouraged from breeding, but its peroration (scarcely noticed at the time) was no less astonishing, and probably more significant. ‘Are we to move towards moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline, by the corrosive effects of inflation?’ he asked, his face characteristically furrowed in anguish. ‘Or can we remoralise our national life, of which the economy is an integral part?’

      Modern British politicians hadn’t previously used such language, but over the following two decades the evangelical message was heard again and again. ‘I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil,’ Thatcher said, ‘and I believe that in the end good will triumph.’ Speaking to the Zurich Economic Society in 1977, she warned that:

      we must not focus our attention exclusively on the material, because, though important, it is not the main issue. The main issues are moral … The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. It is superior because it starts with the individual, with his uniqueness, his responsibility, and his capacity to choose … Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

      She explicitly associated her belief in economic freedom of choice with the Christian doctrine of the same name, as a means of salvation. Self-reliance and property ownership were ‘part of the spiritual ballast which maintains responsible citizenship’. (Many Christians, of course, remained unpersuaded that the prime minister was doing God’s work. Anglican bishops such as David Jenkins and David Sheppard protested against the mass unemployment which she had created, and the 1985 report Faith in the City, commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, blamed the Tories’ social Darwinism for the squalor, decay and alienation found in Britain’s inner cities. Thatcher reacted furiously to the criticisms, arguing that men of the cloth had no business commenting on her industrial and economic policies – apparently oblivious to the fact that her own metaphysical and religious justifications for the new ‘enterprise culture’ had legitimised these clerical ripostes.)

      As the daughter of a man who had been both a preacher and a local councillor, Thatcher knew how usefully scriptural texts could be deployed to suggest divine sanction for political prejudice. Speaking to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988, she justified her blitz on benefit-claimants by quoting St Paul’s epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘If a man will not work he shall not eat.’ In another startling biblical exegesis, she said that ‘no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions. He had money as well.’ Like Reagan, Thatcher often implied that most public welfare provision was unnecessary: if the nation had enough millionaires, their natural benevolence and wealth-spreading talents would suffice. (Alas for the theory, charitable giving by Americans with annual salaries above $500,000 actually fell by 65 per cent between 1980 and 1988; the real Good Samaritans, who raised their donations by 62 per cent, turned out to be humbler souls earning between $25,000 and $30,000. Even more remarkably, the poorest in the land – those on $10,000 a year or less – gave 5.5 per cent of their income to charity, a higher share than anyone else.)

      While affecting to admire Victorian philanthropy, Thatcher displayed a visceral contempt for the noblesse oblige of the wealthy paternalists in her own ranks –‘the wets’, as she called them, who ‘drivel and drool that they care’. Her real heroes were buccaneering entrepreneurs, and it sometimes seemed that no other way of life, including her own, was truly virtuous. (The political writer Hugo Young recalled one social encounter with Thatcher which ‘consisted of a harrying inquiry as to why I didn’t abandon journalism and start doing something really useful, like setting up a small business’.) ‘These people are wonderful,’ she raved. ‘We all rely upon them to create the industries of tomorrow, so you have to have incentives.’ Every obstacle to money-making – corporation taxes, antimonopoly rules, trade unions’ bargaining rights, laws protecting workers’ health and safety – had to be minimised or swept away altogether. No wonder the stock market on both sides of the Atlantic went wild in the 1980s. For all Thatcher’s pious injunctions about living within one’s income, this was a decade of borrowing and spending. Between 1895 and 1980 the United States had shown a trade surplus every year, but during the presidency of Ronald Reagan it was transformed from the world’s biggest creditor nation into the biggest debtor – and tripled its national debt for good measure.

      Most people would regard it as suicidally irrational to embark on a credit-card splurge without giving a thought to how the bills can ever be paid. Yet when the denizens of Wall Street did just that in the 1980s, they were lionised. Gossip columnists and business reporters alike goggled in awe at the new financial titans – men such as Ivan Boesky, ‘the great white shark of Wall Street’, who was said to be worth $200 million by 1985, and Michael Milken, ‘the junk-bond king’, who earned $296 million in 1986 and $550 million in 1987. Boesky liked to describe himself as an ‘arbitrageur’ but the title of his 1985 book, Merger Mania, summarised the source of his wealth in plainer language. He had an enviable talent СКАЧАТЬ