Thatcher & the Tories

By Ian Stewart

In the years between 1912 and 1965, the Scottish Unionist Party was the main centre right political party in Scotland. Throughout the 1950s, it was the majority party in Scotland and in the 1955 general election gained a majority of both the vote (50.1%) and of the seats (36 of 71). They are the only political party ever to have done so.

In 1959 it became the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party and, in 1965, it was merged into the Conservative Party of England and Wales, forming the basis of the modern UK Conservative Party. Albeit never again hitting the dizzy heights of 1955, the Tories continued to gain a respectable number of Scottish seats in subsequent elections up until their disaster of 1997 :

1966	1970	1974	1974	1979	1983	1987	1992	1997
20	23	21	16	22	21	19	11	0

In the Autumn of 1978, James Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister, had taken the decision to delay calling a general election (which he probably would have won). Then came the 'Winter of Discontent', the public sector strikes when 'the dead lay unburied and the rubbish uncollected in the streeets', as the tabloids put it. By April 1979, after the Labour government lost a vote of 'no confidence', which had been brought by the opposition leader Margaret Thatcher, by a single vote, Labour were forced to fight a campaign against a background of rising unemployment and industrial strife largely caused by Callaghan's own public sector cuts.

In the general election held in May 1979, the Tories won and Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister.

The economic engine she created, based on the unrestrained accumulation of wealth and deregulated financial markets, turned into the uncontrollable juggernaut which has resulted in the current economic depression, the greatest in 100 years.

Almost everything that has gone wrong with the neo-liberal model, the housing bubble, the bonus culture, fraudulent derivatives, tax havens, financial speculation, the collapse of manufacturing, have their origins in the Thatcher revolution of 30 years ago.

Thatcher wanted to 'abolish socialism' at home and defeat communism abroad. The political philosophy which took her name was founded on deregulated financial markets, privatisation of state assets, the sale of council house and the dismantling of the welfare state.

She ignited the 'big bang' in the City of London, a wave of deregulation which opened the way to the 'anything goes' era of financial buccaneering.

She launched a fire sale of nationalised industries, starting with British Telecom and British Gas, allowing the British public to buy shares in companies . . . which, as taxpayers, they already owned.

One of her earliest acts was to break the link between the State Pension and average earnings, linking them instead to future rises in inflation and thus effectively ensuring that the value of the state pension would reduce, forcing people to seek security in private pension provision.

This was a situation of which 'the market' took full advantage, resulting in the mis-selling scandals of personal pensions, endowment mortgages and 'with-profits' insurance bonds as commission-driven financial advisers developed ever-more ingenious 'financial products'.

However, Thatcherism wasn't just an economic policy, it was a social psychology based on possessive individualism, it was about getting as much as possible for yourself and your immediate family and then letting the rest of the world go hang . . . the 'I'm all right Jack' attitude which is now entrenched in our society. Ooops, my mistake . . . she famously said in a soundbite, 'There's no such thing as society.'

Thatcher realised that to destroy socialism she had to destroy the political power of the industrial working class. She adopted a scorched earth policy of destroying the unions through high interest rates, industrial closures and mass unemployment.

As the country plunged into the deepest manufacturing recession since the war, unemployment rose to more than three million, a level not seen in Britain since the Depression years of the 1930s, the effect being almost total devastation of Scotland's industrial communities . . . and she paid the bills using Scottish oil revenues.

Having effectively broken most of the unions, and Labour, in 1984 she confronted Arthur Scargill and the miners, arguably the strongest union left in the country. After almost a year, in March 1985, the strike ended with the miners' defeat, the political power of the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) permanently broken, and allowed the Thatcher government to proceed with the consolidation of its free market programme.

Eventually, in the UK general election held on 1 May 1997, the Conservatives, now led by John Major, were annihilated, gaining only 165 seats at Westminster and with both Scotland and Wales becoming 'Tory-free zones'.

To put this rout into perspective . . . when Margaret Thatcher came to power in May 1979, the Conservatives held 339 seats in total, 22 of these in Scotland . . . as of May 1997, the Tories had no Scottish MPs or MEPs and there was not a single Scottish Council under their control.

In the subsequent UK general elections held in 2001, 2005 and 2010, the Conservative party have only won / retained a single seat in Scotland.