Brian Wilson: A Margaret Thatcher Day? Here’s why it can't happen

I was in Norway to write about the emerging oil and gas industry. This proved to be quite relevant to what happened thereafter and has led to comparisons, mostly erroneous, down to the present day. By then, the Labour government had set up the British National Oil Corporation along the lines of Norway’s Statoil.

Thatcher was no sooner elected Tory leader than one of her henchmen, Patrick Jenkin, declared that her first act in government would be to privatise BNOC. When Scottish Nationalist and Liberal MPs went into Thatcher’s lobby to bring down the Callaghan government by a single vote, they knew that was part of what they were opening the door to.

This turned out to be of tremendous importance. When Norway eventually set up a Sovereign Wealth Fund in 1990, the proceeds did not come from revenues in its own waters but the global activities of Statoil. That was the opportunity denied to the UK by privatisation.

The Scottish electorate punished the SNP for their perfidy by relieving all but two MPs of their seats. It took a generation for that memory to fade. One of the deposed MPs wrote perceptively that despite the carnage for the SNP, their long-term prospects had improved. Scotland’s suffering would become their opportunity as, by a circuitous route, it duly did.

Labour obligingly tore itself apart under the auspices of the saintly Tony Benn; everyone who makes Labour unelectable become saintly in the fullness of time. While the early phase of Thatcherism should have made her incapable of re-election, Labour did the job for her and the Falklands War put icing on her 1983 cake.

Again, a bit of historical revisionism is worth correcting.

Thatcher did not take the lead in insisting the islands must be re-taken. That fell to Michael Foot, the “inveterate peace-maker”, who came from a generation of the left which understood that failing to confront aggressive dictators only encouraged them.

As it turned out, a principal beneficiary was Argentina, which was soon thereafter relieved of the fascist Galtieri dictatorship. Given her subsequent adulation of General Pinochet, it seems unlikely this prospect played much part in Thatcher’s calculations but history surely judges she was right to resist the Falklands invasion.

Most who lived through the Thatcher years associate her more than anything with the cruel demeanour towards the collapse of traditional industries and communities around them.

When Labour left government in 1979, it had not received a single penny of North Sea revenues. When Thatcher was deposed in 1990, the cost of additional unemployment equated uncannily to the revenues from oil and gas. That was the real scandal of the North Sea which affected every corner of the UK.

The miners’ strike left scars that still have not healed. If the miners had been led by Mick McGahey and others with a strategic brain, fatal confrontation would have been avoided. Instead, Arthur Scargill – high on previous successes – found in Thatcher an enemy who would use the power of the state to ensure victory. Coal would have declined anyway but a managed transition could have been so much gentler.

It is a myth that hardly anyone in Scotland voted for Thatcher. She attracted numbers the current Tory leadership can only dream of. One political masterstroke was the sale of council houses, a policy Labour might have implemented. The difference would have been the guarantee of a trade-off; for every house sold, a new one built. The failure to maintain that equilibrium made Thatcher’s version divisive, with many beneficiaries, some of whom voted for her in appreciation, while sowing the seeds of an inter-generational housing crisis.

The poll tax is another subject that attracts myths, notably that Scotland was cynically used as a laboratory before it was risked in England. The facts are different.

In 1986, I became a Labour candidate in a Tory-held seat. The local Tories were faced with vast protest meetings about the prospect of rates re-valuation which, by some quirk, was mandatory in Scotland but not elsewhere. They were pleading for some alternative system and that is why the poll tax was dusted off the shelf in some demented right-wing think tank.

Given the fact this made matters much, much worse for the Scottish Tories – and I was one of the beneficiaries – the really extraordinary sequel was that Thatcher extended it to England and Wales, probably the single biggest factor in her own political demise. Non-payment campaigns hurt nobody but local authorities trying to shield the poor from Thatcherite austerity. It was the backlash in Tory heartlands that brought down both the poll tax and Thatcher.

My last encounter with her was in 2001. We were both travelling to Kuwait for ceremonies to mark the tenth anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s defeat after that benign old patriarch (as later myth-makers would have it) invaded that country. I was representing the current UK government while Lady Thatcher was star of the show, revered in Kuwait as their chief liberator, much to the irritation of John Major.

“We’ve got to stand by them”, she asserted, referring to the Kuwaitis. I concurred. Then there was a flash of the old Thatcher. “We should have finished the job … but I was gone by then”. I agreed and indeed it would have saved a lot of future trouble if Saddam’s despotic regime had been disposed of at that time while there was no doubt about his status as an “aggressive dictator”.

We took up the conversation later in the flight though by now she was on a bit of auto-pilot. “We should have finished the job … but I was gone by then”. Then a pause and the killer line: “Dear George Bush. But such a weak man”. I wondered how many of her former Cabinet colleagues had suffered from the same assessment.

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