Speeches, etc.

Margaret Thatcher

Article for Western Mail ("The kind of society I would most like to live in ...")

Document type: Speeches, interviews, etc.
Source: Western Mail, 1 May 1979
Editorial comments: Item listed by date of publication.
Importance ranking: Major
Word count: 786
Themes: Conservatism, Employment, General Elections, Monetary policy, Privatized & state industries, Labour Party & socialism, Strikes & other union action

The kind of society I would most like to live in …

Both sides in the General Election are agreed on one point: it is one of the most important elections of this century. On its outcome may depend the future of the country for many decades.

Happily, the choice is unusually clear. The essential question is whether we propose to continue the drift towards the all-powerful and all-purpose state, financed out of ever more oppressive taxation or whether we will have the courage to set our faces in the opposite direction and start the long haul back to a truly free and soundly prosperous society.

Politics without idealism has no root: idealism without a sense of the politically possible bears no fruit. I have never left anyone in any doubt about what my ideals are.

I would like to live in a society in which the laws were few and simple but firmly predictably and impartially enforced and in which, within the limits of those laws, people were free to look after themselves and their families in the knowledge that an efficiently caring state was always at hand to aid them in times of real need.

I am not fool enough to think that these ideals can be realised overnight or indeed that they can ever be wholly attained. I offer them not as a blueprint but as a polar star. They set the standards by which I shall try to judge my every political action and by which I shall expect you to judge me.

This, then, is one of the roads before us. The other, mapped out in the Labour Party's manifesto, is a little less clear and straight. There has already been too much slanging in this election campaign, and I do not propose to add to it; but there are some warnings which it is my duty to give.

The Labour manifesto is not a moderate document. It is a painfully worked out verbal compromise between the views of the two types of contemporary Socialist politician—those who are mainly concerned to keep the Labour Party in power and those whose only ambition is to complete as rapidly as possible the Socialisation of Britain.

In practice, however, the differences between these two types are not as great as people suppose: and this for one very good reason. Part of the price for maintaining the unity of the Labour Party has always been concession—sometimes gradual, sometimes dramatic—to the Left. That process is still going on as the manifesto clearly shows.

For instance, there is not much emphasis in Labour propaganda nowadays on nationalisation because nationalisation is not a popular word with the electorate, but read and digest these lines from the manifesto:

“We shall expand the work, and finance the National Enterprise Board using public ownership to sustain and create new jobs and ensure that we get an adequate return on our investment.”

Well, there is no doubt about what that means: the National Enterprise Board is to be used as an instrument for extending state ownership, as a means of nationalisation by stealth.

If Labour's policies of increasing state control and of high taxation were producing the goods in the shape of national prosperity, many of us would still have our doubts about them. There is a case for preserving freedom for its own sake: the quality of life depends on choice. But, alas, we have been getting the worst of both worlds. The truth is that the Labour way stands condemned by experience. Your pounds can only buy half as much as they did in 1974.

While Labour have been in office consumer prices have gone up 100 per cent. compared, for example, with 21 per cent. in Germany. Unemployment hovers round the 1½ million mark. World trends simply cannot be blamed for all this. Many other countries who have done better than us have not for instance had the benefit of North Sea oil.

But the electorate does not need statistics and economic comparisons to convince it. You all remember Labour's bitter winter—the suffering it brought to the old and the sick and the terrible feeling of frustration it induced in all of us.

So what is left of the Labour case? Labour has only one ally in this election (though it could be a formidable ally), despair—the sense that it is too late to stop the rot, that the remedies which we offer (strict economy in the running of government, lower taxation, a boost to small businesses and sensible reforms of trade union law) will not work or will be prevented by the activity of some irresponsible minority.

To accept this would be to say farewell to faith in democracy and the British people. It would also be to abandon all hope of restoring a decent level of national prosperity and of creating the wealth we need to give a fair deal to the old, the sick and the disabled.

The task of getting Britain back on course demands skill as well as idealism. I believe that the Conservative Party of today has both. Surely, it is time for a change. If so, who else can bring it about?