On her 100th birthday, there’s one lesson the left needs to learn from Margaret Thatcher to avoid disaster

Reporters covering the event spotted many proud Thatcher lookalikes among the female attendees; and in her closing speech, Kemi Badenoch hailed Thatcher as a great leader, one who did not manage decline but reversed it, who did not compromise with enemies but defeated them, and who did not follow trends, but changed them.

And some of this is true. Thatcher was a remarkable politician by any measure; and impressively resolute and skilful, when it came to pursuing radical change, while keeping her key voters on side.

What no serious historian of the United Kingdom could possibly conclude, though, is that she succeeded in reversing Britain’s long-term decline, whether in terms of global power and influence, or of the well-being of its citizens.

She was demonstrably wrong, for example, about the wisdom of privatising major utilities such as water, gas and electricity. She was wrong about the absolute primacy of markets in healthy societies, failing to recognise that markets only work well for the majority in a context of strong institutions, and robust regulation.

READ MORE: Kemi Badenoch's conference speech may have appealed to Tory members, but it will likely be her last

Wrong to smash the unions

She was wrong in her belief that markets were rational, setting the ideological stage for the wholesale deregulation of financial markets that led to the great crash of 2008; she even believed that free market capitalism would tackle the threats of environmental degradation and climate change, when in fact it has largely continued, wherever it is allowed to, to seek out short-term profit at the expense of all our futures.

And at the grass roots of British society, she was simply wrong to imagine that smashing the unions, and subjecting ordinary workers to a labour market that often combines growing insecurity with deteriorating real incomes, would make workers more productive, rather than creating massive new social burdens of systemic underemployment and chronic ill health.

In that sense, she paved the way for the deepening inequalities, the mounting public discontent, and the marginalising of real centre-left alternatives, that has plagued British politics for the last 15 years, leading first to the vacuous populism of the Brexit campaign – an act of economic idiocy Thatcher would never have supported, for all her patriotic grandstanding – and now, in a final irony, to the rise of Reform, which seems to be devouring her beloved Conservative party, as many voters lurch towards the delusional far-right.

A lonely, unsupportive society

And yet, despite this increasingly ominous catalogue of long-term failure, the Conservatives – under pressure – can still think of nowhere else to go, but back to Thatcherism, and its discredited mantras. One of the core ideas put forward by Badenoch this week, for example, was that she could and should cut public spending by driving what her Shadow Cabinet colleague Helen Whately calls the “slightly mentally ill” back to work.

If those claimants, though, are mainly suffering from anxiety and depression, then their condition – as compared to people in happier countries – is surely to some extent a product of the alienating, atomised, lonely and unsupportive society created by 50 years of economic neoliberalism, and by the absence of hope it has inflicted on so many.

Our failure to deal with climate change in ways that offer a clear path to a viable future, the filth and depletion that threaten our day-to-day enjoyment of nature, the stressful conditions of 21st-century employment and underemployment, the pain of living in a rip-off society with soaring prices for basic needs, the consequent pressures on family life, the breakdown of once-strong communities – none of this is likely to produce a generation of happy, confident and creative citizens, working together to face real challenges, rather than toxic imaginary threats. To improve people’s lives, we need to help them, not beat them up; and help costs money, at least upfront.

Finding ways to tax the super rich

We therefore need, at this moment, to emulate Thatcher in one way, and in one way only; we need to alter the terms of the political conversation, and begin to find ways of investing in our future – not only in business and infrastructure, but in our battered communities and people.

Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green party in England and Wales, was right to argue, this week, that there is now a super-rich class which – enabled by the politics of the last half-century – is able to loot our economy and our lives on a scale most of us can barely imagine, although he is perhaps wrong to think there is any easy way of compelling this increasingly powerful and sociopathic group to pay more tax, however modest.

Yet without access to, and democratic control of, at least some share of those vast resources, we now have little hope of a democratic and environmentally viable future, in which ordinary citizens can continue to enjoy the combination of security and freedom that we were able, for a few brief post-war decades, to take for granted. That privilege was not a happy accident, but something built for us, structured and fought for, by the generations that came before.

So now, with all our strength and ingenuity, we need to start building that kind of society again, under the tough conditions of the new millennium. And that task will be much easier if we can find leaders – here in Scotland, across the UK, and beyond – who are able, as Margaret Thatcher once did, to challenge the prevailing assumptions that now dominate our political and economic debate; to change the political weather; and to call time at last on a period of economic history that, after so much triumphal sound and fury, finally offered – for most of us, and for our planet – only a damaging and dangerous false dawn.