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Beware the shadow of Thatcherism
By Joe Horgan
Margaret Thatcher’s most stunning victory was not her winning of three elections.
It was not her destruction of Britain’s industrial communities. It was not her introduction to generations of families of a way of life called long term unemployment. It was not her destruction of the trade unions. It was not even that famous iron will that allowed 10 Irish republicans to starve
themselves to death. Her most famous victory was the one she had over people’s minds.
Thatcherism altered the way people thought about themselves and those around them. This was the woman who famously said that there was no such thing as society. This was the leader whose sole belief was in the power of the individual and the power of money through the expression of market forces.
It was a way of thinking that infected the whole of British society. Margaret Thatcher attempted to do away with the whole idea of community, the notion that people might look out for each other and the sense that our own well being derived somehow from that of our neighbours. Thatcher was the guru of the me, me, me society, the high priestess of self.
She was the one who believed in the big lie of the meritorious society with the main conceit being that those who were at the bottom were there because they deserved to be. But most of all she was the one who helped turn British society into something far more selfish.
Into a place where people genuinely do not know their neighbours and a place where the belief is that as long as you can get on yourself, well, anything outside of that is not your concern.
She was in many ways the harbinger of the empty, celebrity obsessed culture that now predominates because that world of hers can only ever look upwards at those it perceives to be the epitome of success and glamour. It has nothing else inside it.
The biggest danger here in Ireland is that the same could happen. The politics of a government come and go and most political regimes are in essence reactive rather than internally driven.
The Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrat coalition that has overseen the economic transformation of Irish society is one that, in terms we are no longer supposed to use, is very right wing. It is dominated by an adherence to market values and a belief that the desires of capital are the driving force of society.
In other words we should concern ourselves primarily with our economic life and let that be the one factor that shapes and moulds our society. Whether on the environment, health or education you differ from a government on certain policies, it is on their central outlook that their legacy hangs.
Our main worry should surely be, not about individual policies but about the cultural impact this government will have. Just what kind of Irish society will Mary and Bertie create?
Quite clearly they have not completely broken the mould of Irish politics. They are as friendly with big business as many another regime before them. They are as associated with what is widely viewed as a corrupt political entity as those that preceded them. They are far from unique. What is unique though is the expansion of the economy and how this has given them the ammunition to extol their belief in a materialistic, self-regarding society.
I can only go on hearsay, on what ordinary people say to me in the course of a conversation. But again and again from wildly differing people I have heard the claim that Irish society is becoming more selfish, that no one looks out for anyone else anymore, that people no longer have the time for each other, that neighbour no longer calls in to neighbour, that community no longer exists.
Now I do not know how you quantify such a thing, how such conversation becomes a statistical representation but it is what I hear over and over. An article in a newspaper here recently suggested that the rise in apparent luxury and standard of living was matched only by a rise in dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the quality of life. It claimed in fact that Irish people if not more unhappy than before were at the least no happier. With all the gaining of DVDs, mobile phones and cars what is it that we are losing?
The most frightening thing about this government and what they have done and are doing to Irish society is that they may well change the nature of the Irish people themselves.
If we are in a society that is being constantly encouraged to embrace all that is new and modern and dispose of all that is from the past and is traditional what kind of Irish people are being born from the ashes of the old?
Bertie’s legacy may turn out to be not his reputation as the teflon Taoiseach to whom many a murky association is made but none made to stick but that he altered the nature of Irish society itself.
He does not lead in any strident way and is not the forceful, overbearing politician that Margaret Thatcher was but in the empty space that he creates the purely economic values of the culture he sits astride will flood in. Make no mistake this is a society that has undergone the most fundamental alteration and all it has leading it is Bertie’s evasive glance and Mary’s greedy eyes.
So if Bertie, Mary and Margaret get their way, we shall no longer greet each other with a how’s it going and a chat about the weather but with a query about the worth of our houses and a revving of our new engines.
We shouldn’t stop to think about our lives but only to count our money. But let us not give up on this beautiful old country yet. Despite what those market forces and the tired old dragon might say, there is always an alternative.
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