Paul Addison
NO TURNING BACK
Thatcher's Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era
By Richard Vinen (Simon & Schuster 416pp £20)

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Mrs Thatcher divided the political nation into those who were passionately in favour of her and those who were passionately against. It has never been easy for either side to cultivate historical detachment but Richard Vinen thinks it is high time that we all began to do so. His appeal is addressed with special force to those who, like himself, were on the Left throughout the Thatcher years. 'I have often felt exasperated', he writes, 'by the partisan nature of writing on this subject and particularly by the sneering tone many authors adopt with regard to Margaret Thatcher herself.' His own treatment of her, by no means uncritical, emphasises the gulf between the caricature of dotty right-wing extremist and the pragmatism and caution she so often displayed. Biography, however, is incidental to Vinen's main purpose, which is to define the nature of 'Thatcherism' - the constellation of ideas, policies and values that came to be associated with her. His book, which is beautifully written with great wit and finesse, helps us to think straight about an era of visceral prejudice.

There is nothing we academics like better than an 'ism', and nothing we enjoy more than taking it apart. There never has been, we point out, an agreed definition of the term. It has often been used in an over-simplified fashion and some authorities refuse to employ it at all. I may have thought it out clearly but you, unfortunately, are in a bit of a muddle, and the political scientists are all at sea as usual. Finally, with a mischievous gleam in the eye, we come to the ultimate paradox. Was Marx really a Marxist? Did Keynes ever become a Keynesian? Was Thatcherism a doctrine projected on to a politician whose career was in reality a mass of contradictions?

Thatcherism is one of those terms that mean different things to different people and hence cause endless confusion. Herbert Morrison is reputed to have said that 'socialism is what a Labour government does'. By the same token it can be argued that Thatcherism is what Mrs Thatcher did. But Nigel Lawson, one of the key figures in her government, held that Thatcherism was a body of ideas separate from the lady herself, who was sometimes at odds with the doctrine named after her. Indeed she was no thinker. 'In the eight years that we worked closely together,' said her guru Alfred Sherman, 'I have never heard her express an original idea or even ask an insightful question.' Nor were her governments consistent in their policies. Privatisation, a comparatively minor feature of the programme at the beginning, acquired a colossal importance that no one had anticipated. Control of the money supply, which was proudly proclaimed as the centrepiece of economic policy in 1979, proved unworkable and had to be abandoned. The pro-European stance that the government adopted at the beginning gave way to doubt and division, with Thatcher at the head of the Eurosceptics. Theorists wrote of Thatcherism as though it were an ideology but it was more diffuse than that, and there was never a distinctively Thatcherite position on race relations, 'permissive' legislation or capital punishment. At the core of Thatcherism, as Vinen argues, was free-market economics, but this was closely allied with a concern for order or 'discipline': economic policy was indeed partly a means to an end, the restoration of social hierarchy and managerial authority. Thus defined, it was essentially a robust reassertion of traditional Conservative values in response to a period of social and economic crisis.

Vinen, it has to be said, does not penetrate very far into 'Thatcher's Britain'. Except for an excursion into the coalfields for the miners' strike, and a hurried tour of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, he concentrates on high politics and the Westminster village. Like most political historians he is fascinated by Enoch Powell, whose eccentric array of opinions he contrasts with the comparatively conventional outlook of Thatcher and her ministers. For them, he suggests, the Fifties were the golden age. Hence they were the true heirs of the post-war consensus, a nice paradox that stretches the evidence too far. In the Fifties the Conservatives lived contentedly enough with nationalised industries, strong trade unions, and a commitment to full employment. In the Eighties the Thatcher governments, or at any rate Thatcher's free-market disciples - Howe, Lawson, Ridley, Nott and Tebbitt - were determined if they could to break the power of organised labour and put the clock back to the Thirties. No doubt they were lucky in the fact that events played into their hands - they could hardly have wished for a more inept opponent than Arthur Scargill - but they were making a conscious break with the spirit of post-war Conservatism and the influence of Edward Heath. According to some accounts they were opposed by 'wets', who argued for Keynesianism and the appeasement of labour, but Vinen is sceptical. There was, he argues, no clear-cut division: the 'wets' often went along with the 'drys' and vice versa. His cameo portraits of the dramatis personae, both major and minor, are one of the pleasures of the book.

In the Eighties, Vinen writes, 'many of us claimed repeatedly that the government's policies were so obviously wrong-headed that they were bound to bring some signal disaster. We should now have the grace to recognise that the signal disaster never arrived.' Yet it was the Thatcher governments that lifted the curbs on bank lending, freed the building societies to act as banks, rejoiced in the City of London as the most dynamic sector of the British economy, and extolled the virtues of the free market. Now that disaster has arrived, must New Labour and the bankers shoulder all the blame?