This will be the last from me on Mrs Thatcher and the BBC….her death has allowed them to air all the old canards about her ‘legacy’….from the Belgrano, the Miners, the cause of the 2008 crash, the apparent rise of greed and individualism/selfishness and the destruction of the manufacturing base.
The BBC has long kept such myths simmering away, a constant repetition no doubt bringing them to a new audience of trusting young listeners and viewers. With the death of Mrs Thatcher clearly this is going to go into overdrive and bore everyone senseless….so I’ll make one last comment on their coverage of Mrs Thatcher and move on to other subjects.
Plenty of nonsense being spoken about Mrs Thatcher on the BBC, and no doubt elsewhere today…a lot of it by the BBC itself.
Ken Clarke fought hard against the tide of Leftwing historical revisionism presented as fact on the Today programme…..
Ken Clarke on the Today programme says that both Left and Right are building their myths about Mrs Thatcher….he suggests ‘someone will have to write a sensible history of her time in office’…but not by the BBC whose political correspondent Nick Robinson is continuing to write the myths and keep them going says Clarke.
The same Nick Robinson who said he ‘sensed’ that those out ‘celebrating’ the death of Mrs Thatcher were in fact merely protesting the ‘Thatcherite consensus’ in politics today. That’ll explain the ‘Rejoice rejoice rejoice the Bitch is dead’ type slogans then.
The problem is that BBC presenters nod along in agreement with much of the nonsense as well as letting the most outrageous comments go unchallenged. There is a distinct lack of context to help judge the truth of many of the anti-Thatcher comments and which serves only to perpetuate the myths and legends that have built up, with not a little help from the BBC, over the years….for instance the Belgrano was not a ‘troop carrier’ but a fully armed battleship, and was sailing towards the Falklands…and even the Argies admit she was a legitimate target.
The first bit of nonsense comes from an ex BBC employee, Judith Stamper, who once interviewed Mrs Thatcher in 1983 for BBC North and accused her of running an ‘uncaring government’.
Stamper is now a political communications lecturer at Leeds University and spoke on 5Live ‘Morning Reports’ (17 mins 30 secs) where she ‘discusses how Margaret Thatcher brought advertising, marketing and public relations into politics and its impact on her campaigns and image.’
Stamper told us that Mrs Thatcher invented the photo opportunity, the walk about, the selling of politics and that ‘spin doctoring’ started with her….she was a manufactured product….Labour’s spin doctoring was a response to that of Mrs Thatcher…er…by then long out of government.
Only problem with all of that is it’s baloney….the first political image making? How about all those Emperors who had their faces on coins, or Elizabeth I who strictly controlled her own image and the paintings of her, or Churchill who used his fame as a soldier and war correspondent to get his foot in the door of politics…or Monty in the desert with his two cap badges…and who can forget Goebbels….or indeed Chamberlain and his ‘piece of paper’. Walkabouts? Try WWII again with the King and Queen touring the blitzed areas to raise morale….and to uphold their own image as people who care about the ‘ordinary people’.
Spin doctoring, image control and self promotion have long been a feature of any political ‘regime’…..Thatcher certainly changed her image to suit her role but her policies were not ‘crowd pleasing’ ones moulded by focus groups…Ken Clarke saying she was a conviction politician who took no notice of polls or the newspapers, her politics were based on her ideology not just designed to stay in power …unlike Blair and Co who sold out their principles to take power and couldn’t make a move without checking with Murdoch first…as indeed Cameron sold out to appease the BBC.
Next bit of nonsense was Mickey Clark on Wake Up To Money….and blaming Mrs Thatcher for the Crash in 2008…’sowing the seeds of disaster’ with the ‘Big Bang’. (16 mins 30) and when a text comes in saying businesses closed in Scotland due to strikes Mickey asks ‘Is that fair?’. …preferring to blame Mrs Thatcher? and not the Unions
The Big Bang being the cause of the Crash is a constant theme on the BBC…and completely unjustified….happening over 20 years before the Crash….and with the economy brought back under control and actually running a surplus rather than a deficit in 1998-2000 before Brown went for broke….clearly something else broke the banks…and that something was Brown’s much more extensive deregulation of the financial industry and the failure of his FSA creation.
The programme is worth listening to though as you get a far more reasoned and sensible analysis from the guests.
Another programme that came as a surprise, in my view, was from Andrew Neil, whom you might have expected to be more balanced, in ‘The People’s Thatcher’ …but the programme painted a more negative picture of Mrs Thatcher than you might expect and slipped in a few barbed comments along the way….when talking about giving away council houses rather than selling them he quoted her as saying ‘That would do nothing for our people’…..meaning the middle class rather than the council house tenants who could benefit from getting a house cheaply….not such a ‘People’s Thatcher ‘ then?
Another quibble with BBC coverage, along with Thatcher’s Big Bang being the cause of the 2008 crash, is the great legend that the BBC help perpetuate that Thatcher alone destroyed the mining industry with pit closures.
Rubbish…she closed uneconomic pits…but then so had previous governments for decades:
Pit closures in 1960s and 1980s….The loss of the collieries was devastating in such villages as Cwmparc, Clydach Vale and Blaencwm and it could be argued that these South Wales villages and many like them have not fully recovered from the colliery closures in the sixties.
The Fifties and Sixties 1950 to 1969….old ways had to be consigned to history. While oil refineries were opening at the mouth of the River Tees, the coalmines and railways were closing with huge consequences for the communities they supported.
What is interesting about the closures in Wales in the sixties is that they were sometimes caused by lack of available labour…the men didn’t want to work down the pits ….better paying jobs with better conditions were available in the factories.
Arthur Scargill in the eighties proclaimed that Thatcher was destroying jobs that belonged to the miner’s sons and daughters….but given a choice would they want to work down the pit? Most of the evidence suggests not…it was a source of income first and foremost…and a dangerous one at that, dirty, hard work. If they could get the same money elsewhere who would mine coal?
The BBC should do more to look at the history of coal mining and stop allowing the myth to be kept alive that Mrs Thatcher was the ‘Devil incarnate, a demon, an absolute devil’ as one miner called her on the Nolan show…going on to proclaim that the Jews celebrated the death of Hitler and he would celebrate the death of Thatcher in the same way.
Whilst many of the guests invited on to various BBC programmes spend a deal of time giving fair and rational analysis of Mrs Thatcher’s policies and legacy it does seem the BBC presenters still can’t resist blaming her for everything….or not questioning the ‘received wisdom’ that she is to blame.
Look at one last myth…We are constantly told that Thatcherism spread the blight of ‘individualism’ and promoted selfishness and greed, fragmenting society and destroying social cohesion.
As I understand it Christianity usually gets the credit, not the blame for ‘individualism’, and it was this that gave us the ‘Enlightenment’ and the enterprising individuals who whilst seeking to improve their lives improved others along with it (along with the Protestant work ethic)….a feat not possible in societies suppressed and controlled by oppressive community values….and I believe ‘greed’ was mentioned in the Bible a couple of thousand years ago….so not Thatcher’s fault perhaps?
You can blame, in more recent times, the Sixties and all those anti-establishment types, in the Media and Arts especially, who ended the automatic respect for authority and the deference to ‘one’s betters’.
You can of course blame the Welfare State which broke communities and made people reliant on the State rather than helping each other…especially inside the Family. The State has taken over the duties and role of the Family….people pay their taxes and abandon all further responsibilities for much that goes on in Society.
Human Rights laws and Health and Safety laws both kicked away the foundations of the civil society and encouraged a more antagonistic and aggressive and greedy society as people relied on State Law to settle disputes rather than common sense and mediation….they always see a profit now in any dispute.
And as for social cohesion…wasn’t it Labour that imported millions of immigrants who form their own societies within a Society unable to cope with such a large influx?
People, if not born with a silver spoon in their mouths, do get issued a ‘Ration Book’ of Rights that they can use to their own advantage…the one thing missing is a similar book demanding they fulfil their ‘obligations’ to Society and pay something back.
Shame the BBC does not do much at all to reflect such different perspectives on the causes of the perceived ills of our Society…..a start would be acknowledging that Thatcher inherited a broken economy and country….little mention is made of the conditions in the 1970’s which were the real causes of the gutting out of the manufacturing base.
