The World: Views of a Tory Lady

Can Margaret Thatcher revive Britain ‘s Conservative Party? Her cure is a brisk dose of Tory principles, laid on smartly with a no-nonsense schoolmistress ‘s rod. A sampling of the leader’s views:

ON SOCIAL MOBILITY: The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class. It has never been simply a matter of income, but of a whole attitude to life, a will to take responsibility for oneself—the middle-class morality that Shaw despised so much. We need those who are going to save money, who are going to do things for themselves.

ON PRIVATE PROPERTY: If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a Socialist and have done with it. Indeed, one of the reasons for our electoral failure is that people believe that too many Conservatives have become socialists already. Britain’s progress toward socialism has been an alternation of two steps forward with half a step back.

ON DEFENDING “MIDDLECLASS INTERESTS”: If middle-class values include the encouragement of variety and individual choice, the provision of incentives and rewards for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the state and a belief in the wide distribution of individual private property, then they are certainly what I am trying to defend.

WHY THE TORIES LOST: We lost [October 1974] because we did not appear to stand firmly for anything distinctive and positive. Sneering at “middleclass values” is to insult the working class no less than the bourgeois. Do British workers have no feeling for freedom, for order, for the education of their children, for the right to work without disruption by political militants? Of course they do, and if they are no more than cash-grabbing anarchists, then we must try to show them the way back to sanity.

ON TORY STRATEGY: To listen, to lead, that is our role. Listen to the younger generation: they don’t want equality and regimentation. Listen to working families the length and breadth of Britain: they don’t want growing state direction of their lives. Listen to the men and women at work: they don’t want to be propped up by subsidies. To deny that we failed the people is futile as well as arrogant. Successful governments win elections. So do parties with broadly acceptable policies. We lost.