This week marks the centenary of the New Statesman. You might be surprised to know that I have a subscription to the magazine. It usually features some very strong writing, even if I disagree with most of it. They asked me to contribute a piece to a feature they are running in this weeks issue which debates the proposition “The Left won the twentieth century”. Needless to say it’s not something I have any truck with. I was only allowed 300 words, so here is what I sent them. Hopefully it will appear unedited!
If you had posed the statement “The Left won the twentieth century” in the 1970s, then most would have unquestionably agreed. The state was in charge of all the major industries from telecommunications to coal. Trade union leaders were regular visitors at Downing Street, and in the words of the Labour Chancellor at the time, Denis Healey, he was “squeezing the rich until the pips squeaked”. The Soviet Union was at the height of its power and influence throughout the world and the spread of Communism seemed unstoppable.
Then in the space of two years two leaders were elected who were united in the same belief – that not only the strangling influence of socialism in their own countries was wrong, but that the spread of Communism had to be tackled. Their names were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and they would go on to change the story of the twentieth century.
Huge, state owned industries were privatised. Trade unions were vanquished, the enterprise economy was encouraged, income tax rates were slashed. On an international scale the reputational malaise suffered by Britain and America was reversed. The Falklands demonstrated to the Soviets that the West might not be the soft touch they had counted on. At last, the Americans stood up to the Communist threat in Latin America and Africa.
Thatcher stood shoulder to shoulder with Reagan and espoused the virtues of a free society, and their voices were heard loud and clear in the capitals of Eastern Europe. Thatcher spotted Gorbachev’s potential as a reformer before anyone one else and ensured that Reagan encouraged his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika. The defeat and fall of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall were in no small part down to these three, with more than a walk on part played by Pope John Paul II.
In the late 1990s Margaret Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement was, she replied “New Labour”. That says all you need to know about who won the twentieth century. Even under ‘Red Ed’ Labour is no longer really a party of what we traditionally mean by ‘the Left’.
