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U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss leaves Downing Street for Parliament to take her first session of Prime Minister’s Questions, September 7, 2022, in London.
The last thing the Queen did before her death was formally install her third woman prime minister—47-year-old Liz Truss. A new prime minister literally kneels down, brushes her lips across the Queen’s outstretched right hand, and that medieval ceremony makes her PM. The Queen notoriously did not get along very well with Margaret Thatcher after her first woman prime minister launched her campaign against British workers and civil society.
Truss has certainly encouraged the comparison. She dresses in the same type of white blouse as Thatcher, wore the same chapka on a visit to Moscow, was photographed in the turret of a tank just like Thatcher, and constantly invoked her famous predecessor as her role model.
The description of Margaret Thatcher as the “Iron Lady” was in an article in the Red Army newspaper in 1978, with the Soviet journalist thinking that comparing her to the medieval iron maiden torture instrument would be a satisfying insult. Thatcher loved the term. She adopted it to symbolize her battle with the antisemitic military junta in Argentina that stupidly took on the British army and Royal Navy in the Falklands.
Truss, for her part, has sought to reduce workers’ rights and contain the wave of strikes that hit Britain this summer, just as Thatcher is forever associated with laws marking the end of the post-1945 mixed-economy social welfare state with a role for trade unions, which ended what the French call les trentes glorieuses—the 30 years of strong growth after 1950. Workers enjoyed good pay, cheap housing, free medical care and pensions, and ever-longer holidays. It was the biggest improvement in the lives of the working class since the Industrial Revolution.
It is often assumed that Margaret Thatcher was locked in a permanent battle with British trade unions all during her 11 years in power from 1979 to 1990. In fact, the big decade of trade union and working-class militancy in Britain was the 1970s. The worst of the strikes in terms of numbers of workers and unions participating was during the Labour government of 1974-1979.
Thatcher won power in 1979 as an opponent of uncontrolled strikes in every sector from the BBC to electricity power stations in the 1970s. That decade saw a record number of strikes during the last big mobilization of the industrial working class before the great deindustrialization of early globalization, when manufacturing left Europe and North America and headed to Asia and cheap-labor nations of the Global South.
The strikes in Britain in the 1970s were an Anglo-Saxon expression of the 1968 movement and the great occupation strikes in France in 1968.
Young 1968 activists, now university graduates, unlike their working-class parents, went into white-collar and public-sector trade unions as agitators and worker organizers. There were endless occupation strikes at motorcycle factories, shipyards, or watch firms in the manner of the Lip occupation in France. Britain’s Institute for Workers’ Control was an influential left network supported by Labour left politicians like Tony Benn.
I was elected the youngest-ever president of the British National Union of Journalists and helped promote a succession of strikes in newspapers, and even led BBC journalists in a 24-hour strike that for the first and only time in the BBC’s history stopped the BBC broadcasting news to Britain and across the world.
Inflation was at 25 percent in 1975, and all employees sought pay increases to protect their purchasing power. The young militants like myself confused the willingness to strike to protect incomes with a more general raising of consciousness of all employees to move to a quasi-revolutionary transformation of power.
The new prime minister invokes a mythological Iron Lady because she has no other message for the British people.
It was a dream and a stupid one. All the endless militancy produced were giant mountains of refuse sacks in Trafalgar and Leicester Square as rubbish collectors went on strike. Trains and buses stopped, but that alienated all other workers who depended on public transport.
Unlike the social democratic trade unions of Germany and Nordic Europe, British trade unions and left activists rejected social-partnership labor market policies as class collaboration. In the giant, four-million-strong German metalworkers union, IG Metall, it was impossible to strike unless all worker voted with a 75 percent majority for strike action. In Britain, a handful of left agitators talking to workers in a factory car park could call a strike on the basis of a show of hands.
Just as the French moved from 1968 to elect two center-right presidents—Pompidou and Giscard D’Estaing for the 1970s—the British, who experienced a long, drawn-out 1968 decade of militancy in the 1970s, elected Margaret Thatcher.
Other than the giant miners’ strike of 1984-1985, Thatcher did not face anything like the same number of strikes as the two Labour prime ministers, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, did in 1974-1979.
She legislated six different laws to control the labor market and trade unions. The most important was to make obligatory a secret ballot of workers before a strike—which had long been the accepted rule in trade unions in social democratic Northern Europe.
So when Liz Truss says she will copy the Iron Lady, she has simply got her history wrong. The strikes in Britain in 2022 have all been voted for in a secret ballot. Today, workers are looking at inflation that banks say will rise to 20 percent by Christmas. They have suffered ten years of Conservative government austerity programs while their bosses have given themselves giant raises in pay and transferred profits to shareholders rather than allowing workers to keep more of the wealth they create.
The 2022 strikes have involved barristers, McDonald’s, and Amazon workers in the new postindustrial capitalism, and some one-day strikes by railway workers. They are nothing like the giant yearlong disputes of the 1970s. Short of moving to a Chinese or Belarusian model of banning all strikes and forcing workers like Uyghurs in China to be slaves in factories, it is difficult to see what Liz Truss can do if she seeks to emulate Margaret Thatcher.
Her first big decision as Britain’s new prime minister has been to copy President Macron and impose a price freeze on electricity bills for households. This sounds good, but it will raise U.K. government debt to astronomic heights in a manner that would have given Margaret Thatcher a heart attack, as she believed in strict control on unfunded government borrowing. The pound has collapsed to its lowest level in 50 years. Liz Truss, far from being a new Iron Lady, may turn out to be more like one of the failed prime ministers of the Fourth Republic in France—or another failed Tory prime minister in the U.K.
After the 30 great years for the social-market economy that so improved the living standards of the working class in the European Community, and Britain after 1950, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan launched the trente glorieuses for globalized ultraliberalism. That era of cheap money, low inflation, cheap energy, cheap labor, and cheap goods produced anywhere in the world without respect for the conventions of the ILO is now over.
While Putin attacks Europe from the east, Liz Truss has actively campaigned to undermine Europe from the west. She opposed Brexit in 2016, but turned her coat fast as the Tory Party moved to Johnson’s Trumpian style of lies and disinformation about Europe. Truss became a zealous supporter of Brexit, seeing the petty nationalism of Brexit as opening the door to succeeding Johnson.
Yet there is widespread agreement that six years after the plebiscite of 2016, Britain is suffering from having effected a nationalist populist rupture with Europe. All of Europe is wilting under economic pressure from the aftereffects of the pandemic and now Putin’s war. The OECD and the U.K. government’s own economic forecasters say Britain is heading for stagflation and recession. The pound has collapsed.
British firms have lost key export markets in Europe. British scientists have lost collaborative projects with Europe, thanks to the hard Brexit imposed by Boris Johnson. Young British musicians and other cultural workers lost out on the continent’s summer festival season as the British government has made it more costly in terms of insurance and visas to work in Europe.
Holiday-makers heading for the continent via France this summer have faced delays of up to 12 hours waiting in cars under the unusually hot summer sun as Johnson has imposed new passport checks on arrivals and departures from Britain.
There is not a dramatic shift to supporting rejoining Europe, though Scottish voters seem adamant in supporting the ruling Scottish National Party’s push for an independence referendum and the separation of Scotland from English rule as a way of returning to full partnership with the other nations, big and small, of Europe.
The most recent opinion polls show a significant drop in those saying it was right to leave Europe. In a major YouGov poll of 1,600 respondents in mid-August, only 39 percent said leaving Europe was a good idea, compared to the 52 percent who voted for Brexit six years ago. There’s about to be more disquiet in the country with the change at the top of the monarchy. But the past is certainly looking much better than the present.
When Liz Truss made the customary first call of a new U.K. prime minister to the U.S. president, Joe Biden, he made it clear to her that the U.S. would oppose her proposals to try to reopen the EU-U.K. Withdrawal Treaty in a way that could damage the open trade and no borders inside the island of Ireland. Hard-line Tory anti-Europeans and Europhobe extreme Protestant politicians in Ulster want a major rewriting of the treaty. Many fear this would kill the main provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, which some Protestant identity politicians in Ulster call a “capitulation.”
Indeed, Truss pandered to that point of view in her campaign to become Tory leader and prime minister, appealing to the aging anti-European Tory rank-and-file electorate.
Labour is failing to capitalize on the falling support for Brexit and the clear disapproval of business, farmers, cultural workers, universities, and young voters.
In the two communiqués issued by the White House and Downing Street on the Biden-Truss exchange, Washington underlined the president’s expression of concern that Truss should not threaten stability and the settled treaty agreement on Northern Ireland. The Downing Street communiqué made no mention of Biden’s warning.
But the message hit home. Downing Street briefed that Liz Truss would no longer make a fight with Europe over Northern Ireland a priority.
Liz Truss was opposed to Brexit up to the vote in June 2016. She then claimed it would be good for U.K. trade and wealth creation. But of late she has fallen silent, as no one any longer believes that Britain is freer, richer, with better outcomes as a result of leaving Europe.
An Ipsos MORI poll carried out in August showed 69 percent agreeing with the proposition that the United Kingdom is in decline. From the monarchy to the Royal Navy—whose new flagship aircraft carrier, the Prince of Wales, was meant to symbolize Britannia again ruling the waves but has just broken down on its first major voyage and had to be ignominiously towed to harbor for repairs—there is a sense that the Britain Liz Truss now takes charge of has been breaking down since the 2016 Brexit vote.
Broken Britain has 14 million households living in poverty. There is real fear over the rise in cost of living. Trade unions are weaker and unable to attract new members. Once-great political parties have produced clown leaders. The National Health Service has run out of dentists, and the BBC carried heart-wrenching reports on poor people using pliers to extract their teeth or elderly people falling over and waiting nine hours for an ambulance to arrive. There has been a sequence of reports on police forces that cannot respond to crime and are riddled with sexism and racism.
The economy is slowly getting smaller thanks to Brexit. The new prime minister invokes a mythological Iron Lady from long ago because she has no other message for the British people.
What is extraordinary is that Labour is failing to capitalize on the falling support for Brexit and the clear line from business, farmers, cultural workers, universities, and young voters that they now see the hard Tory rupture with Europe as being bad for their future. The Labour leadership seems fixated on the idea that because a group of voters from working-class backgrounds, usually in the postindustrial north, voted for Brexit and then for Boris Johnson in 2019, Labour can only win back their votes by embracing rightist hostility to Europe.
The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, in a major speech last month, made clear that his policy of Brexit was to hug the Tory line close. He is frightened that if he utters a criticism of Brexit or says something positive about European partnership, the Murdoch and other anti-European press plus the Tories will accuse him of repudiating the 2016 plebiscite result. Thus he would send white working-class anti-immigrant voters back to the Tories.
Yet there are huge reservoirs of pro-European voters. They accept that a full return to the EU is not on any agenda for some time. But they don’t want to be told to follow the rightist anti-immigrant isolationist line that is making Britain poorer. They have alternatives, like the Green Party or the Liberal Democrats, or in Scotland the Scottish Nationalists, if they want to vote against Liz Truss on her nativist Europhobia.
Such votes could cost Labour a majority. The first “Rejoin” march in central London is on Saturday, September 10. Starmer needs a more credible stance.
