Amid all the chaos of Westminster, the political beauty pageants, the endless scandal and backbiting, one thing becomes painfully apparent. We have forgotten how to believe in ourselves. I grew up in the shadow of Tony Blair. But not long before he swept into power and began to unmake the pillars that had strengthened our country, there was a nation that prized hard work over handouts - one that saw a person's labour as their own, stood tall in the world and apologised to no one. I was born in 1994. My generation only heard about it. We never truly got to see it ourselves. That spirit had a name: Thatcherism. And we have let it slip through our fingers.
Thatcher's Legacy: Rebuilding a Nation
In this job I have had the privilege of interviewing ministers from Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet. One, who sternly corrected me that it was "Mrs T", told me she did not merely mend an economy, she rebuilt the character of a nation. Lord Lamont spoke of how she inherited a country on its knees. The Winter of Discontent had left rubbish piled in the streets, the dead unburied, inflation raging and the unions holding the nation to ransom.
Unlike the sorry sack of socialists running the country today, her answer was not to hand yet more power to the people who had piled high the fire. Where our PM-to-be, the municipal messiah Andy Burnham, sees the state as the solution, Thatcher saw it as the cause. So she rolled back the frontiers. Selling council homes to the families who lived in them, she emboldened a generation to make their own way. I once worked under a sales manager who had bought her first home because of Mrs T, and would not hear a word said against her. In an office of twenty-somethings, it made her stand out.
The Contrast with Today's Britain
She let people keep more of what they earned, and believed enterprise and freedom - not the dead hand of government - fuelled the engines of prosperity. Above all she believed in the dignity of work and the good sense of ordinary people. She trusted families, not ministries. It was a creed, and it made us formidable. Now look at us. Taxes stand at their highest in more than 70 years, atop a welfare bill that rewards idleness and punishes effort. And presiding over it is a political class that flinches at every hard choice and reaches instead for the comfort blanket of more spending, more borrowing and more control.
Burnham's Vision vs. Thatcher's Creed
Burnham sees the state as the solution. We have traded aspiration for entitlement, and self-reliance for a nanny state that treats grown men and women as children while telling the young they must be ashamed of their history and grateful for whatever crumbs Whitehall leaves. We tax the family farm and the family firm, smother enterprise beneath red tape and net zero zealotry, then wonder why Britain feels poorer, greyer and smaller than it once did.
This is not the country Margaret Thatcher believed in. It is the very country she rescued us from. The answer is not nostalgia, she would have had no patience for a nation gazing mistily at the past. It is to recover the creed that made her great, and us with her. Reward work and take an axe to the taxes that punish it. Shrink a state that has forgotten its place, and trust people to build their own lives. The grocer's daughter from Grantham understood what her successors have forgotten: a nation rises when it asks more of its people, not less. That spirit is not dead. It is only sleeping, and it is time, at long last, that we woke it.
