On 8th April 2013 Tom Mills (New Left Project) wrote an interminable article about Margaret Thatcher and her place in history.
As you might expect, it is not a flattering analysis. Tom Mills does not have a single good word for her. But hey, not everyone sees things in the same way.
Lefties are entitled to write history from a socialist perspective.
What they are not entitled to do is falsify that history.
In a telling paragraph Tom Mills writes:
"...her government turned to the newly fashionable theory of monetarism, according to which the ‘money supply’ was the key to controlling economic growth and inflation. The Labour leadership had already shifted somewhat towards ‘monetarist’ thinking in 1976, coerced by the IMF and influenced by James Callaghan’s son-in-law Peter Jay, but the Thatcherites now embraced a rather crude version – later referred to by Thatcher’s second Chancellor Nigel Lawson as ‘unreconstructed parochial monetarism’ – with characteristic zeal."
You might think from this that the Callaghan government had monetarism reluctantly and undemocratically imposed on them.
Actually however, James Callaghan and Denis Healey adopted monetarism in a secret meeting (secret even from other members of the cabinet) in late 1977.
This is reported by former Labour MP Brian Sedgemore in his 1980 book The Secret Constitution.
Therefore we see that the Labour government voluntarily adopted monetarism in an undemocratic and secretive way, whereas Margaret Thatcher sought a mandate for her monetarist policies, won a landslide election and subsequently validated her policies in two subsequent elections.
Rather than admit this, Tom Mills chooses to put a highly selective spin on the sequence of events suggesting coercion.
And Tom Mills is an aspiring academic.
And ironically he is also contributor to an organisation called Spinwatch.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_death_of_a_class_warrior_margaret_thatcher_1925_2013
As you might expect, it is not a flattering analysis. Tom Mills does not have a single good word for her. But hey, not everyone sees things in the same way.
Lefties are entitled to write history from a socialist perspective.
What they are not entitled to do is falsify that history.
In a telling paragraph Tom Mills writes:
"...her government turned to the newly fashionable theory of monetarism, according to which the ‘money supply’ was the key to controlling economic growth and inflation. The Labour leadership had already shifted somewhat towards ‘monetarist’ thinking in 1976, coerced by the IMF and influenced by James Callaghan’s son-in-law Peter Jay, but the Thatcherites now embraced a rather crude version – later referred to by Thatcher’s second Chancellor Nigel Lawson as ‘unreconstructed parochial monetarism’ – with characteristic zeal."
You might think from this that the Callaghan government had monetarism reluctantly and undemocratically imposed on them.
Actually however, James Callaghan and Denis Healey adopted monetarism in a secret meeting (secret even from other members of the cabinet) in late 1977.
This is reported by former Labour MP Brian Sedgemore in his 1980 book The Secret Constitution.
Therefore we see that the Labour government voluntarily adopted monetarism in an undemocratic and secretive way, whereas Margaret Thatcher sought a mandate for her monetarist policies, won a landslide election and subsequently validated her policies in two subsequent elections.
Rather than admit this, Tom Mills chooses to put a highly selective spin on the sequence of events suggesting coercion.
And Tom Mills is an aspiring academic.
And ironically he is also contributor to an organisation called Spinwatch.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_death_of_a_class_warrior_margaret_thatcher_1925_2013
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