Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else Read Free Page A

go.’
    Another leal privatiser, Nigel Lawson, a minister in the Thatcher government from the beginning almost to the end, dismissed the idea that the government cared about the price it was getting for selling off the family silver. Having many ordinary people owning shares, he writes in his memoirs, was the point. ‘The prime motives for privatisation were not Exchequer gain,’he declares, ‘but an ideological belief in free markets and a wider distribution of private ownership of property.’
    Neither Walters nor Lawson, nor other allies like Keith Joseph, the ex-communist Alfred Sherman or Nicholas Ridley, would have been able to implement their ideas without the prehubris Thatcher herself, her extraordinary sense of the way the political wind was blowing, her conviction of her own rectitude, and the stamina and persistence with which she was able to go on insisting on something until her opponents in government gave in. Hers was a different emphasis to Walters, who saw the curbing of ‘bloody-minded trades unions’ as a useful side effect of privatisation. For Thatcher, privatisation, in the beginning at least, was simply one of many weapons to use in her battle against the unions, which was, in turn, a single episode in her war to exterminate socialism, to be fought in one unbroken front from Orgreave Colliery to Andrei Sakharov’s place of exile in Gorky. Her great political inspiration, apart from her father, was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book,
The Road to Serfdom
, written in Cambridge during the war. Hayek was regarded as an able economist; he eventually won a Nobel Prize for it. But
The Road to Serfdom
isn’t an economics book. It’s a book about society, the recent past and human nature that bears the same relation to sociology, history and psychology as
Atlas Shrugged
bears to literature. It is devoted to the idea that Winston Churchill later nodded to, catastrophically for him, in the 1945 election campaign, when he said Labour would have to fall back on ‘some form of Gestapo’ to implement its welfare and nationalisation programme. Churchill was thrown out of office, and Labour won a huge majority.
    The Road to Serfdom
claims that socialism inevitably leads to communism, and that communism and Nazi-style fascism are one and the same. The tie that links Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany, in Hayek’s view, is the centrally planned economy – as he portrays it, the attempt by a single central bureaucracy to direct all human life, to determine all human needs in advanceand organise provision, limiting each to their rationed dole and their allotted task. Such a bureaucracy will no more tolerate dissent and deviation than the engineers tending a vast production line will accept a pebble jamming the gears. Confusingly, Hayek denies he is a pure libertarian, and declares the free market must have rules; he also says it is acceptable for government to ‘provide an extensive system of social services’. Yet this is in contradiction to his main message, which is that there can be no mixture of state planning and free market competition. To him they are mutually exclusive. ‘By the time Hitler came to power, liberalism was dead in Germany,’ he writes. ‘And it was socialism that had killed it.’ Even to
try
to make socialism work, according to Hayek, is dangerous:
    in the democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different – the very destruction of freedom itself.
    Hayek was proven wrong. As in other western European countries, socialists came and went from power in Britain, introduced a welfare state and took control of large swathes of the economy without democracy and individual freedoms being threatened. The NHS was set up, council houses were built,