The Children of Thatcher

In April 2008, the now Foreign Secretary William Hague sent a cable to American officials reassuring them that Hague, David Cameron and George Osborne were all ‘Children of Thatcher’. The three most powerful men in the land, controlling our country, our economy and our interests abroad are self-confessed acolytes to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: one of the most reviled and destructive leaders of recent times. Presumably they share her appetite for mass unemployment, riots on British streets, privatisation and armed conflict – all of which dominate the headlines now that the Conservatives are back in power.

We all know this, but Cameron and his crew do quite a good job of hiding it from the general public with misdirection, Liberal Democrat stooges and this irritating insistence that unimaginative and painful decisions ‘have to be made'. ‘There is no other choice,’ the Conservatives tell us, forcing us to draw the conclusion that it was a waste of time replacing the previous government with these ‘Children of Thatcher’. If there are no choices, then it hardly needs a new government to make them. If a new government has no fresh ideas in respect to dealing with the country’s problems, then they really have little business asking for our votes.


That is unless their objective in government is simply to re-install their favoured ideology: Thatcherism. You have to ask yourself, what are three millionaires doing in the high echelons of the government anyway? Haven’t they got better things to do? Shouldn’t they leave government to clever people with new ideas who really want to change things for the better? If the country wanted cuts, they could have voted in anyone to do it. It might have been nice to see a party – even an individual – with an original idea with regard to the economy. Although we suspect that Thatcherism and its aims are David Cameron’s objective, and we see it in William Hague’s own fair hand, it is difficult to imagine that they would try to pull such a thing off right before our eyes. It’s nice then to be reminded by the smug Conservative Environment Minister, speaking to an American audience, that Cameron would have made his Iron Lady proud with cuts “Thatcher could only have dreamt of”.