ANAS Sarwar recently described Nigel Farage as a ‘Margaret Thatcher tribute act’. To be fair to the rather testy leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Farage has never denied his admiration for the Iron Lady. Neither has he hidden his seemingly unwavering commitment to the same small-state, free-market approach that characterised her governments during the 1980s. ‘I supported Margaret Thatcher’s reforms of the economy,’ he said. After her death in 2013 he declared that he was the only politician ‘keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive’.
For some, however, last week’s policy announcements cast some doubt upon this claim, suggesting that if he is indeed a tribute act, he’s not a very good one. Declaring his intention to remove the two-child cap on child benefit, for example, at a cost of £3.5billion to the Exchequer, is not only profligate, violating Thatcher’s belief in individuals and governments living within their means, it will ensnare the working class in the kind of benefit trap that she abhorred, encouraging worklessness and welfare dependency – societal afflictions that crush aspiration, erode personal liberty and prevent individual self-fulfilment.
According to this narrative, restoring the winter fuel payment at a cost of £1.5billion also belies his claim to be the ideological heir to the Iron Lady. Again, it represents an unrestrained spending splurge, an approach to governing that inevitably leads to higher taxes and increased borrowing, as well as a means by which individuals become less responsible, less independent, and over-reliant on the nannying hand of the state. A Thatcherite response to fuel poverty would be to cut the taxes being used to subsidise uneconomical green technology, not to solve a problem caused by state interference by adding another layer of state interference.
Okay, one might concede, Farage is promising to scrap Net Zero, saving £40billion, reducing fuel bills and freeing individuals from state interference in the energy market. He’s also committed to jettisoning Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes (saving £7billion), cutting legal immigration to net zero, bringing a halt to illegal migration and the extortionate use of asylum hotels, and he has promised to cut the disability benefits bill from the £100billion it is projected to reach by 2030. These are all eminently Thatcherite policies, one could argue, rooted in her social conservatism and neo-liberal notions of individual freedom.
There are also signs of Farage’s New Right credentials in some of his other pronouncements. His proposal to increase the personal allowance on income tax to £20,000 seeks to encourage work and liberate people from the aspiration-sapping tentacles of big government. His pledge to reintroduce the transferable tax allowance between married couples, moreover, is a laudably ambitious attempt to free children from the often-devastating socio-economic consequences of broken homes by promoting and supporting the traditional family – a socially conservative commitment with a neo-liberal twist. These policies appear to be undiluted Thatcherism.
However, to judge whether Faragism is indeed indistinguishable from the creed espoused by the Iron Lady, or whether it’s a pale imitation, as asserted by Anas Sarwar – or whether it’s something completely different – we must consider his entire offer, and, more importantly, the guiding principles that underpin his agenda.
These point to a philosophy more akin to traditional conservatism than Thatcherism. Yes, there are shades of New Right thinking, as mentioned above, but these shades are not justified by a Thatcherite evangelical commitment to individual freedom, even though greater freedom would be a welcome by-product of their implementation.
They are justified, as are his other proposals, by the traditional Burkean principles of ‘family, community and country’, as he said in last week’s speech. Like Burke, the great 18th century conservative thinker, he recognises the importance of family as an institution that provides societal stability, transmits accumulated wisdom from one generation to the next, and satisfies the profound human need for stability and kinship. He also acknowledges, as Burke did, that this is the seed of belonging that germinates into love of one’s community and, ultimately, love of one’s country. Farage’s offer should be seen through this remarkably coherent intellectual prism. Even his decision to lift the two-child benefit cap, although in my view mistaken, is justified by his commitment to the family unit.
Farage wants to release the organic – living, breathing – nation from the cancerous mutations engendered by an overmighty and out-of-control state. He wants to liberate and strengthen the nation rather than the individual.
Does this contradict his fabled admiration for Mrs Thatcher? Of course not. Just because he supported her policies in the 1980s doesn’t mean he should mimic them in the 2020s. Different times have different challenges, challenges that require different and imaginative responses. Mrs Thatcher knew this: that is why her government heralded a radical departure from the policy platforms of her post-war predecessors.
Farage might be an admirer of Mrs Thatcher, he might even call himself a Thatcherite, particularly when craftily seeking to divide the Conservative Party, but, sorry Mr Sarwar, he’s no Margaret Thatcher tribute act. He’s a traditional conservative cut from the same cloth as Edmund Burke, perhaps with a sprinkling of Disraelian pragmatism to boot.
