There is an old joke about a Dubliner, who is lost in the Irish countryside on his way to his cousin’s wedding. He asks a random farmer for directions. The farmer sucks in his teeth and replies: “I wouldn’t have started from here.
” Britain, like the lost Irishman, is where she is. Our country in 2024 is not where we would have wanted to start. As the great philosopher of Oasis fame Noel Gallaher said in an interview a few years ago: “I loved the 1990s”, noting “it was a great period, a great moment in time.
We were all Thatcher’s children, who got off our ar**s and did it for ourselves”. Indeed, the nineties were “brilliant” and, partially, a product of a Conservative Party that had restored the patient to health. In the 18 years from 1979 to 1997, the Conservative Party transformed the United Kingdom from a country humiliated at home and abroad to one that had regained her mojo and much of her prestige.
Internationally, the nadir for the United Kingdom found expression in a Labour Party begging the International Monetary Fund in 1976 for a loan to meet deteriorating economic conditions. In exchange, the IMF demanded and got large cuts in spending, not least an acceleration of coal mine closures. Nationally, it was the state’s inability to govern.
The Labour Party funded by the Trade Unions, and beholden to them, could not reign them in. Pay increases were sought but could not be met for fear of rising inflation. The series of debilitating strikes led .