Statist Tory leadership has forgotten that only enterprise will get Britain out of this economic hole

Until recently Margaret Thatcher anniversaries attracted a lot of attention, by which I mean they attracted attention from the political and media class and people like me who like to talk about these things. No longer. It was the 30th anniversary last weekend of Thatcher’s fall and it was mentioned in only a few places. It is as though the episode is finally slipping away, becoming history that can be discussed as history.

For the Tories this is, on one level, a practical political advantage. In the years between her resignation on 22 November 1990 and her death on 8 April 2013 her party was unduly obsessed. What was her legacy? Was New Labour trying to steal her mantle? How did any new Tory leader measure up to her? What about Europe? What would Thatcher do about any particular problem that presented itself?

For a Tory like David Cameron, leader from 2005, that fixation among members of the Tory tribe was a problem. One Nation Cameron was respectful of her achievements but convinced that she was complex, imperfect, human. In particular he thought she had never developed a proper theory of the State, which is true as she was focussed so much as a matter of necessity on questions of markets and national realignment.

But following her death, and the extraordinary ceremony and paying of respects, that stopped. The Tory pendulum swung suddenly. From always asking what Thatcher would do, the Tories flipped to barely discussing her and hardly ever referencing her work.

In part this was down to the emergence of Boris Johnson and the manner in which from 2016 he replaced Thatcher as the dominant personality in the Tory tribe. There was a different blonde bombshell in town, closer in outlook to Michael Heseltine, her nemesis in 1990. Boris shares Hezza’s love of grand projects and state largesse. He has referred to himself as “Brexity Hezza”.

In the Brexit battle of 2016, Thatcher was too conflicted a figure to merit much attention. Not only was she gone, she didn’t fit easily with one side or the other. Although she had enthusiastically backed the “Stay In” campaign in 1975 during the first referendum, later she fought with Europe. She never in office advocated leaving the European Community, though.

Only when she left office did the scepticism of her late speeches as PM turn into something even stronger, which to critics looked like wisdom after the event or self-justification for having been tricked or tricked herself. The Brexiteers could hardly use her as a shield, when she signed away a lot of sovereignty and was one of the architects of the EU’s Single Market that Britain is now leaving.

In this way, Thatcher has faded. The full stop in the process was provided by the final volume last year of Charles Moore’s magnificent three part biography.

But the pendulum swung too far away from Thatcherism. By the end of the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s spending review statement today I couldn’t get Thatcher – with her love of enterprise and all her imperfections – out of my head.

The Tories under Johnson and Sunak just spend, spend, spend, as though it is a virtue in itself. After such a discombobulating crisis the spending and boasting about it has taken on an almost mesmerising quality. Tory MPs gaze on the scene, some looking stupefied by what is being done.

At several points, Sunak referred to the importance of businesses and families, but as victims of the crisis. The assumptions underpinning the statement were overwhelmingly statist. Everything is about what the government will do and what it will spend next.

This statism must be partly force of habit, when since March the population has demonstrated that there is a relentless capacity, among a majority, for compliance. That means looking to the government for answers on everything as though we work for it rather than the other way round.

Many of the measures this year were necessary. The government stopped the economy; the government must help bail out businesses barred from trading. The deficit this year of £394bn is justified, although it looks peppered with waste along the way.

But the only way in which that vast deficit can be closed, in future years, is via economic dynamism and the unleashing of a spirit of enterprise and entrepreneurialism. We need businesses inspired and encouraged to grow Britain out of this deep hole. Surely the Chancellor should have called more today for help, ideas, inspiration that will early next year be applied on the supply side of the economy to drive growth?

Instead, resources are allocated on the most bizarre basis. Some £4bn was today set aside for a “pork barrel” of levelling up funds. That sounds small in the context of this year, but a lot of people had to work hard to pay their taxes to account for that £4bn.

Another point. The Thatcher administrations were hardly pure, but the regional aid and enterprise zone approach was carried out mostly by the book, with oversight and proper governance. That £4bn will need sign off from local MPs, an incredible invitation to all manner of chicanery and scandal. The Tories are now throwing money, other people’s money, at the “Red Wall” seats and hoping some of it sticks, to help them at the next election.

The economic situation facing Thatcher in 1979 and the emergency confronting Johnson and Sunak today are quite different, of course.

Thatcherism emerged as a rejection of decades of post-war consensus because the establishment position – Tory and mainstream Labour – was too statist. She appealed to the aspirational, to those emerging into the expanding middle class, and to those tired of chaos and national decline.

It is not like that now. A sudden pandemic created this emergency and the government had to act. But Johnson and Sunak have in the process been captured completely by statism. Both need urgently to refamiliarise themselves with concepts like enterprise, or they’ll end up like Ted Heath.