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| Margaret Thatcher: the first peak oil prime minister |
There has
been an awful lot of debate raging since former British prime minister Margaret
Thatcher died last week. And like many debates that raise the emotional tempo this
one is crystalizing nicely into two competing camps, namely the camp that says
she ‘saved’ the UK from decline and the camp that says she left it a scorched
moral wasteland where only the greedy and the bigoted flourish.
Regardless
of what one might think of her policies however, what has been mostly missing
is the role that oil played in her ascendency. When she came to power in 1979
Britain was a dark and miserable place. At least that’s the official narrative;
from what I remember things were actually not that bad at all. I, as an 8
year-old boy, could roam around my local town at will without anyone regarding
this as unusual, the music in the charts was pretty good, television was for
the most part entertaining and giant supermarkets had yet to suck the life out
of local communities. Things were pretty good if you didn't read the newspapers.
But one
aspect of life in the 1970s that could hardly be called good was the price of
oil. The two oil shocks that had occurred earlier in the decade has threatened
the onward march to a wealthier, more comfortable, future. People might have
been watching the Good Life on television, but that didn’t mean they actually
wanted to give up their jobs and raise pigs in their own back yards. Something
had to be done!
Enter
Thatcher stage right. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham hit the moribund
political scene like a whirlwind, smashing taboos and giving the whole
gentleman’s club a sharp kick up the backside. Like any successful politician
in a democracy she had identified a deep craving within the psyche of the
electorate and had used the power of promise to unleash a wave which she rode
to victory as well as any Oahu surfer.
Although
people didn’t realize it, they had just done a deal with the devil. No, not
Thatcher, the devil I am referring to is right out of Doctor Faustus and its
name is oil. Thatcher, and her ideologist in crime Ronald Reagan, pulled every
trick in the book to flood the world with cheap oil. North Sea production was
ramped up off the coast of Britain, and Reagan did the same thing, eliminating
price controls on oil and natural gas in the US. Deals were struck with other oil
producing nations to do the same thing and pretty soon the price of oil – and thus
the price of everyday life in the industrialised world – crashed to a level so
low that it was hardly worth thinking about. The age of mega-abundance was upon us.
Britain,
along with much of the industrialised world, then moved into a peculiar
position. The access to cheap energy and materials might have been temporarily
secured, but Thatcher had a dragon she wanted to slay in the form of the unions.
British industry, as she saw it, was inefficient and stuffed full of
unproductive suits and workers – most of whom happened to be socialists. The
miners’ strike is the best remembered battle here, and Thatcher, by now
power-crazed, refused to back down – and won.
But who
needed industry anyway? It was much cheaper to get poorer countries to make
stuff for you. I remember going on a school trip to a factory where they made tennis racquets.
The production manager gave us a talk and I clearly remember him saying that
they were ‘offshoring’ soon to China where ‘Each worker will make ten tennis racquets
for a bowl of rice.’ And we children all nodded sagely at what seemed to make sense.
Instead of
industry we got finance. The so-called Big Bang happened in 1986, when the
shackles were thrown off the City of London and financial firms were, not to
put too fine a point on it, allowed to create money out of thin air. This
proved to be much easier than making cars or ships or digging up coal, and the tax receipts were
fantastic too. Nobody mentioned the fact that the whole thing looked like a
Ponzi scheme, and the boom in the 1980s swept everyone up, including many of
Thatcher’s former naysayers who suddenly found they were doing quite nicely out
of it. There can be few more spectacular examples of this than the former
Marxist comedian Alexei
Sayle, whose stock in trade was lambasting Thatcher and the Tories with foul-mouthed invective. Sayle
now test drives luxury cars for the right wing Telegraph newspaper and he’s tied
himself in quite a few rhetorical knots trying to explain that one.
But bitter
cracks had opened up in the national discourse. Who had the greater moral right
to exist? Was it the pit miner, whose family had worked in the same pits for
generations, or was it the new breed of financial whizz-kids in the City, who
wore red braces and said things like ‘Greed is good,’ into their brick-sized
mobile phones? Well, we know who won that battle, if not the debate, in the
end.
Individual
families were riven – including my own. Once, my aunt and uncle came for
dinner. I must have been about 15 at the time, and after a couple of glasses of
wine a discussion started between my father and my uncle about the coal miners. My
father was ardently pro-Thatcher and had done well out of her policies, whereas
my uncle was a socialist through and through, and drove an ambulance for a
living. Things became heated and my uncle said to my aunt ‘Get your coat, dear,’
and they walked out. I never saw or heard from them again and have no idea if
they are dead or alive. Such were the divisions that opened up over Thatcher.
Now, almost
thirty years later, it is clear what Thatcher’s legacy was. She, and others
like her, rode to power on a gusher. People wanted a cheap way of life and she
gave it to them. The billions of barrels of oil that have been wasted over the
last few decades could have been used to build a new infrastructure that didn’t
rely on the assumption of an infinitely available and cheap energy source.
Instead, we wasted it on expensive plastic yachts for the rich and cheap holidays
on the Costa del Sol for the poor, and a million other things in between. The chance we were given was squandered.
Was Maggie
to blame? Yes and no. She might be a figure of hate for the left and a source
of quasi-religious devotion for the deluded neoliberals on the right (including, I might add, Tony Blair)
but ultimately, if she hadn’t come along, someone very like her would have
seized the same opportunity. Is this how democracies seize up in the end? With
two ultimately competing blocks of voters vying for their own share of the pie
and regarding the competing faction as ‘evil’? What would Jung say ...
People
often accuse her of making Britain a crueler, nastier place. Is this true? I
have no idea. Looking at it the other way around it could be said that a modern
industrialised lifestyle was making Britain a crueler, more atomized, society
and that Thatcher was merely our totem. She was the crucible that allowed the
60 million residents of these islands to access vast material riches at the
expense of the Third World, and to burn our way through oil supplies that took
billions of years to form. She allowed the proud nationalists among us to
perpetuate the myth that Britannia had not quite finished Ruling the Waves, and
that it was our manifest destiny to remain Great.
Without
her, or someone like her, our energy descent would have proceeded in a nicely
linear fashion. It’s fun to do a thought experiment on this one. Imagine, for a
moment, that instead of electing a Thatcher, we had elected a dull leader
lacking in charisma but with the nation’s long term security at heart. This
leader, instead of throwing her weight behind motorway and airport
expansions, chose to support and invest in bicycle power and energy from windmills. Her government made
it law that every house should be thickly insulated to cut down on energy loss,
and that cars should be taxed at 200% so that you had to be quite well off to
afford one (reinvesting the money in public transport instead).
Yes,
Britain would have looked like a larger version of Denmark, where all of the
above were followed through on. But instead we got a massive road network that
is constantly jammed and unsafe to cycle on, millions of new flimsily-built
properties that leak heat like sieves (I have freezing toes as I write this in
the fairly expensive 1990s-built house we are currently renting) and an energy grid
that is geared for failure.
So, instead
of a painful but relatively gentle transition to a future where the ability
to harness energy slips slowly from our grasp what we can expect instead is a
traumatic and sudden drop-off of available energy exacerbated by a painful financial crash
that will likely be the most traumatic time since the cities were bombed to
rubble by Hitler.
Luckily for
Maggie, though, she won’t be around to experience all that. That joy is all ours.
