• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It was a reasonable introduction to the prejudices and pleasures of an Oxford degree course.

I left St Catherine’s and walked down Holywell Street to Blackwell’s bookshop. I had never seen a shop with five floors of books. I felt dizzy, like too much oxygen all at once. And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to be able to write their share, and why were there still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?

I was so excited, so hopeful, and I was troubled too, by what had been said to me. As a woman would I be an onlooker and not a contributor? Could I study what I could never hope to achieve? Achieve it or not, I had to try.

And later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.

Whatever happened that day worked out for me; I was given a place, deferred for a year.

And that took me straight to Margaret Thatcher and the 1979 election. Thatcher had the vigour and the arguments and she knew the price of a loaf of bread. She was a woman – and that made me feel that I too could succeed. If a grocer’s daughter could be prime minister, then a girl like me could write a book that would be on the shelves of English Literature in Prose A–Z.

I voted for her.

It is commonplace now to say that Thatcher changed two political parties: her own, and the left-wing Labour opposition. It is less often remembered that Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK broke forever the post-war consensus – and that consensus had lasted for over thirty years.

Spin back to 1945, and whether you were on the Left or the Right in Britain or Western Europe, rebuilding societies after the war could not happen using the outdated and discredited neo-liberal economics of the free market – unregulated labour, unstable prices, no provision for the sick or the old or the unemployed. We were going to need housing, plenty of jobs, a welfare state, nationalisation of utilities and transport.

It was a real advance in human consciousness towards collective responsibility; an understanding that we owed something not only to our flag or to our country, to our children or our families, but to each other. Society. Civilisation. Culture.

That advance in consciousness did not come out of Victorian values or philanthropy, nor did it emerge from right-wing politics; it came out of the practical lessons of the war, and – and this matters – the superior arguments of socialism.

Britain’s economic slow-down in the 1970s, our IMF bail-out, rocketing oil prices, Nixon’s decision to float the dollar, unruly union disputes, and a kind of existential doubt on the Left, allowed the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s Right to skittle away annoying arguments about a fair and equal society. We were going to follow Milton Friedman and his pals at the Chicago School of Economics back to the old free market laissez-faire, and dress it up as a new salvation.

Welcome TINA – There Is No Alternative.

In 1988, Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, called the post-war consensus, the ‘post-war delusion’.

I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.

I did not know that Thatcherism would fund its economic miracle by selling off all our nationalised assets and industries.

I did not realise the consequences of privatising society.

I am driving under the