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My new year's resolution for 2012 is easily stated. Avoid lazy labels and simplistic stereotypes in political commentary, even when it is about Margaret Thatcher. As with all such resolves, this one is easier to say than to do, since few reputations have become so set in stereotypical aspic as Thatcher's. She remains worshipped on the right and excoriated on the left, with almost no middle ground. What more is there to say? Quite a large amount, in fact, if the state papers from 1981 – released by the National Archives at midnight last night under the 30-year rule – are a guide. Documents from one of the most embattled early years of Thatcher's 11-year premiership depict a rather more nuanced and pragmatic politician than the officially sanctioned labels of visionary or villain would allow. Nowhere is this more striking than in the papers on the IRA hunger strike. Thatcher's later reputation in this supercharged episode is of absolute implacability. The IRA prisoners' campaign for political status triggered instincts that make her a warrior queen to her admirers and a figure of undiminished hate to her detractors. Yet now it is confirmed that in July 1981, under international pressure because of her perceived intransigence, Thatcher twice authorised a back-channel exchange with the IRA, setting out the concessions she would make if the hunger strikes were ended. Even more astonishingly, she allowed the cabinet to discuss the hitherto unthinkable option of British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Almost as counter-intuitive to modern eyes is the revelation, also from the torrid month of July, of the extent of Thatcher's shock on visiting Liverpool after the Toxteth riots. She was, apparently, "taken aback" by the wave of hostility towards the Merseyside police. The fact that she was "very concerned" was officially minuted. And she told the Catholic archbishop of Liverpool that she had been "amazed" by the anti-police feeling. The upshot was that Thatcher sided with Michael Heseltine over central government intervention to boost Merseyside and against Treasury and No 10 advice to abandon Liverpool to "managed decline" and not commit scarce financial resources there. Other new documents help give a rather more contoured view of Thatcher than we are used to reading. There's the letter from the industry department, for instance, in which Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit complain that the prime minister's readiness to meet MPs from constituencies facing factory closures meant she was giving the regrettable impression that the government could help them. And there's a fascinating exchange – which would have led to patronising mockery at the time but now, after the MPs' expenses scandals, seems extremely prescient – in which Thatcher forces her Welsh secretary to cut the cost of his official flat in Cardiff from £26,000 to £12,000. Good for her. So do these new documents mean that all previous assessments of Thatcher must be rewritten? Was she, after all, a more moderate Conservative than she is nowadays cast? Was there, in reality, no Thatcherite counter-revolution against the postwar settlement? No to all three questions. Thatcher may have given the go-ahead to secret contacts with the IRA, but the efforts led nowhere. The fact that she sided with government intervention after Toxteth, or was prepared to listen to MPs whose constituents faced job losses, does not mean that she can be reinvented as the friend of the poor or redundant. These papers are a reminder that the Thatcher of 1981 had her insecure side. She was a work in progress, a not yet fully formed icon compared with what she became after the Falklands in 1982 and the miners' strike in 1984. What the new papers do, though, is remind us that the cruder mystiques, from right or left, can sometimes be little more than simplistic silliness, explaining nothing in particular while pretending to explain everything in general. Thatcher was no more right about everything than she was wrong about everything. She was far more interesting than that, as the new documents attest and, though I have not yet seen it, as the Meryl Streep movie may do, too. She was an exceptionally forceful, determined and effective political leader who, nevertheless, failed in several significant respects, as her overthrow proved. If nothing else, as Hugo Young once wrote, she was proof incarnate that personality matters in politics. In spite of her occasional hesitations, Thatcher's stock-in-trade was division. By instinct, inclination and effect she was a polariser. She glorified individualism and the nation state, but despised the communities, the traditions and the social bonds that existed in between them. When she spoke about "our people" she did not mean the people of Britain, or even England; she meant people who thought like her and who shared her many prejudices. And most British people never voted for her, in spite of a press-driven personality cult unrivalled here since the death of Churchill. She abhorred disorder, decadence and bad behaviour, but she was the patron-in-chief of a process of social and cultural atomisation which has fostered all of those things, and still does. That unforgotten legacy, as argued eloquently by the columnist Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph, is why she should not have a state funeral when she dies. The governments that have followed Thatcher's have struggled to put a kinder and more cohesive face on the forces that she unleashed, and to create some stability and validity for the public realm that remains. New Labour offered one response in prosperous times. The coalition is now attempting another in more straitened ones. Any future government in the next decade will have to craft a third. There can certainly be no going back to the failed postwar past with which, never forget, Margaret Thatcher had to deal. But there should be no going back to her own failed past, either. She was the most formidable political leader of my lifetime, but her legacy is one of public division, private selfishness and a cult of acquisitiveness that has certainly made this country what it is today, though not quite in the way that she intended.

Margaret Thatcher unmasked: the lady was for turning | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian

Not to mention the fact that obsessive, dated loathing for the woman is pretty much the only thing keeping the left in existence.

Actually, what struck me here was something that's quite incidental to the writer's main arguments. When did individualism become the Great Satan of the left?

Up until relatively recently individualism and progressiveness went together. They were the foundations of Republican liberalism - each of us free to stride out alone towards a new horizon, creating a dynamic, conquering society as we did so. Even the revolutionary communist parties of the early 20th century bought into it. It was the right that thought everyone would be better off shunted into the oppressive, unchanging roles favoured by religion and local hierarchies. Now, of course, it's the opposite.

When did it change? And why?

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Actually, what struck me here was something that's quite incidental to the writer's main arguments. When did individualism become the Great Satan of the left?

Never. It's just the way the right likes to spin things; any attempt to, say, protect workers from bosses is interpreted as an attack on "individualism" or "freedom" or whatever.

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When did it change? And why?

If it changed, and I'm not convinced that it did, it occurred when the grand statist projects of Fascism were discredited. The old blood-and-soil school of conservatism, while still very much alive as seen in organs like the EDL and some Tory Euroscepticism, keeps a relatively low profile, and the Libertarian strand of heroising "job creators" became dominant.

Of course, I think that's junk, becuase in order to "free" these captains of industry, workers must be made unfree, and increasingly subject to the whims of their employers. Thus I maintain that Conservatism is in practice, if not in rhetoric, still engaged in the suppression of the individual.

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Never. It's just the way the right likes to spin things; any attempt to, say, protect workers from bosses is interpreted as an attack on "individualism" or "freedom" or whatever.

I'm just quoting the article:

She glorified individualism and the nation state, but despised the communities, the traditions and the social bonds that existed in between them.

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What Lady Thatcher's ironing board can tell us about David Cameron and the collapse of British society – Telegraph Blogs

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Twenty-one years after being overthrown by her party's pro-euro faction, Margaret Thatcher still continues to exert an enormous gravitational pull on British political life. With The Iron Lady film soon to be released, there has already been much speculation about whether she should be given a state funeral (in fact, and sadly for Labour, Thatcher's death is more interesting than Ed Miliband's entire life). As Charles Moore recently wrote, what other modern British prime minister, aside from Churchill, would be worthy of a biopic? (Blair has been portrayed on several occasions, but always as a slightly comedic salesman or trendy vicar.) So it's entirely fitting that, as official papers now reveal, Mrs Thatcher was so modest that she insisted on paying £19 for an ironing board. As this paper reports: Files released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule include a note about the cost of refurbishing the Prime Minister’s official residence, in which Baroness Thatcher pointed out that she and her husband, Denis, used only one bedroom and already had their own crockery. She wrote: “I will pay for the ironing boards and other things, like sufficient linen for the one bedroom we use. The rest can go back into stock. MT” As a rule the great leaders are not made great by having the most lavish balls, the swankiest private jets or the grandest titles. Looking back, it was obvious that the New Labour project would end in dismal failure when its leaders began lavishing a fortune on new wallpaper, sofas, and grace and favour mansions. And David Cameron – the £680,000 of taxpayer's money he spent refurbishing Downing Street does not bode well. Of course we can't entirely blame Cameron, just as we can't entirely blame MPs for making the taxpayers fund their lifestyles. Thatcher grew up in an era of hardship and penny-pinching, but she also lived in an age of high social solidarity and restraint. Politicians rarely cheated because they were more likely to see the taxpayers as people like them; there were also a greater sense of national solidarity, and though religion was in decline, the general climate was still strongly influenced by Biblical prohibitions. When did all this change? Depending on political allegiances, once can either blame the 1960s or the 1980s, although personally I think things started to change in the 1990s, when conspicuous consumption became the norm, bling came into fashion, and the typical song format changed from "I love you" to "I love me". It is not that people are more selfish – there is still plenty of altruism about, as the case of the woman who gave a kidney to a lady she met at a dinner party illustrates – but rather there are no social restraints or taboos or pressures forcing not-very-altruistic people to behave themselves. Like when Thatcher came to power, we're entering a period of austerity, when hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs and belts are being tightened across the land. Yet we also have among the richest Cabinets in history, with a prime minister worth somewhere in the low eight figures. In Ireland the shock of financial meltdown has been met, by many accounts, with surprising levels of social solidarity; people have agreed to defer loans to people who might lose their homes; civil servants have handed over money from their pensions to help pay off the national debt. It's not quite Bedford Falls, the setting for Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life; that film continues to bring tears to tipsy eyes every Christmas because it shows how much social solidarity can help a community overcome financial hardship, but it's heading in the right direction. In contrast, Britain now displays one of the major symptoms of low social capital – when the rich do not feel obliged to help out those less fortunate to them. In the past decade less than £10,000 has been gifted to the exchequer by British citizens; why aren't any of our mega-rich Cabinet donating money? David Cameron's catchphrase "we're all in it together" was so pathetic (in the old sense of the world) because it was so plainly untrue. Maybe I'm doing the man down, and secret papers will reveal in 30 years' time that he spent all his weekend caring for Aids orphans and puppies: but Cameron, unlike Thatcher, seems a fitting leader for our age.

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