Brexit: The Worst Pandora’s Box Ever or The Remaking of The United Kingdom?
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Privatization was the very basis of Thatcherism.
When Britain’s first woman prime minister talked of ‘rolling back the frontiers of state’ she meant transferring the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy to private hands.
At a time when very few outside the trade union movement knew or had any idea what privatization looked like, the mass mobilization and radicalization of the British public was never going to happen.
Back then, the prevailing view was that unions were recalcitrant and needed to be destroyed and those with long memories of the 1970s, had no affection nor appetite for their militancy against Thatcherite economic reforms.
The lack of public sympathy meant that the forces of opposition to privatization lost quite handily to the Conservative government, during the miners strike in 1984 to 1985.
But this seismic loss was mitigated by the fact that the United Kingdom was in the European Union.
And Margaret Thatcher, who was as much a culture warrior as a neoliberal ideologue, understood that the European Union was a huge obstacle to handing economic powers to private hands, and this put her on collision course with the…