 Before coming to my main business of the afternoon, two preliminary points. First, as ever, I would like to thank Hansen Gulchin for their great kindness in having invited me to address so many conferences of the Property and Freedom Society. Second, I would like to be first to congratulate Keir Markland on a most remarkable maiden speech to this august gathering. I am all the more impressed and astonished, so far as I do not necessarily agree with the word of what he said. It was a tour de force as far as defences of James the Second Go. That being said, I come to the main business. When she died in April 2013, the mainstream opinion was that Margaret Thatcher had been the kind of person whom Donald Trump is hoped or feared to be. She had humbled the left. She had brought fundamental changes to the conduct of economic policy. She had made her country great again and respected in the outer world. This being the assumption, conservatives went into ostentatious mourning and the leftists rejoiced. I appreciate that there is a close personal friend of Mrs Thatcher sitting in this room. And for the avoidance of any doubt, whatever, I will say now that I have no desire to impugn her personal character, which seems to me to have been singularly pure and honest as British politicians go. Forgive me, that was not an ironic compliment. I do admire Margaret Thatcher's character. Many aspects of her character were admirable indeed. Even so, I do not in any sense regard her as a conservative, let alone a libertarian hero. Instead, I regard her in every sense as the midwife of the leftist police state that is modern Britain. I begin with her economic policies. When she came into government in 1979, the British state was running a large budget deficit. This deficit was routinely monetised and the country had, for most of the previous decade, been suffering double digit inflation. At the same time, the trade union movement was unreasonably strong. The trade union movement had used this power to obtain regular cost of living increases for its members that were not always justified by local circumstances. And they had also resisted the necessary structural changes to the various companies without which long-term real increases in the standard of living were impossible. Margaret Thatcher's solution to these problems was, in my view, disastrous. You solve the kind of inflation we were suffering by cutting government spending. You shut down a few ministries. You cut the real salaries of the state employees who remain. What Margaret Thatcher did instead was to allow and to encourage her chance through the Exchequer to raise interest rates, to raise them very high after 1980. The effect was to make much of our manufacturing industry unable to borrow. The consequent rise in the value of sterling on the foreign exchanges also made our manufacturing exports largely uncompetitive. The result of this was that between 1980 and 1983, about a quarter to a third of British manufacturing industry collapsed. Unemployment went up to at least 3 million and bearing in mind the statistical tricks used to hide these things, the true unemployment rate probably went considerably higher than that. This unemployment did not come substantially down until the middle of the 1990s, by which time it was simply a matter of transferring the long-term unemployed from the unemployment register to their old age pensions. Millions of people lost their jobs. You can romanticise the traditional working class in my country, and I will not do so. They gave their total trust to a group of men who regarded it as their duty to resist every necessary structural reform, both to private companies and to the conduct of state economic policy. These men were often also in the pay of a hostile foreign power. At the same time, the British working classes were our people. And at a stroke, the old system of skilled and semi-skilled industrial labour which had given dignity to millions and had given secure and often well-paid employment to those people and the means to make full use of the freedoms that liberal democracy guarantees was swept away. And these people were thrown at the mercy of a mean and capricious welfare system, or they were herded into menial jobs without any kind of security and no kind of career advancement. The consequence was entirely to be expected. There was a growth of political apathy. There was a growth of drunkenness and drug addiction and divorce. There was a growing tendency to superstition and a growing tendency to witch-hunting hysteria against whomever the British media decided was the monster of the day. As I said, there is nothing unexpected about this. This is what always happens when large numbers of people have found that the bottom has dropped out of their world. Indeed, especially when they know that their own rulers have knocked the bottom out of their world. I know that in our circles, talk of economic equality is unpopular. But since we are where we are, and since the actually existing elites in our countries have not always obtained their position by natural merit, I think there is a case for avoiding policies which throw large masses of people into pauperism. I spent the first part of my life living in a country where inequality was visibly reducing. I have spent the rest of it in a country where it has been visibly increasing and I know which one I prefer. So who are the beneficiaries of Margaret Thatcher's economic policies? Not, I will say, the traditional entrepreneurial class. If you look at the headline rates of tax, these came down very sharply. The standard rate of income tax from 35% to 25%, the top rates from an eye-watering 83% or even 98% down to 40%. But once you look behind the headline rates, the picture is somewhat different. Most people had not paid the top rates of income tax in the old days. Yet many people on quite ordinary incomes found themselves in the 40% tax bracket. And overall, the tax burden as a percentage of gross domestic product was much the same when Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990 as when she came in in 1979. There had been what we might call a bonfire of controls in the early days. For example, the abolition of exchange controls, the abolition of price controls. But this bonfire of controls was followed by a regrowth of different controls. Health and safety laws, which did very little to improve the health and safety of people at work but which certainly were a burden on business. Later in the decade, environmental protection laws owned the money-laundering laws. And the tax system became increasingly more opaque and more rapacious. The traditional entrepreneurial class did not noticeably benefit. So who were the beneficiaries? Workers of all kinds in the state sector and in those sectors which were paid for by the state and of course the service sectors. I know that we are supposed to go moist in the eye when we think about the service sector. How much nicer it is an industry. Depends on from which position you are looking at it. If you look at the top end of the service sector, yes, it's very nice to sit in a wine bar running your business with a mobile telephone. If you're looking at it from the bottom and most of the bottom positions in the service sector are decidedly menial, cooks, cleaners, skivvies of every kind. No advancement, no career progression, no room for the acquisition of skills. Then the replacement of industry by services is not necessarily a very good thing at all. But I turn to the state sector. At any time it would have been unjust to spare the burden of adjustment from a group of people whose own growth had brought that evil upon us. But the 1980s were not any time. They were a time when a new class of people were rising to prominence. They were taking over the media. They were rising through the state administration and through education and through every branch of the state and every area which was funded by or which in any sense relied upon the state for its existence. Call these people what you will, the totalitarian humanists, the new left, the cultural Marxists, the enemy class. These people go under many names. Talking of their nature is often controversial. Are they disciples of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, whose work they read at university and whose terminology they use, or are they the latest manifestation of Anglo-American Puritanism? This is a matter which I could discuss at considerable length without coming to any definite conclusion. I will simply point out that we still do not have an agreed terminology to describe these people or an agreed means of discussing their nature. But the problem is that Margaret Thatcher was always very good at identifying her enemies and marking them out for destruction. There is nothing wrong in principle with this. I might do it myself if ever I were in her position. Her problem was that she invariably identified the wrong enemies. Close to the top of her demonology was a group of aging men who had seen the unemployment of the 1930s and who may have fought on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War. They were the enemy within who had to be crushed. She paid no attention to the people I have mentioned. She did not regard them as an existential threat. Indeed, I'm not even sure that she regarded them as a nuisance. But what do these people want? They had no interest in controlling the price of bread. They had no particular interest in the traditional working classes. What they wanted and what they want is to get inside our heads and to remake ourselves and to remake us in their own lunatic and evil image. Their ambition in the 1980s was to achieve this through their growing dominance in the media and in education. And as soon as they were able, they would use the direct powers of the state to work their revolution. Margaret Thatcher spent a lot of time fighting her war against Arthur Scargill and his friends, trade union leaders, a war in which the British working class was collateral damage. She did everything short of rolling out the red carpet to a group of people who would later become the friends of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. Look at her trade union reforms. Of course, I grant that the trade unions were out of control and that some thing had to be done about them. Her settlement of the problem, however, involved placing the unions in a legal straight jacket. A legal straight jacket, which the older class of trade union leaders was quite unable to understand, let alone work. And so their place was taken by university graduates of the usual sort, who knew exactly how to make the new system work to their advantage. She identified the wrong enemy. Many foreigners wonder how Tony Blair managed to make reforms so radical and so apparently irreversible and in so short a time in a country as conservative as England has long been thought to be. An answer to this question requires me to say something about the nature of the English Constitution or perhaps the British Constitution, forgive me. Now, a constitution is not to be seen as a set of words on paper. It is instead something which arises almost spontaneously from the settled nature of the people of a country. Obviously change the people and the Constitution will change. Even when the people remain the same, as time goes by the people will find new concerns, new circumstances will arise and in consequence of that the Constitution will change again. A Constitution is not a fixed thing. It is an expression of the settled nature of a people and as the people change their minds, as they change their emphasis again, as I said, so the Constitution itself will change. Within this loose framework, radical or ill-considered changes are prevented or at least slowed by the existence of fixed constitutional rules. In the United States, these fixed constitutional rules are contained as words on paper written at the end of the 18th century. I often find conversation with American conservatives and libertarians wearism because of their obsession with what a particular section of this 18th century document said and what it surely must mean. But that is how the Americans have their fixed rules. England has no written Constitution. In my country, institutional stability is or was achieved by a sense of tradition or an imagined sense of continuity with the immemorial past. If you'd asked the average Englishman in, let's say, in 1980 to justify, to justify trial by jury, that's a good one, if you'd asked an average Englishman in 1980 to justify trial by jury, he might have told you that it was a good thing for the avoidance of politicized justice or that it avoided the unwisdom of allowing case-hardened judges to decide disputed matters of fact. But on the whole, I suspect the justification would have been that trial by jury had existed since at least the 13th century, which effectively means forever, and that to abolish it now would be as shocking, as shockingly outrageous as to metricate the clock or the calendar. Now, if you look at America, I suspect this is how it works there. Once you get behind the verbiage about what a particular section of this late 18th century document means, what you probably have is a disinclination to change what has been long settled. The difference between our countries is that we avoid the verbiage. And I would add that we maintained a free constitution for about twice as long as America has existed. Now, this body of rules and assumptions and expectations is not... It has no claim on the imagination as a set of individual parts. It is an undifferentiated mass in which everything is connected to everything else and everything supports everything else. We have trial by jury and have had it since time out of mind. The judges and the lawyers were horsehair wigs in court and have done so since time out of mind. We have the English system of weights and measures and have had them since time out of mind. We have titles like sheriff and bailiff and plaintiff and have had them for time out of mind. If you start making changes to the incidental parts of this kind of system, there is a danger that you will unsettle the fundamental parts. In, pardon me, the Tory case against radical reform in the early 19th century can be expressed in a sentence from Lord Eldon, the Tory Lord Chancellor. Touch one atom, he said, and the whole is lost. And until about 1960, constitutional change in England was largely organic in the sense that new meanings were attached to ancient words or new substance was carefully injected into ancient forms or was carried through with a decent regard for the unamended remainder. If, for example, we take the most radical single change in England of the 19th century, the Judicature Acts of the 1870s, these marked a fundamental break with the past. And yet by 1901, I doubt if anyone but legal scholars and older lawyers would have remembered the courts in England had worked in any other way. Change was carried on behind a screen of apparently immemorial constitutional rules. In 11 years, Margaret Thatcher's government carried through a century of constitutional change. And these changes were made with almost gloating disregard for the proprieties. And these changes almost invariably increased the power of the state. We were given pre-publication censorship for the first time in 300 years. We were given ex-post facto criminal laws. The privilege against self-incrimination, a very ancient privilege, was weakened. The ancient right of an inquest jury to find a general verdict was abolished. The ancient right of parenterie challenge of jurors was abolished. There were significant restrictions on the ancient rights of freedom of speech and freedom of association. We were given a real war on drugs and police powers were massively increased. Indeed, the old rule that an English police officer was somebody given a salary and a uniform to do what any other citizen might do if he was so inclined was ruthlessly swept away and replaced by the idea of what was really a pro-state militia. A pro-state militia used in the first instance to pursue Margaret Thatcher's war against the coal miners and other trade unionists who rightly or wrongly disagreed with her approach to economic management. I had lunch in 21 with an old university friend. This was four years into Tony Blair's time in office. He said to me that we were living through the nearest thing our country had ever known to a Jacobin revolution. I disagreed then and I disagree now. Tony Blair was Napoleon, creating a new order on the ruins of the old. The Jacobin revolutionaries had been the Thatcher and major governments. They were the ones who had destroyed the ancient constitution. They were the ones who had broken what Bajot called the cake of custom. They were the ones who had set every precedent that was now being ruthlessly used by the Blair government. When I came out as a libertarian in 1977, I thought it reasonable to support the Conservative Party as led by Margaret Thatcher. I took time off from A-level revision to campaign in the 1979 general election. I was highly delighted when the Conservatives won a majority. If I spent the next few years scratching my head and wondering if I had been entirely wise, my enthusiasm was rekindled by the Falklands War and I spent the six weeks of that war jumping up and down with a union flag in each hand. I am not alone. There were millions of other people in my country who voted Conservative in 1979 in 1983 and again in 1987 in the reasonable expectation that Margaret Thatcher was restoring our freedoms as well as our greatness. But it is now 37 years since Margaret Thatcher became our prime minister. I think we are able to see her in better perspective than was possible in her days of power. She was no champion of liberty. She was no Ron Paul. She was no Donald Trump. She pushed through, or on the most charitable interpretation, she unwittingly fronted, the transformation of our wonderful and beloved England into a sinister police state. And so I do not admire Margaret Thatcher. She competes with Tony Blair for the status of our worst peacetime prime minister in the past 100 years. Indeed, bearing in mind what I have said already, I feel that she is worse than Tony Blair. By their fruits shall ye know them, said Christ. In my opinion, Margaret Thatcher was a corrupt tree and the evil fruit that she brought forth has left a bitter taste that may never go from our mouths. And so with the greatest of respect to her personal character, which again for the avoidance of doubt I say was entirely unspotted, that is what may perhaps be regarded as a most alternative view of Margaret Thatcher. Thank you.