Thatcher the way they like it

While Tony Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, will receive the plaudits, the ideological architect of Labour's likely third consecutive general election victory will be far from the spotlight on Friday morning.

Margaret Thatcher has purposely been kept to the sidelines by the Conservative Party during the election campaign for fear that she will remind voters of the unpopular policies associated with her final months in power. Yet 15 years after she left office, the Iron Lady's impact on the British political landscape is as strong as ever.

Those who doubt the enduring legacy of Thatcherism - and how far to the neo-liberal Right it has shifted the political consensus - should think back to the last general election held in Britain before she became Conservative leader.

In October 1974, Britain was faced with a choice between a Conservative Party that had nationalised Rolls-Royce and whose leader, Edward Heath, railed against the unacceptable face of capitalism and a Labour Party pledged to extend public ownership and to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families.

Heath had included Josef Tito, Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong among his political heroes. His Labour counterpart Harold Wilson, decried for being too right-wing by Labour radicals at the time, had, when in office, refused to bow to US requests to send British troops to Vietnam, introduced a national plan and nationalised the steel industry.

It may only have been 30 years ago, but in many ways the political world inhabited by Heath and Wilson seems more like 300 years ago. Not only would a Keynesian interventionist such as Heath be out of place in today's Conservative Party, he would find his ideas on the economy and foreign policy to be far to the Left of the present Labour Party, too.

Conversely, Blair may be standing under a Labour banner, but is a more enthusiastic cheerleader for big business and the market economy than any post-war Conservative prime minister bar the Iron Lady and her successor, John Major.

Far from marking a break with Thatcherism, New Labour's ascendancy in fact represents its continuum, albeit in a repackaged, made-over-for-the-millennium, environment-friendly form.

It's true that the high priestess of market fundamentalism would never have introduced a minimum wage or signed Britain up to the European Union's social chapter. It is also difficult to have envisaged her taking up the issue of Third World debt as enthusiastically as Brown has done.

But, on the core, defining issues of the day, Blair and Brown sing unmistakably from the Thatcher hymn sheet. Both enthusiastically embrace globalisation, the neo-liberal world order that Thatcher - together with her buddy from across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan - did so much to establish.

Both talk passionately about markets and the need for further economic reform, and wax eloquent on the virtue of private business and entrepreneurs. Both show the classic Thatcherite's indifference to the loss of jobs in manufacturing (300 a day since Labour came to power) and they welcome Britain's transformation into a service sector economy.

State ownership - the panacea of the party in the past - is well and truly out: on the contrary, New Labour has extended the reach of the private sector into areas that even Thatcher dared not venture - such as air traffic control and the building of National Health hospitals.

It's little surprise that with such an agenda, both the Confederation of British Industry - Britain's main employers' organisation - and the British Chamber of Commerce, have rallied to the New Labour cause.

On foreign policy, too, New Labour has plotted an uncompromisingly Thatcherite path, taking the Iron Lady's Atlanticism to new and, some would say, absurd lengths by joining in with an illegal, unpopular and costly invasion of a country that posed no threat to Britain.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives, faced with a Labour Party that has unashamedly stolen most of its clothes, have been left in political no-man's land. Unable and unwilling to outflank Labour on the Left, the party has been forced to place an exaggerated importance on those areas where differences still exist, and in doing so has made it all too easy for Labour and its allies in the media to dismiss them as scaremongering obsessives.

On Iraq, the issue over which Labour is arguably at its most vulnerable, the Conservatives' attempts at point-scoring have come across for what they are - the opportunism of an increasingly desperate party.

Labour, meanwhile, after years of demonising the woman who defeated it in three consecutive elections from 1979 to 1987, is now less reticent about claiming the Thatcherite legacy as its own.

In a recent press conference on business policies, Brown claimed Thatcher would be "appalled" at today's Tory pledge to spend more, tax less and borrow less. The central message of the Conservative Party throughout the 1980s was, according to Brown, its competence on the economy - and Labour was now the party that would entrench the hard-won economic stability.

"Lady Thatcher's Tory Party used to run the economy", added Trade and Industry Minister Patricia Hewitt. "Mr [Michael] Howard's Tory Party runs away from it."

To the time traveller from the mid-'70s, politics in Britain today would seem incomprehensible. And it's all down to a lady with a handbag.