Thatcherism aids May --- and could help SA

THE last British person to express the kind of bravado Prime Minister Theresa May exhibited this week is unemployed. David Cameron’s 2016 Brexit gamble cost him his job and the country a place in the EU.

May’s April call for June elections has caught opposition parties offguard and shows she is confident in her ability to strengthen her mandate as an elected head of government and to be allowed to execute her version of an exit from the EU while crushing what political opposition remains in the UK.

What gives May the confidence to take such a dramatic step rather than quite legitimately serve out her term to 2020?

She thinks she understands her electorate better than her predecessor did.

May also is the beneficiary of a legacy entrenched by Margaret Thatcher. One of the core building blocks of Thatcherism was that by giving citizens the opportunity to own a stake in the economy, they would become inherently more conservative in their world view and would be more likely to vote for her party. By allowing council housing residents the chance to buy the roof over their heads at competitive rates, she did precisely that. She added three million new propertyownerstothenine million that existed in 1980 and cemented her position to become one of the longest-ruling prime ministers in modern British history.

Tony Blair’s Labour beat the Conservatives by breaking away from its socialist roots. Current leader Jeremy Corbyn has made the party unelectable thanks to his harking back to a past that Britain would rather forget.

Property ownership brought prosperity to those able to get onto the housing ladder. That is a critical lesson for South Africa.

It’s easy to dismiss the views published last week in Business Times by new Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba’s economic adviser, Chris Malikane, as being the rantings of a mad Marxist academic. Malikane’s thesis that democracy has failed to bring economic liberation for a dispossessed majority is spot-on. His proposed solutions to nationalise key industries and take over the land without compensation to owners, though, would only worsen the plight of those who need help most.

The state doesn’t need more banks; it already owns the Land Bank, Development Bank, Postbank and Industrial Development Corporation. They should collaborate on creating an attractive mortgage product aimed at ensuring wider property ownership, whether it be Thatcher-style, taking ownership of the roof over your head, or providing title deeds to those living on tribal trust land.

Property ownership is about giving citizens a meaningful stake in the economy. If it’s a place to raise a family or a place that provides the bedrock for creating multi-generational wealth, the moment someone owns an asset they treasure, they have a vested interest in making an economy work more effectively.

Strategist Clem Sunter has warned for most of the past decade that South Africa needs urgently to have a discussion on its economic future. He called it an economic Codesa. Whatever you call it, it’s long overdue. Beneath the hollow rhetoric of “white monopoly capital” and “radical economic transformation” lies a brutal truth — South Africa cannot have a prosperous future with 80% of its people excluded from the benefits of being part of a modern economy.

One way to address that is via property. Failure to include more people in the economy will simply fuel calls to pursue populist economic policy, which will harm those it claims to help more than solve the problem.

South Africans can choose to manage the transformation of the economy into one that provides fair access to markets and capital, or have people with nothing to lose hanker after the romance of a glorious socialist past.

Whitfield is a public speaker on the political economy and an awardwinning financial journalist and broadcaster