It is perhaps fortunate that lords spiritual are lords already. In all the dishonesty and pretence to which we have been subjected in recent days, from politicians and clergy alike, Mr Cameron's slightly diffident claim that "we are all now, in a sense, Thatcherites" may not seem one of the most outrageous. (Perhaps the prize goes to Cecil Parkinson's suggestion that Margaret Thatcher would have been surprised by the grandeur of a funeral which she largely planned herself.)
No-one, Mr Cameron said, first of all, would want to go back to the days of "undemocratic trades unions". Democracy, as ever in our society, serves as a human shield for more debatable notions. The pro-Thatcher populace is less finicky and commonly asserts that their heroine saved the country from "being run by the unions".
The idea that commercial or industrial activity should be organised primarily for the gratification of the workers may not be as totally heinous as is assumed. It is, after all, the organising principle for those at the top of the corporate tree in many instances, where the property of those who own the corporation, as shareholders, is looted by the senior management. How else does one characterise the situation at our major commercial banks? "Destruction of shareholder value" it is called but it could have plainer and more disapprobious names.
Property is a cultural concept that has no inevitable meaning and in some societies it is incomprehensible, certainly in the form in which it has come to be the bedrock of western societies. The "property-owning democracies" have only very recently struck down the formal link between suffrage and property and the spirit lives on in the belief that "people only value what they pay for". Remember the poll tax.
Yet property for us is both shibboleth and enigma. Whilst it supposedly underlies our social and political, as well as economic structure, we are less than certain exactly what it means, just like anarchists and bolsheviks, who more gleefully tweak its tail with slogans such as "property is theft" and "we will continue to steal what has already been stolen".
We are not entirely sure where property begins and ends, what we can and cannot "own". We seem to be agreed that we cannot own other people, at least not formally, but it was only historically recently that formalised slavery was accepted as lawful, moral and necessary - including famously by the American Founding Fathers.
In the beginnings of our own society all property was the sovereign's and everything "held" by others was by grant or in return for services. Our modern "freeholds" are a relic of that system and feudal monarchy might be regarded as more akin to state socialism than to free-enterprise, free-market capitalism. In fact the latter was to be the death of monarchy and there has been a long and gradually successful struggle to wrest property (and power) from the sovereign monarch into private hands. Not too many of them of course. Dilution is the enemy (as shareholders know) and the successful private hands have inevitably been the few not the many. Strength has lain in concentration rather than numbers and the few occasions when numbers have triumphed in wider political history, in popular revolution, have always relatively quickly been subverted by individual and oligarchic interests. British "revolutions" hold the record in this respect. Despite a famously fractious and unruly populace its staying power has never been impressive - right down to Sid cashing in his windfall shares promptly on the market.
The masses lose out in another way. Once the rising classes have stripped the sovereign of as much of its direct holdings of property and wealth as possible (often through indebting the monarch by financing territorial warfare), attention turns to the commons - those parts of the sovereign's holdings given over to customary use by the people. In our country's case, through reformation, agricultural enclosure, exploitation of natural resources and colonial expansion, the process has been extremely effective and fuelled our economy in the days when it was flourishing.
Land was the major instance and, as the poor "mad" poet John Clare attested, was lost long ago: the earth gone,water and air linger on, and fire always at hand for vengeful retribution. Yet the most recent phase in this process in our own society has been the capture of the issuance of money and its reckless exploitation by private interests which has led to our present catastrophic plight (a stage started on Mrs Thatcher's watch along with the brief diverting windfall of North Sea oil). This last is a battle which the state, as residual inheritor of the sovereign, might still win if it were not already thoroughly infiltrated and captured by oligarchic interests. How vain and unlasting was Mrs Thatcher's championing of small-town methodist virtue.
Where next? The momentum has to continue if the bicycle is to remain upright. The latest sub-plot in the process in our country (triumphantly exported to much of the rest of the world) has focused on undoing the post-war welfare-state settlement (no ceremonial funeral for Mr Atlee) with its then nationalisation of some of the major "means of production, distribution and exchange". All that has now been significantly and largely progressively undone by all governments since the 1970s - although "exchange" of course was the part that the socialising programme did not even start on. That is the important sense in which David Cameron claims "we are all Thatcherites now".
Of the young Margaret Hilda Thatcher (from pulpit to newspaper column it is customary to use her full name to invoke her assumed instincts before they were eroded by the exercise of power: it must be some special connotation of Hilda as a name and the fact that it was never part of the name she was publically known by) it must be doubtful whether she sympathised with the more far-reaching effects of the processes her government encouraged, but she might be seen a a kulak's daughter, who died in a suite of rooms at the Ritz, more convenient that her several million pound London house vested in the name of a shadowey corporation registered in a tax haven (a status modest by comparison with the retirement financial arrangements of her New Labour successor, whom she described as her "greatest achievement").
The association with wealth leaves few politicians - of whichever hue - these days untouched and they need to appeal overtly to the people, or a goodlly chunk of it, precisely because they are, whatever their origins, no longer of the people or "one of us".
