Thatcher For Beginners (1997)
Because this book is a British publication, it is perhaps not an ideal introduction to the Iron Lady for American readers. For instance, the authors, not unreasonably, assume that the reader will be familiar with the idea of a candidate for Parliament being "adopted" by a district not their own. But to Americans, used to the idea of residency requirements for candidates, this is pretty obscure stuff. On the other hand, so much of the story of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power, and her exercise thereof, parallels events here in the United States, that the tale often has a familiarity which is haunting even when told, as here, in comic book form.
British voters, notoriously, dispensed with Winston Churchill before the dust of WWII had even settled. Though even Churchill was an accomodationist with the Social Welfare state, he was not willing to move anywhere near as far in the direction of Socialism as the British people believed felt necessary. Traumatized by two World Wars and the Great Depression, Brits, like most of the continental European counterparts, and many Americans, interpreted (or, rather, misinterpreted) this series of catastrophes as representing the failure of Capitalism. Thus, while they had to turn to Churchill to wage the War, as he was nearly the only serious political figure not tainted by appeasement, as soon as the conflict ended they wanted to make sure they had a government which would seize control of the economy and give them cradle to grave welfare programs.
Most of the subsequent Tory leaders--like their Eastern Establishment Republican counterparts in the States--determined that they too would have to embrace statism in order to appeal to voters. The Brits, as is their wont, came up with a terrific name for this form of "conservative" accommodation with the unions and socialism, terming it Butskellism, a combination of the names of Tory Home Secretary Rab Butler and Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Thus, even when the Tories came to power, they did not seek to make fundamental changes to the Social Welfare State--just as Eisenhower and Nixon left alone New Deal programs or even sought to expand them.
Then, just as the GOP had its Buckleys and Goldwaters, the mid-60s finally saw the rise of a determined and vocal conservative wing of they Tory Party. In Britain's case the movement was led by men like Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell, who took F. A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom and the writings of Milton Friedman as their gospel (years later Margaret Thatcher is purported to have dropped a copy of Road to Serfdom down on a table and declared : "This is what we believe!"). Believers in the Free Market and monetarism, opposed to government planning and ownership of industry, hostile to union power and high taxes, they found an eager acolyte in Margaret Thatcher. Derogatorily labelled a "grocer's daughter", she had been raised on her father's sensible, conservative, middle class bromides and felt comfortable repeating them and making them the basis of policy.
By 1974, when Edward Heath led the Party to defeat in the polls, she was poised as an unlikely challenger on his Right, and gained control of the Party in 1975 (while Ronald Reagan prepared to mount a conservative challenge to a sitting President, Gerald Ford, of his own Party.) As global recession--triggered by 50 years of socialism, Cold War spending, and oil price shocks--plunged the West into crisis, it became clear that Big Government was not a viable long-term alternative to Capitalism and Thatcher (using devastating ads depicting long lines of job seekers and the slogan "Labour isn't working", crafted by the Saatchi brothers) and the Tories were elected to power in 1979 (just a year before Reagan would win victory in America).
Once in office, it turned out that the economic situation was so bad that classical conservative economics could not turn things around quickly, but, at the Conservative Party conference in 1980, with the "wets" urging her to abandon course, Thatcher told them :
You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning.
This determination, combined with a confrontation with striking coal miners (see Reagan vs. the air-traffic controllers) and the conveniently timed Falklands War (see Grenada), made it seem, whether it is truly the case or not, that conservative ideas had brought about the inevitable economic recovery.
She was able to ride this recovery and the endgame of the Cold War (she was particularly helpful on the issue of upgrading America's intermediate range missiles based in Europe) for a decade, but came a cropper in 1989 over the same issue that doomed George Bush : taxes. In Thatcher's case it was the attempt to replace local rates with a poll tax, but whatever the merits of her position, it only served to tie her directly to an unpopular tax--a fate that any conservative should know enough to avoid. The other issue that helped to bring her down was one on which history will most certainly prove her right : opposition to the European Union. Not only is increasing integration with continental Europe likely to destroy what little remains of the distinctly British character of the nation, the rest of the Party badly underestimated, and still underestimates, how effective an issue this could be in appealing to working class whites in the country. William Hague just lost an election in which he half-heartedly spoke out against the EU, but the next elected Tory Prime Minister will likely have based their campaign on anti-German and anti-French rhetoric.
As for what Thatcher actually achieved in office, the authors are more perceptive than many critics of Reagan have been, when they note that Monetarism was at the core of Thatcherism and that the defeat of inflation in the West must in some measure be credited to regaining control of the money supply. They are however rather silly in giving her such grudging credit for privatizing the previously nationalized industries--their argument is that she did not make this a major campaign pledge in '79. And it is, of course, true that Britain is still, even today, burdened by an enormous, inefficient, and costly Social Welfare system. But the mark of what she accomplished is most easily measured by reference to the Labour Party and the terms of the national dialogue she left behind. As Reaganism turned the Democratic Party into a safe haven for the kind of bland Eisenhower Republicanism of a Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher's greatest legacy is Tony Blair, who is more conservative than any of, at least, her 20th Century Tory predecessors.
There is no bigger fan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher than I am, but the similarity of their respective rises to power suggests that it was more likely the ideas that they drew upon than anything truly unique to them as individuals, which resulted in the resurgence of conservatism in the 1980s. It should not diminish either of them in our eyes for us to note that their success owed much to men like Friedman and Hayek. I believe it was Isaac Newton who said :
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of Giants.
Both parts of the statement are likewise true of Thatcher and Reagan.
It is not that they espoused ideas that were new or unique to them, nor
that their legislative victories were necessarily revolutionary, but that,
at a time when most intellectuals, pundits, and fellow politicians had
come to believe in the decline of the West, they instead saw their nations
as great, as (in Reagan's favorite image) shining cities on a hill.
To a significant degree, it was they who restored the luster, and that
is no small achievement.
(Reviewed:29-Jun-01)
Grade: (B)
