Thursday 13 January 2011

Not for turning


I’ve been busy catching up with some of the things I’ve missed over the New Year break. My people have been jolly decent, compiling a little archive of clippings, news items that they knew I would be interested in. One of the more important is information about Baroness Thatcher’s period in government, all contained in official papers released under the thirty year rule by the National Archive at the end of December.

There are really no great surprises, I suppose. Opposition to her economic policies came as much from within her own ranks as without. The most revealing document is a wittering eleven page memorandum – lecture might be a better word- from Harold Macmillan, a former prime minister whose antediluvian politics might best be described as old fashioned Tory guilt, warning that her tough stand on monetary policy – this was a time when inflation was running in double figures – would lead to a “constant recession.” He goes on to berate her for abandoning “consensus politics”, in other words the lazy thinking that had done so much to undermine this country since 1945. Her actions, as he saw it, were “against the essence of Tory democracy.”

The best riposte to this silly meandering came years later when Baroness Thatcher published her post-premiership memoirs. “What great cause”, she asked, “would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?” Indeed. But Macmillan, though doddering and long out of power, was still an influential figure within the Conservative Party, which made her task all the harder, opposition to change coming even from within the government itself from an intellectually impotent old guard.

It has to be a matter of some celebration that she was neither Macmillan nor Heath, his unhappy protégé; she knew what was necessary and had enough Churchillian courage to proceed regardless. Within a few years inflation had come down from twenty-seven to four per cent, putting the country on the path of sustained economic recovery, not artificially fuelled by taxation and public spending of the Macmillan variety. The lady truly was not for turning.

The documents also reveal her admiration for President Reagan, written off in 1980 as stupid by so many of her advisors. Within a few years he was to show himself a figure of commanding political stature, in my estimation one of the great presidents, standing even among the greatest. The partnership between the President and the Premier was in large measure responsible for the spring time of the people, a revolution that swept communism away from Eastern Europe. In the end that will surely stand as the greatest achievement of all.

31 comments:

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  2. Macmillan’s economics were based not on ‘selling off the family silver’ but living off the family capital. He was an exhausted volcano, the nadir of a discredited and irrelevant tradition. History will forget him, Adam, as it has forgotten John Pym, known now only to specialists. Thatcher will stand alongside Cromwell, a permanent fixture in the popular imagination, for good or for ill.

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  4. The most destructive myth of modern politics is that government can fix all social problems. The truth is people fix their own problems, and the best government can do is stay out of the way. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both vilified for exposing the myth, and reducing the extent of government interference in some areas of economic activity. Unfortunately, they increased government interference in some areas of social life. But there is an inertia in the corridors of power and after they had left the political stage, their successors undid almost every accomplishment. Real reform will have to wait until the voters are ready to enforce it.

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  5. On this, Adam, you and I shall just have to stare at one another from the opposite sides of an argument. :-)

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  7. Calvin, yes, that's something that's not often understood.

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  9. Anna, I am with you on the Maggietollah. Yes, she made mistakes, what politician doesn't? However what marks her out from the mundane rest of recent years is her resolve. Like you, I agree with the comments made by Calvin.

    Lest it be forgotten SuperMac was also for the UK joining what was then the EEC.

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  10. Hi, WfW, and welcome. Yes, your are quite right to mention that. He was also th one who let Heath-dog off the leash. :-))

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  11. Margaret Thatcher: The Iron lady !

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  12. "The partnership between the President and the Premier was in large measure responsible for the spring time of the people, a revolution that swept communism away from Eastern Europe"

    In this point I have to disagree with you. Communism stumbled and crumbled due to its own clumsiness and internal flaws. Even if communism were the only system alive, it would have failed, independent of any external factors. People living under communist regimes were unhappy (to say it in some way) with the contradictions of a system able to produce the best rockets, but also the worse cars.

    Sleepless communists seem to have missed this point: there was no foreign agent provocateur needed, no traitors, no fascists. It was their own people who gave the final push on a system on the edge of a cliff.

    The contradictions were inherent to their system, equal to the contradictions that they claimed were inherent to capitalism.

    What we indeed can thank Thatcher, Reagan and other Western figures and institutions is the building of bridges with - and shaping of - the new societies arisen from the ashes of the old communist regimes.

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  13. There was never a phrase for it like "Clinton Derangement Syndrome" or "Palinoia", but Bss Thatcher clearly had the same effect on some people.

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  14. Would the British government today, respond to an invasion of the Falklands as Margaret Thatcher did?

    I weep at the thought...
    :-(

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  15. CI, alas, the previous administration made sure that it could not.

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  16. M, so it is! My apologies. The correction has been made.

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  17. Jean Paul, yes, mine is a one-dimensional explanation; the whole process was far more prolonged, subtle and complex. My point was simply that the Soviet economy, already fragile, could not stand up to the arms race with the West. It was the last straw.

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  18. Hi Ana.

    Just popped in to wish you a good New Year but what an interesting post!.

    I stand with you on the Blessed Margaret T. and I note that Adam does not totally agree with you.

    To be fair, she was an absolute bitch in her prime. As a member of the Federation of Conservative Students, we were invited down to a reception to meet our recently elected Leader. She duly appeared but refused to address us or even speak to any of us individually because our President had been a wee thing negative about her in a Press interview the day before. She spent the entire reception talking to a reporter fro the 'Woman's Weekly' who was doing a 'Day in the Life of' feature on her.

    None of which alters the fact that she was the right person in the right place at the right time. Our country was going straight down the drain, mainly as a result of the overweening power of the Unions. She stopped that and I am surprised that Adam has fallen for the post-event reinterpretation of history that the Left are still trying to foist on us.

    Mind, I think that you are being a bit harsh on SuperMac who was also, in my opinion, in the right place at the right time. Our necessary disentanglement from the Empire might well have been much messier if Macmillan and Macleod had not been there.

    Not convinced that the Blasted Heath was his protege either. That was surely Sir Alec who would never have 'emerged' as PM without Mac the Knife's machinations.

    Heath must have been a total oik in Macmillan's eyes. They were both One Nation Tories and fervently pro-European but I can't believe that they ever got on personally, particularly given the fact that Heath was, in my personal experience, an arrogant, self-obsessed, sociopathic total shit.

    I could, as ever, be wrong.

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  19. One of the greatest ladies of the twentieth century. I must confess I joined the Conservative Party after watching Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley if that stands as some form of tribute.

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  20. John, I am absolutely convinced that you are not wrong! A very Happy New Year to you.

    I’m sure she was but what the country needed at the time was an absolute bitch! Mother tells me that the seventies was a period when we had something of an infatuation with strong, hectoring and nannying females; Maggie as leader of the Conservative Party, Penelope Keith as Margo in a sit-com called The Good Life, and a dog trainer called Barbara Woodhouse, who had her own TV show. I’m not convinced that there is any real connection here, but it’s an intriguing thesis.

    I have really no desire to be harsh on Macmillan, and I agree that he was a decent prime minister, the last truly great representative of a dying tradition. I have D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan on my bookshelf, which I intend to read and review as soon as I have finished Douglas Hurd’s biography of Robert Peel. I confess I was as irritated by his memorandum, as Maggie must have been on the day, old solutions for new problems, which clearly determined some of the expressions I have used here.

    I describe Heath as a protégé – not a friend or an equal in the sense that Sir Alec was – because he pushed down the European path that Supermac had opened. Yes, he was an oik and an office boy, a horrible little managerial type, but I have no reason to suppose that Macmillan did not wholly approve of his European ‘triumph.’

    Once again let me say that your assessment of the Blasted Heath is spot on. Even Philip Ziegler, his most recent biographer, could not make him likeable, no matter how hard he tried. It’s rather a pity that the man was not born a few decades later. He would have been perfect in New Labour alongside Blair. The Tories must have gone mad when the elected him leader. It’s just occurred to me that he was Harold Wilson’s Frankenstein Monster, emerging from the white hot heat of the ‘technological revolution’ – Technocratic Man, adopted by a Conservative Party obsessed with joining the modern world!

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  21. Rehan, I haven't seen that. I'll try and track it down.

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  23. Thanks for that, Adam, a valuable amplification.

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  25. Of course Euroscepticism it's not bigotry, or, if it is, I'm a bigot. I love to travel; I love to immerse myself in different cultures, all sorts of different experiences. The thing I hate about ‘Europe’, the one size fits all ‘Europe’ of Rumpy von Pumpy and his acolytes, is that it reduces variety and difference to dull conformity, to the most appalling forms of mediocrity.

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