An early beneficiary of this political turbulence was Margaret Thatcher, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, who swept to power in the general election of May 3, 1979, following the so-called Winter of Discontent. Her rise was as improbable as it was inexorable. In a party of reflexive male chauvinists, she was a woman. In a party traditionally dominated by landed aristocrats, rich industrialists, and upper-class twits of every stripe, she was a product of the striving middle class. Her predecessor as party leader and Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had been indelibly dubbed “the Grocer” by the satirical magazine Private Eye. Though cruelly aimed at Heath’s status anxieties, the Eye’s gibe was rooted in his stint negotiating food prices in Brussels. Margaret Thatcher, however, was the actual daughter of an actual grocer, and proud of it. Finally, in a party riddled with “wets” who had accommodated themselves to Labour’s postwar welfare state, she was a doctrinaire free-market fundamentalist, a radical believer in the individualism of the successful, a despiser of “society” (“there is no such thing”) and social solidarity—a visionary, even a kind of revolutionary, and in temperament anything but conservative.
At her death last week, at the age of eighty-seven, she was the Right Honourable Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, laden with honors. The encomiums poured forth in a torrent. Some were a little over the top: “the greatest British peacetime Prime Minister” (David Cameron, the Tory who currently holds that office), “this greatest of Britons” (the Daily Telegraph). But no one could doubt that her personal political success was unparalleled in modern times. Cameron credited her with “winning the backing of the British people three times in a row.” Under Mrs. Thatcher, the Conservative Party did indeed win three successive elections, each of which yielded a parliamentary landslide. But she never truly won “the backing of the British people.” Her share of the popular vote—never more than forty-four per cent—was lower than the loser’s tally in five of the last seven American Presidential elections. Yet because the United Kingdom crams three major parties into a system suited for two—“first past the post,” winner-take-all in every constituency—and because two of those three parties were left of center, Mrs. Thatcher’s Tories were able to amass huge parliamentary majorities. And since a British Prime Minister’s power is largely unfettered, she rarely failed to get her uncompromising way even though most of her fellow-citizens were never in sympathy with her policies. No doubt this was a source of the uniquely venomous quality of the bitterness that she provoked in life and the ugly gloating that, in some quarters, welcomed her death.
Among the eulogists last week was Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who is running for Congress as a Democrat in the district that includes Charleston, South Carolina. Thatcher, Busch said, was “a tough consensus builder who cared about everybody.” Perhaps this was meant as a bit of gentle satire: Busch is the sister of Stephen Colbert, of “The Colbert Report.” For Thatcher was a breaker of consensus, not a builder of it. And she did not care about everybody. She seemed not to care about the poor and the near-poor, whose misfortunes she tended to regard as failures of character. Tough she was, though. Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the daily newspaper of the Soviet Army, crossly dubbed her the Iron Lady. She embraced the sobriquet with relish, and Hollywood eventually ratified it. The lady’s will, if not the lady herself, was truly made of iron: strong, unalloyed, purer than steel, but inflexible and, ultimately, brittle. “Thatcherism”—small government, privatization, meagre public services, regressive taxation, monetarism, hostility to trade unions, indifference to unemployment, austerity as a matter of principle, nationalism, military pride, and Victorian social values, all with a sheen of Murdochian populism—leaves a mixed legacy. The rumpled, cozy Britain of the postwar decades, the Britain of the Ealing comedies, of the Goon Show and Wallace & Gromit, gave way, amid riots and tumult, to a Britain of pitiless dynamism and poisonous inequality.
Tony Blair repaired much of the damage that Thatcherism had done to public services, but, partly under her influence, his “New Labour” shed the Party’s pacifism and its last traces of Marxism and embraced her valorization of enterprise. As the current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said last week, “She moved the center ground of British politics”—moved it to the right. Yet she ended up not only severely weakening the Conservative Party but also moving it to the left. When the Tories at last returned to power, three years ago, they did so with only 36.1 per cent of the vote and in an unprecedented coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Cameron brought back austerity, with disastrous results so far. But his slogan, “The Big Society,” is one that Thatcher might have taken as a rebuke. And her Victorian censoriousness has been shelved. Where Thatcher forbade local authorities to “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship,” Cameron is on the point of legalizing marriage equality for gays.
The Iron Lady had her velvet moments. She told her ideological American cousin Ronald Reagan that Mikhail Gorbachev was for real at a time when many of Reagan’s advisers thought that glasnost and perestroika were Commie tricks to weaken the West’s resolve. But the moral high point of her tenure was a passionate speech on global warming, delivered at the United Nations in 1989. “What we are now doing to the world,” she said,
by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. . . . The environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. . . . Those countries who are industrialized must contribute more to help those who are not.
She didn’t do much about it, and in retirement she recanted, dismissing climate change as “a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.” Even so: De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Hendrik Hertzberg
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