She saved her country - but can it save itself?
By Mark Steyn
A few hours after Margaret Thatcher’s
death on Monday, the snarling deadbeats of the British underclass were
gleefully rampaging through the streets of Brixton in South London, scaling the
marquee of the local fleapit and hanging a banner announcing, “THE BITCH IS
DEAD.” Amazingly, they managed to spell all four words correctly. By Friday,
“Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” from The
Wizard of Oz, was the No. 1 download at Amazon U.K.
Mrs. Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter
John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she
arrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be
greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist
fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it
make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a
concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk
business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs,” almost a quarter-century after
her departure from office.
Of course, it would have been asking too much of Britain’s torpid
Left to rouse themselves to do anything more than sing a few songs and
smash a few windows. In The Wizard of Oz, the witch is struck
down at the height of her powers by Dorothy’s shack descending from
Kansas to relieve the Munchkins of their torments. By comparison,
Britain’s Moochkins were unable to bring the house down: Mrs. Thatcher
died in her bed at the Ritz at a grand old age. Useless as they are,
British socialists were at one point capable of writing their own
anti-Thatcher singalongs rather than lazily appropriating Judy Garland
blockbusters from MGM’s back catalogue. I recall in the late Eighties
being at the National Theatre in London and watching the crowd go wild
over Adrian Mitchell’s showstopper, “F**k-Off Friday,” a song about
union workers getting their redundancy notices at the end of the week,
culminating with the lines:
“I can’t wait for
That great day when
F**k-Off Friday
Comes to Number Ten.”
You should have heard the cheers.
Alas, when F**k-Off Friday did come to 10 Downing Street, it was not
the Labour party’s tribunes of the masses who evicted her but the
duplicitous scheming twerps of her own cabinet, who rose up against her
in an act of matricide from which the Tory party has yet to recover. In
the preferred euphemism of the American press, Mrs. Thatcher was a
“divisive” figure, but that hardly does her justice. She was “divided”
not only from the opposition party but from most of her own, and from
almost the entire British establishment, including the publicly funded
arts panjandrums who ran the likes of the National Theatre and
cheerfully commissioned one anti-Thatcher diatribe after another at
taxpayer expense. And she was profoundly “divided” from millions and
millions of the British people, perhaps a majority.
Nevertheless, she won. In Britain in the Seventies, everything that
could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen
government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel,
British Coal, British Airways, British Rail . . . The government owned
every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every
industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people.
The top income-tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income 98
percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government
should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their
entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious to all in
2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an
extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then
the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the
cliff edge.
Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did
after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that
recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program
at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most
consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and
Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was
not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.
Mrs. Thatcher saved her country — and then went on to save a
shriveling “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The
Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the
map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off — as so much had already
been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa,
Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to
Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a Western nation to
go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly
dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert
and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV,
embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in
1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more
formidable?
And, even when Mrs. Thatcher won her victory, the civilizational
cringe of the West was so strong that all the experts immediately urged
her to throw it away and reward the Argentine junta for its aggression.
“We were prepared to negotiate before” she responded, “but not now. We
have lost a lot of blood, and it’s the best blood.” Or as a British
sergeant said of the Falklands: “If they’re worth fighting for, then
they must be worth keeping.”
Mrs. Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, at a time when
everyone else assumed decline was inevitable. Some years ago, I found
myself standing next to her at dusk in the window of a country house in
the English East Midlands, not far from where she grew up. We stared
through the lead diamond mullions at a perfect scene of ancient rural
tranquility — lawns, the “ha-ha” (an English horticultural innovation),
and the fields and hedgerows beyond, looking much as it would have done
half a millennium earlier. Mrs. T asked me about my corner of New
Hampshire (90 percent wooded and semi-wilderness) and then said that
what she loved about the English countryside was that man had improved
on nature: “England’s green and pleasant land” looked better because the
English had been there. For anyone with a sense of history’s sweep, the
strike-ridden socialist basket case of the British Seventies was not an
economic downturn but a stain on national honor.
A generation on, the Thatcher era seems more and more like a
magnificent but temporary interlude in a great nation’s bizarre,
remorseless self-dissolution. She was right and they were wrong, and
because of that they will never forgive her. “I have been waiting for
that witch to die for 30 years,” said Julian Styles, 58, who was laid
off from his factory job in 1984, when he was 29. “Tonight is party
time. I am drinking one drink for every year I’ve been out of work.” And
when they call last orders and the final chorus of “Ding Dong! The
Witch Is Dead” dies away, who then will he blame?
During the Falklands War, the prime minister quoted Shakespeare, from the closing words of King John:
“And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.”
For eleven tumultuous years, Margaret Thatcher did shock them. But
the deep corrosion of a nation is hard to reverse: England to itself
rests anything but true.
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