Britannia Radio

Daniel Hannan

Margaret Thatcher saved Britain

Posted By: Daniel Hannan at Jun 12, 2009 at 12:12:15 [General]

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Chris Bryant, Oxford Union, Peter Lilley

So said members of the Oxford Union last night, by 154 votes to 152. Alright these results never tell you very much, and it was a close thing. Even so, how refreshing to see undergraduates rejecting the Billy Elliot view of the period. When I speak to sixth-formers, I often find that their teachers have presented the 1980s to them as an era of monstrous selfishness interspersed only by bigotry. So total is our cultural elites' disdain for Margaret Thatcher that her eventual demise is regarded as a legitimate cause for celebration by BBC comedy writers and Guardian columnists.

 
Margaret Thatcher and one of her admirers earlier this year

Last night, Peter Lilley and I did our best to contextualise Thatcherism by describing the calamity that had preceded it. It is difficult, these days, to convey the sheer unremitting awfulness of the 1970s: the pessimism, the rancour, double-digit inflation, price controls, incomes policies, power cuts, the three-day-week, the winter of discontent. It felt as if we were finished as a country. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, we had been outperformed by every European economy. "Britain is a tragedy - it has sunk to borrowing, begging, stealing until North Sea oil comes in," said Henry Kissinger. TheWall Street Journal was blunter: "Goodbye, Great Britain: it was nice knowing you".

Then came the réveil national. Inflation fell, strikes stopped, the latent enterprise of a free people was awakened. Having lagged behind for a generation, we outgrew every European country in the 1980s except Spain (which was bouncing back from an even lower place). As revenues flowed in, taxes were cut and debt was repaid, while public spending - contrary to almost universal belief - rose. In the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher showed the world that a great country doesn't retreat forever. And, by ending the wretched policy of one-sided détente that had allowed the Soviets to march into Europe, Korea and Afghanistan, she set in train the events that would free hundreds of millions of people from what, in crude mathematical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ideology humanity has known.

Why, then, do Lefties loathe her? Two MPs made the case against. One was Labour's Chris Bryant, whom I had been predisposed to like: he had always struck me on television as a good parliamentarian and a conviction politician, and I was delighted to find that he's clever and charming in real life. He made the classical Labour case against her: that Britain became more unequal; that former industrial workers were pushed onto invalidity benefit; that, at a time when every other Western country was making life easier for gay people, Section 28 was the only postwar piece of legislation that went in the opposite direction. Fair enough.

Then Evan Harris for the Lib Dems and, even more, the undergraduate speakers, attacked her in personal and aggressive terms, blaming her for everything from human rights abuses in China to the recent financial crisis. (Quite an achievement for someone who left office 20 years ago.)

Where does it come from, this inchoate hatred? Anti-Thatcherites tell you that it's because she closed down the old industries. (She didn't, of course: she simply stopped obliging everyone else to support them.) Yet it must surely be obvious by now that nothing would have kept the dockyards and coalmines and steel mills open. A similar process of deindustrialisation has unfolded in every other Western European country, and the only parties that still talk of "reviving our manufacturing base" are Respect, the Scottish Socialists and the BNP.

No, what Lefties (with honourable exceptions) find so hard to forgive is the lady's very success: the fact that she rescued a country that they had dishonoured and impoverished; that she inherited a Britain that was sclerotic, indebted and declining and left it proud, wealthy and free; that she never lost an election to them. Their rage, in truth, can never be assuaged; for it is the rage of Caliban.