Sunday, September 23, 2007
John Gray on Thatcher and Brown
Now that JP has taken against John Gray, the contrarian in me feels compelled to post an article by him. This is an interesting piece on Thatcher and Brown. Don't agree with it all but there's some interesting observations there. Bad news for Cameron too if he's right.
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More on Gray: http://impdec.blogspot.com/2007/06/god-is-not-great-christopher-hitchens.html
Simon Jenkins on Thatcher:
This hate figure doesn't merit a state funeral. All she did was rescue Britain
Margaret Thatcher was a revolutionary leader who improved people's lives. The left's continued fury will serve to cheer her
On Monday evening the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher attended a private concert in London at St John's, Smith Square. She was a magnificent apparition, arriving in dying sunlight and guided to her seat like Turner's Fighting Temeraire, masts and spars still ghostly proud and with attendant tugs fussing round her.
Thatcher was also attended by the Furies that continue to afflict her reputation. They were roused this time by reports that she is to be accorded a "£3m state funeral" as and when she dies. While Gordon Brown's admiration for her is one of the few sentiments he shares with Tony Blair, there is something ghoulish in publicly discussing the death of the living. It speaks volumes of Downing Street's present state of mind.
Were Thatcher discomfited by reading of her demise, her spirits will have been raised by the reaction from the left. As the New Statesman and Guardian letters page erupted in stereotypical rage, the lady's nostrils must have sniffed the cordite and her sinews responded nostalgically to the sound of battle.
In the Statesman the playwright Ed Waugh denounced Thatcher's "unprecedented attack on the living standards and democratic rights of working people". What, he asked, of the "selfless miners ... and heroic Liverpool councillors"? A state funeral (surely of no concern to the left) would be "an unforgivable betrayal of Labour voters".'
[...]
'Of course, Thatcher should not have a state funeral, and I cannot believe she would want one. Such funerals are for heads of state, or occasionally for those who saved the state from catastrophe in war, for a Nelson, a Wellington or a Churchill. Even Churchill's funeral did not evoke universal assent. He was regarded by many as is Thatcher by the Guardian. But he embodied and unified the nation in its hour of peril. His funeral was a moment of recollected gratitude.
Victory in war delivers a salving balm to the reputation of a leader. No such balm is available in time of peace, even if victory requires greater leadership and skill, and the facing down of implacable foes. Yet no serious historian could deny that Thatcher's coming to power in 1979 "saved Britain" in a realistic sense. It began a transformation in its political economy and, for the overwhelming majority of Britons, it was a change for the better.
The human costs were high, not least those imposed by Geoffrey Howe's savage "restructuring" budgets of 1980 and 1981. But the privatising of the public trading sector and the freeing of markets in labour and capital jolted Britain from laggard to leader among European economies. Whatever the downsides, this was the challenge that had defied the failed governments of the 70s and that Thatcher accepted and met. Others in Europe have yet to match her radicalism, and they know it.
There was no greater testament to this than that Labour and the Liberal Democrats should have adopted Thatcherism in all material respects in the 1990s. The protesters can complain that under Thatcher "market forces guided every aspect of British life", but she was more timid at being Thatcherite, and with probably more generous safety nets, than Blair and Brown. She refused point blank to privatise the coal mines, the railways and the post office. She would not have privatised virtually all public investment, as has Brown so extravagantly.'
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