The staying power of the Iron Lady’s convictions
Henry Higgins asked, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Canadian conservatives might ask: “ Why can’t Stephen Harper be more like Maggie Thatcher?” At least when it comes to winning elections.
Since the Post is this week running a series on the state of Canadian conservatism, and the great lady’s 80th birthday is due on Oct. 13, it is relevant to reflect on the legacy of one of the most important conservative politicians of the 20th century.
Great leaders are made by great challenges, and Mrs. Thatcher was tempered in the furnace of inevitable and necessary conflict. In the mid 1970s, Britain was “ The Sick Man of Europe.” Mrs. Thatcher took over a desperately divided Conservative Party that, under her predecessor, Ted Heath ( who died this summer), was as thoroughly interventionist and dirigiste as its Labour opposition. When the Tories were ejected, the unrepentantly socialist Labour Party inevitably made things even worse.
Margaret Thatcher came to power with a clear set of truly conservative ideas that involved emphasizing personal responsibility and community, curbing destructive union power, unleashing enterprise by cutting taxes and slashing burdensome and counterproductive regulation, and clearing out the Augean stables of the British state-owned industries. Hers was both an economic and a moral revolution. Britons were forced — reluctantly — to face the fact that they had been living under a welfare state that was not only financially untenable but bred a destructive sense of entitlement. Her crusade was helped — although “helped” may seem a strange word — by two critical events: the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands and the fact that she was almost blown up by the Irish Republican Army in a Brighton hotel.
Intriguingly, if you wanted to see Maggie Thatcher’s legacy, you might return to Brighton this week, where the Labour party is holding its annual conference. Labour is in almost as much disarray as its Tory opposition (which just ditched its fourth post-Thatcher leader, Michael Howard), but this is mainly over Tony Blair’s commitment to Iraq rather than over his social and economic policies, which are thoroughly “ Thatcherite.”
Earlier this summer, Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer and impatient heir apparent to Mr. Blair, praised Mrs. Thatcher’s economic record. Sixteen years ago, Mr. Brown was writing off Mrs. Thatcher’s allegedly “ naive yearning for the Arcadian simplicities of a marketplace.” With state ownership long thrown off the Labour platform, and New Labour bemoaning a welfarebred “culture of worklessness,” it seems that Maggie wasn’t so simplistic after all. Mr. Blair now wants to introduce more competition and choice in education and health care, which were key parts of Mrs. Thatcher’s platform before her third term in office.
One tribute to her ongoing iconic status is that she is still the object of visceral hatred and misrepresentation. Perhaps the most ludicrous knock against “ The Iron Lady” — a title of which she was fond, and which was in fact given to her by the Soviets — is that she was “ divisive.” But how could she be anything else when she was seeking to overturn a suicidal political “consensus”?
Not only did she change the nature of British political culture, she re-established Britain as a moral force on the world stage. Her taking back of the Falklands was a bold act of principle. Above all, she should be remembered for her critical role in ending the Soviet empire.
As with Tony Blair, she is claimed to have been a “ lapdog” of the White House, but she was far from it. She expressed herself fully and freely on the U.S. deficit, disagreed with the invasion of Grenada and — significantly — criticized America’s muddled approach to Lebanon ( for which it is still paying, and of which Iraq is partly a consequence).
What split her party, and ultimately led to her ouster, was partly her profound Euro-skepticism, and partly the poll tax. The poll tax was a terrible political mistake, but she might note two trends in Europe that vindicate her: first, that it continues to become a bureaucratic morass, but secondly that her legacy is being embraced within Germany, in particularly by Christian Democrat leader Angela Merkel, and even within France.
Canada was never very high on Mrs. Thatcher’s list of concerns. The repatriation of the Canadian Constitution rates a footnote in her autobiography. She was no fan of Pierre Trudeau or his pacifism. She bridled at Brian Mulroney’s grandstanding over South Africa, and she believed that Canada’s Progressive Conservatives placed too much emphasis on the adjective rather than the noun. The fact that she was right on that score is one of the reasons they no longer exist.
Mr. Harper is reportedly a student and fan of Thatcherite policies, but part of his problem may be that he simply doesn’t face the kind of publicly acknowledged challenges that Mrs. Thatcher faced.
The Liberals were never as ideologically out to lunch as the British Labour Party, even under Pierre Trudeau. And for much longer than the now ever- sopragmatic British Labour Party, the Liberals have known how to steal whatever policies “work” — that is, win votes. For the moment.
Mrs. Thatcher’s was a politics of conviction. The shame for Canada is that conviction doesn’t seem to play well unless it happens to be posturing on the left. The Canadian electorate sometimes resembles nothing so much as the proverbial frog sitting more or less comfortably in slowly heating water. Even if they did jump, they wouldn’t be sure which way.
Tragically, Mrs. Thatcher is now showing the signs of forgetfulness that were the mark of decline in her great friend and fellow conservative Ronald Reagan. Her situation has grown sadder with the passing, two years ago, of her beloved husband, Denis. At least her 80th is to be marked with a big party in London in two weeks’ time. There is much to celebrate.
For anybody who wants to express their good wishes to Mrs. Thatcher, a lady named Angela Trudeau has taken the initiative of setting up a special Web site through which congratulatory emails can be passed. The address is www.happybirthdaymargaretthatcher.ca.