By Mark Steyn
Friday, April 12, 2013
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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