Margaret Thatcher Is Having a Moment

By John O’Sullivan

Saturday, July 12, 2025

 

Speaking at a Conservative Party election rally at Plymouth in May 2001, almost exactly ten years after her defenestration from the party’s leadership and premiership, Margaret (by then Lady) Thatcher addressed the cheering Tory faithful in confidential terms: “I was told beforehand that my arrival was unscheduled, but on my way here I passed a local cinema and it turns out that you were expecting me after all.”

 

“The [cinema] billboard read The Mummy Returns.”

 

It was a joke with sly implications. She was endorsing the common judgment that her political murder of ten years before had been a case of matricide. She had been killed in broad daylight by “Thatcher’s children,” whom she had raised to the cabinet, with a stake driven through her heart (contrary to rumors that she didn’t have one), and buried at the crossroads at dead of night, a mixture of salt and garlic scattered over her grave. Yet now, not only had she risen from that grave, but before arriving in Plymouth, she showed she had lost none of her taste for blood — sorry, controversy — by venturing on a sharp criticism of multiculturalism.

 

“A multicultural society will never be a united society,” she had said in the election campaign, to the consternation of Tory modernizers who wanted the party to disown her remarks. William Hague, then Tory leader, refused to do so yet managed not to provoke hostile reactions. As The Guardian lamented seven years later, arch-modernizer David Cameron had since reiterated her criticism of multiculturalism to zero public outrage. But the main message of her arch little joke was that the mummy was politically immortal: she had the power not only to rise again but also to kill again — and perhaps other mystical powers too.

 

As good as her word, the mummy rose again in the first quarter of this year, called forth from the vasty deep by desperate Tories hoping she could perform a double miracle — raise not only herself but also the party from the dead — on the pretext of celebrating her 100th birthday.

 

Conveniently enough, Margaret Thatcher, born in October 1925, left them a second significant anniversary to celebrate this year, and doubtless more if the Tories can unearth them. The second is the 50th anniversary of her defeat of Edward Heath in the first round of the Tory leadership contest on February 4, 1975.

 

She didn’t become Tory leader until February 11, when she was elected handsomely over four other contenders in the second round. But the first round was the decisive one. Tories then felt chivalrously that they couldn’t deny the girl the reward of her courage in taking on the party establishment. Tories today rightly sense that her first-round success marked a decisive victory for her brand of conservatism over the anti-traditional managerial style of Heath’s corporate conservatism — “Heathco” to the satirical magazine Private Eye — and they have resolved to celebrate it as a major moment in Tory history.

 

They have been doing so in nostalgic events, which bring together three interesting and overlapping but distinct groups: the surviving veterans of the three Thatcher administrations (1979–90), Tory organizations that have special links to her legacy, such as right-wing women’s groups, and those active politicians and apparatchiks who believe that Thatcherism must be part of any conservative phoenix that rises from the ashes of the last election and — just as important — is then able to fly.

 

***

 

The Thatcher centenary began with three celebrations blending policy debates with nostalgia. Women2Win, a group within the Conservative Party that promotes Tory women candidates, produced a documentary about the 1974 leadership election in which figures on both sides amiably recalled the battle. The Centre for Policy Studies — a think tank that Thatcher and Keith Joseph founded in 1974 to promote (in descending order) her leadership campaign, anti-inflationary economics, and the then-infant concept of Thatcherism — held a conference on how to pull off a similar revival in the even more daunting political environment of the 2024 landslide defeat. A post-Thatcherite think tank, Policy Exchange, where her official biographer, Charles (now Lord) Moore, is now a visiting scholar, began its coverage of the centenary with a panel on the 1975 leadership campaign. That event brought Thatcher and Heath partisans together for a good-humored postmortem on how she won and what it meant historically.

 

I was fortunate enough to be invited to all three occasions, less as a veteran of these Tory wars — that came later — than as a parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Telegraph who was reporting on them at the time. In that role, I had helped to organize a dinner at a London club for four Telegraph editorial writers and then-candidate Thatcher, which my late and fearless colleague, Frank Johnson, opened as follows: “What will you do when the leadership election is over, Mrs. Thatcher?” She answered, “Well, Frank, I shall be leader of the Conservative Party.” “No,” he said, “I mean, seriously.” She replied: “If I didn’t think I could win, I wouldn’t be standing. I don’t take on hopeless battles. I prepare and win.”

 

Which, of course, she did, and not just during the leadership battle. When in government, she had to cope with the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, inflation, and the Cold War. All of those ended in victories for her, but the miners’ strike was an especially significant one. When the miners first challenged her government, in 1981, she had looked at the odds, decided they were unfavorable, and instructed her energy minister to settle on the miners’ terms. Then she instructed her cabinet to prepare for another such challenge down the road by building up stocks of coal and ensuring they could be moved to power stations, and by empowering the police to restrain “flying pickets” from keeping miners from work by force. When the second miners’ strike duly came, in 1984, she prevailed outright, entrenching her labor union reforms and the constitutional authority of the elected government in one stroke. One very clear lesson from Thatcher’s career is the vital importance of preparation — or, to put it in slightly different language, of intellectual investment in formulating policy.

 

We can see that at present because, by comparison, Britain’s new Labour government made very little intellectual investment during its 14 years in opposition. It shows, too. Labour entered office with few “joined up” ideas of how to govern in a socialist vein, and its first attempts to do so have already been embarrassingly reversed. Last summer’s budget, which added billions in extra public spending, has been followed by a “Don’t say emergency” spring budget that increased taxes and cut benefits to the disabled. Those are at best half-socialist priorities that in part clash with the interests of the modern Labour Party’s base — namely, the administrators and recipients of an expanded welfare state.

 

Despite these cuts, the latest forecasts predict that this year’s deficit will be an astounding 5 percent of GDP. Going ahead, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government looks likely to be a shuttlecock batted back and forth between the bond markets and radically statist Labour activists who, in a post-budget poll, pushed Starmer and his chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, deep into negative popularity. They also gave top billing to the net-zero fanatic, Energy Minister Ed Miliband, whose ministerial days are probably numbered. All of which suggests that Labour’s governance will combine public unpopularity, schizophrenia on policy, and an endless economic crisis for several years to come.

 

That’s the political atmosphere — likely to be receptive to the financial and economic realism of Thatcherism — in which Tories have now embarked on their own policy rethink. But they will have to solve a range of problems before they can reinsert Thatcherism seamlessly into the next “New Toryism.” The first obstacle they face is the hostile caricature of Thatcher’s economic and social record drawn by a still-angry left, relentlessly regurgitated by the U.K.’s progressive media-academic-cultural complex, and (highly inconveniently) embraced by some conservatives in or near the Tory and Reform Parties. The caricature argues that her anti-inflationary and labor market reforms created an economy in which British workers are “left behind” in run-down, crime-ridden, “sink” housing estates, living on disability benefits, while low-paid immigrants take the unskilled jobs in a deindustrialized economy lagging behind its neighbors. That economy, in turn, is said to have spawned a mass of social problems, from crime to family breakdown. These criticisms echo arguments leveled against Ronald Reagan and Reaganism by some U.S. conservatives.

 

Such criticisms ignore the massive contrast between the outcomes of Thatcher’s (and Reagan’s) policies and those of later governments. Thatcher was elected in June 1979, when the nation was still reeling from the “winter of discontent” of spreading strikes. By the mid-1980s, her reforms had lifted the U.K. economy to the world’s fifth largest, increased its obdurate productivity rate, and revived a spirit of energy and enterprise in the British people. Thatcher’s successful economic policies were continued under John Major’s administration, until Labour’s 1997 victory, when a Treasury official briefing Gordon Brown, the incoming Labour chancellor, on the state of the U.K. economy, said happily: “These are wonderful figures.” (“What do you want me to do?” Brown replied. “Send them a thank-you note?”)

 

Thatcher and Major had kept immigration to an economically manageable and socially assimilable 50,000 individuals a year. Along with labor market reforms, stable finances, and taxation reform, leading to lower rates and higher revenues, this level of immigration filled local labor shortages and played a modest part in helping the economy grow under Tory and Labour governments. But Tony Blair’s Labour government deliberately increased the numbers of immigrants sharply in order to “dish the Tories” (i.e., shape an electorate that would make their opponents unelectable). Tory governments failed to reverse that course — indeed they aggravated it, admitting almost a million immigrants into Britain in the party’s last year in office. A contributory factor was that, from the turn of the century, the U.K. Treasury believed that mass immigration was a surer and cheaper path to prosperity than higher investment in technically advanced industries. As a result, when Reeves, Labour’s new chancellor, took over from Rishi Sunak’s outgoing Conservatives last July, no thanks were necessary. The U.K. economy was reeling from Covid, the lockdown, net zero, inflation, high levels of mass immigration, and much else — though it was still outperforming the major European economies both pre- and post-Brexit.

 

If this bipartisan responsibility for the failures of Britain’s economy is denied, as the left understandably denies it, it’s but a small step to attribute increased crime, family breakdown, the growth of the underclass, and other social evils to Thatcher’s neglect of society and social provision. As a critique of Thatcherism, however, that attack runs slap-bang into the fact that government social spending rose sharply in the Thatcher years. So when did these pathologies start? When did crime start to rise? Illegitimacy to increase? Family breakdown to get seriously worse? Divorce figures to rocket?

 

As it happens, we know the answer to these questions. In his book The Strange Death of Moral Britain, the late Christie Davies, a distinguished Welsh sociologist, established that these major changes started in the 1950s and early 1960s, almost 20 years before Thatcher entered Downing Street. Another expert witness is the socialist writer Jeremy Seabrook, who lamented in his 1978 book What Went Wrong? that low-income council estates (what Americans call public housing) were squalid and crime-ridden, crime was increasingly endemic, illegitimacy was rising, families were being weakened, and an underclass had been created.

 

Note that Seabrook’s book was published the year before Thatcher’s election and four years after Sir Keith Joseph was almost driven out of politics for giving the speech in which he identified these very same social evils as a “cycle of deprivation,” called for policies to tackle them, and suggested (very hesitantly and with moral qualms) that state-supplied contraception might be a “bridge” to the more fundamental cultural and moral changes that were necessary. Britain’s media, the progressive left, “the great and the good” all the way down to the bishops, and critics in all the parties promptly joined in denouncing Joseph for proposing to “sterilize the lower classes.” Serious reformers were frightened off, and the problems of the underclass were fenced off from serious consideration for another decade.

 

Could Thatcher have tackled these pathologies more vigorously in the years that followed? I doubt it. She and her governments did tackle them, in health and education, with different levels of success. Some of their solutions, e.g., in educational reform, ran into the obstacle of the civil service “blob” that weakened essentially conservative reforms by “adding on” quite different objectives. Health reforms, too, multiplied managerial complexities because simpler proposals were considered too controversial. In addition, Blairite ministers reversed some of Thatcher’s reforms — and then reversed them back again. If a case is to be made against her on such grounds, it would have to be that her governments shrank from more fundamental reforms because, as the anti-Joseph hysteria had shown, they carried a high risk of calumny, unpopularity, and defeat.

 

If Thatcher didn’t make the reform of the welfare state the signature policy of her administration, however, she had at least the excuse that she first needed to tackle the larger and more pressing problems of economic decline, inflation, overmighty labor unions, and the Soviet threat. Whatever your judgment on that, Thatcherism can hardly be held responsible for failures that either began a quarter of a century before Thatcher entered office or resumed 18 years after she left it.

 

What is the excuse of later governments?

 

***

 

If Thatcherism is to play a serious part in any revival of the Tory party, the leftist myths about Thatcher’s record will have to be rebutted by serious historians and by party leaders. Her real record is well worth defending. That’s important for the Tories, because Thatcher is one their few remaining serious assets. Keeping her as their sole property is vital for them. Since they lost last year’s election in a landslide, emerging with only 121 seats in a Parliament of 650, they are frequently dismissed as being on their way to extinction. Recent opinion polls have shown Reform to be the most popular of the three leading parties, followed by Labour, with the Tories lagging in third place. In the recent local elections, Reform won hands down, with almost a third of the national total, drawing votes not only from the Tories but also from Labour. It also looked like a more substantial threat to Labour than the Tories, which is a political factor in itself. It negates the main weakness of a new party — namely, that the votes it gains are “wasted” because it can’t win. That fate now threatens the Tories.

 

One unnoticed factor, however, is that Thatcherism has supporters in both of the conservative parties. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, in addition to being a naturally gifted politician, is the nearest thing to the perfect Thatcherite outside her old party. Between now and the next election, both conservative parties will be fighting for predominance in every special election and local election. Only as the election looms will they have the evidence of which is stronger and where, which they need if they are to discuss an electoral pact between them at all seriously. That will be a tall order at any time. But one can’t dismiss ideological sympathy when estimating its chances.

 

Even without the challenge of Reform from the right, however, the Tories know that they have to change drastically. That realization undercuts the prediction (made immediately after the general election) that, because the surviving 121 Tory members of Parliament tended to be drawn from the liberal wing of Toryism, they would tilt the party leftward in order to woo the Liberal Democratic vote rather than Reform’s. Most of these “one nation” Tories have since realized that if they were to go down that road, they would lose their party outside Parliament and probably even more votes than last time. The Liberal Democratic pool of votes is smaller than Reform’s, moreover, and every other political party is fishing in it.

 

Also, liberal Toryism is suffering an even deeper identity crisis than the party as a whole. Its traditional concept of political imagination has long been limited to “catching the Whigs bathing and running off with their clothes,” i.e., adopting a more moderate version of the policies of the left. Liberal Tories pursued that policy to destruction, all too well represented by net zero and uncontrolled mass immigration, under the last government. What they cling to now, in policy terms, can best be described as symbolic totems of “niceness” and “moderation” that have nasty consequences, such as continued U.K. membership of the European Court of Human Rights. Liberal Toryism is now — and for some time will be — an exhausted political tradition in need of convalescence and a regime of reading and reflection (and, some would add, penance).

 

Where does that leave other Tory factions? Paradoxically, though the fortunes of the Tory party are low, there is a festive upsurge of many conservative intellectual and moral traditions and organizations all debating what being conservative means and should mean today. Their debates were exemplified by the two think tanks whose conferences I attended, mentioned above, but also by the books, pamphlets, conferences, and podcasts of such new insurgent groups as Peter Whittle’s New Culture Forum, “communitarian” Tory MP Danny Kruger’s New Conservatives, and former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s Popular Conservatism. Oversimplifying greatly, these three groups represent, respectively, the defense of Britain’s history, culture, and identity; the love of home, family, neighborhood, nation — and, in terms of sensibility, religion and beauty; and the defense of democracy and popular liberties against Leviathan at home and in Brussels. All of these themes and memes overlap, interweave, and enrich one another, and they are encouraged to do so by an overlooked social reality: namely, though political parties in a two-party system contain different and potentially quarrelsome groups, the daily experience of working, talking, and “fighting” (i.e., campaigning) together creates a common identity and tradition that have an independent value for all of them. Each then wills the success of the others.

 

Under the influence of such camaraderie, I would argue that the Tory party is capable of bringing all these factions together in three broad groups — “one nation” liberal Tories, Thatcherites, and national conservatives — and then uniting them in a single, largely harmonious party. Liberal Toryism I have already dispatched to a sanatorium for a rest cure, where it can consider its eventual reactions to the likely national and international events that will redraw political and ideological boundaries. Those events are, first, Britain’s serious economic and financial difficulties described above, and, second, a general international shift from global bodies to nation-states and national governments, from liberal institutions to democratic ones, and from elites to voters and their representatives.

 

As I argue above, the first set of challenges plainly advantages the Thatcherites within conservatism. As the word is currently used, Thatcherites are the devotees of economic and financial realism. To borrow a U.S. metaphor about the Fed, they are the people who take away the punch bowl when the party is really getting going. Fortunately for party unity, a significant number of liberal Tories are also market libertarians, which is one of the two ways of being a Thatcherite in the U.K. Enough of them will hold senior positions on the parliamentary front bench to soothe liberal distress and to remind other Tory factions of the need to contain their communitarian and cultural ambitions within the laws of economics.

 

The second shift of political priorities means that the Tory Party will have to adapt its future policies in the direction of a more populist national conservatism, with a stress on patriotism, respect for Britain’s religious and constitutional traditions, opposition to open borders and mass immigration, commonsense skepticism of gender theory, and most obviously the restoration of national democratic sovereignty over supranational technocracy. That national conservatism — inside which most of the smaller factions mentioned above would fit quite comfortably — is what conservative voters plainly want, and they are fed up with not getting it. And all of the above positions are ideas that Thatcher either liked or would have liked if they had been on the political agenda of her day. It will be a long time before the voters take a serious interest in the Tories again. Until then, they should forswear febrile leadership-swapping, invest time and thought into creating a modern political organization and rethinking policies along post-Brexit lines, and give the party’s current able and unorthodox leader Kemi Badenoch the chance to succeed — as the party did in 1974–79.

 

An undeniable Thatcherite who realized very clearly that Thatcherism encompassed all the aforementioned different Tory traditions — indeed, that they helped one another to survive and prosper in good times and bad — was Nigel Lawson, one of her two great chancellors. He defined Thatcherism early and prophetically as follows: “A mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatization and a dash of populism.”

 

Would Nigel Farage dissent from that? His only known deviation from this right-wing orthodoxy is on gender identity. He thinks he could become an Iron Lady.

Margaret Thatcher Is Having a Moment

By John O’Sullivan

Thursday, June 12, 2025

 

Speaking at a Conservative Party election rally at Plymouth in May 2001, almost exactly ten years after her defenestration from the party’s leadership and premiership, Margaret (by then Lady) Thatcher addressed the cheering Tory faithful in confidential terms: “I was told beforehand that my arrival was unscheduled, but on my way here I passed a local cinema and it turns out that you were expecting me after all.”

 

“The [cinema] billboard read The Mummy Returns.”

 

It was a joke with sly implications. She was endorsing the common judgment that her political murder of ten years before had been a case of matricide. She had been killed in broad daylight by “Thatcher’s children,” whom she had raised to the cabinet, with a stake driven through her heart (contrary to rumors that she didn’t have one), and buried at the crossroads at dead of night, a mixture of salt and garlic scattered over her grave. Yet now, not only had she risen from that grave, but before arriving in Plymouth, she showed she had lost none of her taste for blood — sorry, controversy — by venturing on a sharp criticism of multiculturalism.

 

“A multicultural society will never be a united society,” she had said in the election campaign, to the consternation of Tory modernizers who wanted the party to disown her remarks. William Hague, then Tory leader, refused to do so yet managed not to provoke hostile reactions. As The Guardian lamented seven years later, arch-modernizer David Cameron had since reiterated her criticism of multiculturalism to zero public outrage. But the main message of her arch little joke was that the mummy was politically immortal: she had the power not only to rise again but also to kill again — and perhaps other mystical powers too.

 

As good as her word, the mummy rose again in the first quarter of this year, called forth from the vasty deep by desperate Tories hoping she could perform a double miracle — raise not only herself but also the party from the dead — on the pretext of celebrating her 100th birthday.

 

Conveniently enough, Margaret Thatcher, born in October 1925, left them a second significant anniversary to celebrate this year, and doubtless more if the Tories can unearth them. The second is the 50th anniversary of her defeat of Edward Heath in the first round of the Tory leadership contest on February 4, 1975.

 

She didn’t become Tory leader until February 11, when she was elected handsomely over four other contenders in the second round. But the first round was the decisive one. Tories then felt chivalrously that they couldn’t deny the girl the reward of her courage in taking on the party establishment. Tories today rightly sense that her first-round success marked a decisive victory for her brand of conservatism over the anti-traditional managerial style of Heath’s corporate conservatism — “Heathco” to the satirical magazine Private Eye — and they have resolved to celebrate it as a major moment in Tory history.

 

They have been doing so in nostalgic events, which bring together three interesting and overlapping but distinct groups: the surviving veterans of the three Thatcher administrations (1979–90), Tory organizations that have special links to her legacy, such as right-wing women’s groups, and those active politicians and apparatchiks who believe that Thatcherism must be part of any conservative phoenix that rises from the ashes of the last election and — just as important — is then able to fly.

 

***

 

The Thatcher centenary began with three celebrations blending policy debates with nostalgia. Women2Win, a group within the Conservative Party that promotes Tory women candidates, produced a documentary about the 1974 leadership election in which figures on both sides amiably recalled the battle. The Centre for Policy Studies — a think tank that Thatcher and Keith Joseph founded in 1974 to promote (in descending order) her leadership campaign, anti-inflationary economics, and the then-infant concept of Thatcherism — held a conference on how to pull off a similar revival in the even more daunting political environment of the 2024 landslide defeat. A post-Thatcherite think tank, Policy Exchange, where her official biographer, Charles (now Lord) Moore, is now a visiting scholar, began its coverage of the centenary with a panel on the 1975 leadership campaign. That event brought Thatcher and Heath partisans together for a good-humored postmortem on how she won and what it meant historically.

 

I was fortunate enough to be invited to all three occasions, less as a veteran of these Tory wars — that came later — than as a parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Telegraph who was reporting on them at the time. In that role, I had helped to organize a dinner at a London club for four Telegraph editorial writers and then-candidate Thatcher, which my late and fearless colleague, Frank Johnson, opened as follows: “What will you do when the leadership election is over, Mrs. Thatcher?” She answered, “Well, Frank, I shall be leader of the Conservative Party.” “No,” he said, “I mean, seriously.” She replied: “If I didn’t think I could win, I wouldn’t be standing. I don’t take on hopeless battles. I prepare and win.”

 

Which, of course, she did, and not just during the leadership battle. When in government, she had to cope with the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, inflation, and the Cold War. All of those ended in victories for her, but the miners’ strike was an especially significant one. When the miners first challenged her government, in 1981, she had looked at the odds, decided they were unfavorable, and instructed her energy minister to settle on the miners’ terms. Then she instructed her cabinet to prepare for another such challenge down the road by building up stocks of coal and ensuring they could be moved to power stations, and by empowering the police to restrain “flying pickets” from keeping miners from work by force. When the second miners’ strike duly came, in 1984, she prevailed outright, entrenching her labor union reforms and the constitutional authority of the elected government in one stroke. One very clear lesson from Thatcher’s career is the vital importance of preparation — or, to put it in slightly different language, of intellectual investment in formulating policy.

 

We can see that at present because, by comparison, Britain’s new Labour government made very little intellectual investment during its 14 years in opposition. It shows, too. Labour entered office with few “joined up” ideas of how to govern in a socialist vein, and its first attempts to do so have already been embarrassingly reversed. Last summer’s budget, which added billions in extra public spending, has been followed by a “Don’t say emergency” spring budget that increased taxes and cut benefits to the disabled. Those are at best half-socialist priorities that in part clash with the interests of the modern Labour Party’s base — namely, the administrators and recipients of an expanded welfare state.

 

Despite these cuts, the latest forecasts predict that this year’s deficit will be an astounding 5 percent of GDP. Going ahead, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government looks likely to be a shuttlecock batted back and forth between the bond markets and radically statist Labour activists who, in a post-budget poll, pushed Starmer and his chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, deep into negative popularity. They also gave top billing to the net-zero fanatic, Energy Minister Ed Miliband, whose ministerial days are probably numbered. All of which suggests that Labour’s governance will combine public unpopularity, schizophrenia on policy, and an endless economic crisis for several years to come.

 

That’s the political atmosphere — likely to be receptive to the financial and economic realism of Thatcherism — in which Tories have now embarked on their own policy rethink. But they will have to solve a range of problems before they can reinsert Thatcherism seamlessly into the next “New Toryism.” The first obstacle they face is the hostile caricature of Thatcher’s economic and social record drawn by a still-angry left, relentlessly regurgitated by the U.K.’s progressive media-academic-cultural complex, and (highly inconveniently) embraced by some conservatives in or near the Tory and Reform Parties. The caricature argues that her anti-inflationary and labor market reforms created an economy in which British workers are “left behind” in run-down, crime-ridden, “sink” housing estates, living on disability benefits, while low-paid immigrants take the unskilled jobs in a deindustrialized economy lagging behind its neighbors. That economy, in turn, is said to have spawned a mass of social problems, from crime to family breakdown. These criticisms echo arguments leveled against Ronald Reagan and Reaganism by some U.S. conservatives.

 

Such criticisms ignore the massive contrast between the outcomes of Thatcher’s (and Reagan’s) policies and those of later governments. Thatcher was elected in June 1979, when the nation was still reeling from the “winter of discontent” of spreading strikes. By the mid-1980s, her reforms had lifted the U.K. economy to the world’s fifth largest, increased its obdurate productivity rate, and revived a spirit of energy and enterprise in the British people. Thatcher’s successful economic policies were continued under John Major’s administration, until Labour’s 1997 victory, when a Treasury official briefing Gordon Brown, the incoming Labour chancellor, on the state of the U.K. economy, said happily: “These are wonderful figures.” (“What do you want me to do?” Brown replied. “Send them a thank-you note?”)

 

Thatcher and Major had kept immigration to an economically manageable and socially assimilable 50,000 individuals a year. Along with labor market reforms, stable finances, and taxation reform, leading to lower rates and higher revenues, this level of immigration filled local labor shortages and played a modest part in helping the economy grow under Tory and Labour governments. But Tony Blair’s Labour government deliberately increased the numbers of immigrants sharply in order to “dish the Tories” (i.e., shape an electorate that would make their opponents unelectable). Tory governments failed to reverse that course — indeed they aggravated it, admitting almost a million immigrants into Britain in the party’s last year in office. A contributory factor was that, from the turn of the century, the U.K. Treasury believed that mass immigration was a surer and cheaper path to prosperity than higher investment in technically advanced industries. As a result, when Reeves, Labour’s new chancellor, took over from Rishi Sunak’s outgoing Conservatives last July, no thanks were necessary. The U.K. economy was reeling from Covid, the lockdown, net zero, inflation, high levels of mass immigration, and much else — though it was still outperforming the major European economies both pre- and post-Brexit.

 

If this bipartisan responsibility for the failures of Britain’s economy is denied, as the left understandably denies it, it’s but a small step to attribute increased crime, family breakdown, the growth of the underclass, and other social evils to Thatcher’s neglect of society and social provision. As a critique of Thatcherism, however, that attack runs slap-bang into the fact that government social spending rose sharply in the Thatcher years. So when did these pathologies start? When did crime start to rise? Illegitimacy to increase? Family breakdown to get seriously worse? Divorce figures to rocket?

 

As it happens, we know the answer to these questions. In his book The Strange Death of Moral Britain, the late Christie Davies, a distinguished Welsh sociologist, established that these major changes started in the 1950s and early 1960s, almost 20 years before Thatcher entered Downing Street. Another expert witness is the socialist writer Jeremy Seabrook, who lamented in his 1978 book What Went Wrong? that low-income council estates (what Americans call public housing) were squalid and crime-ridden, crime was increasingly endemic, illegitimacy was rising, families were being weakened, and an underclass had been created.

 

Note that Seabrook’s book was published the year before Thatcher’s election and four years after Sir Keith Joseph was almost driven out of politics for giving the speech in which he identified these very same social evils as a “cycle of deprivation,” called for policies to tackle them, and suggested (very hesitantly and with moral qualms) that state-supplied contraception might be a “bridge” to the more fundamental cultural and moral changes that were necessary. Britain’s media, the progressive left, “the great and the good” all the way down to the bishops, and critics in all the parties promptly joined in denouncing Joseph for proposing to “sterilize the lower classes.” Serious reformers were frightened off, and the problems of the underclass were fenced off from serious consideration for another decade.

 

Could Thatcher have tackled these pathologies more vigorously in the years that followed? I doubt it. She and her governments did tackle them, in health and education, with different levels of success. Some of their solutions, e.g., in educational reform, ran into the obstacle of the civil service “blob” that weakened essentially conservative reforms by “adding on” quite different objectives. Health reforms, too, multiplied managerial complexities because simpler proposals were considered too controversial. In addition, Blairite ministers reversed some of Thatcher’s reforms — and then reversed them back again. If a case is to be made against her on such grounds, it would have to be that her governments shrank from more fundamental reforms because, as the anti-Joseph hysteria had shown, they carried a high risk of calumny, unpopularity, and defeat.

 

If Thatcher didn’t make the reform of the welfare state the signature policy of her administration, however, she had at least the excuse that she first needed to tackle the larger and more pressing problems of economic decline, inflation, overmighty labor unions, and the Soviet threat. Whatever your judgment on that, Thatcherism can hardly be held responsible for failures that either began a quarter of a century before Thatcher entered office or resumed 18 years after she left it.

 

What is the excuse of later governments?

 

***

 

If Thatcherism is to play a serious part in any revival of the Tory party, the leftist myths about Thatcher’s record will have to be rebutted by serious historians and by party leaders. Her real record is well worth defending. That’s important for the Tories, because Thatcher is one their few remaining serious assets. Keeping her as their sole property is vital for them. Since they lost last year’s election in a landslide, emerging with only 121 seats in a Parliament of 650, they are frequently dismissed as being on their way to extinction. Recent opinion polls have shown Reform to be the most popular of the three leading parties, followed by Labour, with the Tories lagging in third place. In the recent local elections, Reform won hands down, with almost a third of the national total, drawing votes not only from the Tories but also from Labour. It also looked like a more substantial threat to Labour than the Tories, which is a political factor in itself. It negates the main weakness of a new party — namely, that the votes it gains are “wasted” because it can’t win. That fate now threatens the Tories.

 

One unnoticed factor, however, is that Thatcherism has supporters in both of the conservative parties. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, in addition to being a naturally gifted politician, is the nearest thing to the perfect Thatcherite outside her old party. Between now and the next election, both conservative parties will be fighting for predominance in every special election and local election. Only as the election looms will they have the evidence of which is stronger and where, which they need if they are to discuss an electoral pact between them at all seriously. That will be a tall order at any time. But one can’t dismiss ideological sympathy when estimating its chances.

 

Even without the challenge of Reform from the right, however, the Tories know that they have to change drastically. That realization undercuts the prediction (made immediately after the general election) that, because the surviving 121 Tory members of Parliament tended to be drawn from the liberal wing of Toryism, they would tilt the party leftward in order to woo the Liberal Democratic vote rather than Reform’s. Most of these “one nation” Tories have since realized that if they were to go down that road, they would lose their party outside Parliament and probably even more votes than last time. The Liberal Democratic pool of votes is smaller than Reform’s, moreover, and every other political party is fishing in it.

 

Also, liberal Toryism is suffering an even deeper identity crisis than the party as a whole. Its traditional concept of political imagination has long been limited to “catching the Whigs bathing and running off with their clothes,” i.e., adopting a more moderate version of the policies of the left. Liberal Tories pursued that policy to destruction, all too well represented by net zero and uncontrolled mass immigration, under the last government. What they cling to now, in policy terms, can best be described as symbolic totems of “niceness” and “moderation” that have nasty consequences, such as continued U.K. membership of the European Court of Human Rights. Liberal Toryism is now — and for some time will be — an exhausted political tradition in need of convalescence and a regime of reading and reflection (and, some would add, penance).

 

Where does that leave other Tory factions? Paradoxically, though the fortunes of the Tory party are low, there is a festive upsurge of many conservative intellectual and moral traditions and organizations all debating what being conservative means and should mean today. Their debates were exemplified by the two think tanks whose conferences I attended, mentioned above, but also by the books, pamphlets, conferences, and podcasts of such new insurgent groups as Peter Whittle’s New Culture Forum, “communitarian” Tory MP Danny Kruger’s New Conservatives, and former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s Popular Conservatism. Oversimplifying greatly, these three groups represent, respectively, the defense of Britain’s history, culture, and identity; the love of home, family, neighborhood, nation — and, in terms of sensibility, religion and beauty; and the defense of democracy and popular liberties against Leviathan at home and in Brussels. All of these themes and memes overlap, interweave, and enrich one another, and they are encouraged to do so by an overlooked social reality: namely, though political parties in a two-party system contain different and potentially quarrelsome groups, the daily experience of working, talking, and “fighting” (i.e., campaigning) together creates a common identity and tradition that have an independent value for all of them. Each then wills the success of the others.

 

Under the influence of such camaraderie, I would argue that the Tory party is capable of bringing all these factions together in three broad groups — “one nation” liberal Tories, Thatcherites, and national conservatives — and then uniting them in a single, largely harmonious party. Liberal Toryism I have already dispatched to a sanatorium for a rest cure, where it can consider its eventual reactions to the likely national and international events that will redraw political and ideological boundaries. Those events are, first, Britain’s serious economic and financial difficulties described above, and, second, a general international shift from global bodies to nation-states and national governments, from liberal institutions to democratic ones, and from elites to voters and their representatives.

 

As I argue above, the first set of challenges plainly advantages the Thatcherites within conservatism. As the word is currently used, Thatcherites are the devotees of economic and financial realism. To borrow a U.S. metaphor about the Fed, they are the people who take away the punch bowl when the party is really getting going. Fortunately for party unity, a significant number of liberal Tories are also market libertarians, which is one of the two ways of being a Thatcherite in the U.K. Enough of them will hold senior positions on the parliamentary front bench to soothe liberal distress and to remind other Tory factions of the need to contain their communitarian and cultural ambitions within the laws of economics.

 

The second shift of political priorities means that the Tory Party will have to adapt its future policies in the direction of a more populist national conservatism, with a stress on patriotism, respect for Britain’s religious and constitutional traditions, opposition to open borders and mass immigration, commonsense skepticism of gender theory, and most obviously the restoration of national democratic sovereignty over supranational technocracy. That national conservatism — inside which most of the smaller factions mentioned above would fit quite comfortably — is what conservative voters plainly want, and they are fed up with not getting it. And all of the above positions are ideas that Thatcher either liked or would have liked if they had been on the political agenda of her day. It will be a long time before the voters take a serious interest in the Tories again. Until then, they should forswear febrile leadership-swapping, invest time and thought into creating a modern political organization and rethinking policies along post-Brexit lines, and give the party’s current able and unorthodox leader Kemi Badenoch the chance to succeed — as the party did in 1974–79.

 

An undeniable Thatcherite who realized very clearly that Thatcherism encompassed all the aforementioned different Tory traditions — indeed, that they helped one another to survive and prosper in good times and bad — was Nigel Lawson, one of her two great chancellors. He defined Thatcherism early and prophetically as follows: “A mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatization and a dash of populism.”

 

Would Nigel Farage dissent from that? His only known deviation from this right-wing orthodoxy is on gender identity. He thinks he could become an Iron Lady.

Take a Stand for the Iron Lady

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, February 04, 2021

 

It is a cliché, but you really, truly should be careful what you ask for.

 

I use a very helpful app called 1Focus, which I keep on my work computer to block Twitter and other similar websites that might distract me during my work day. It is a nice, simple procedure: You block the site for a specified period of time, and then, if you try to navigate there or click on a link to it (people send me a lot of Twitter links) the page will not come up.

 

Instead, you will get a page with some motivational quotations about procrastination and time-wasting. There’s Aristotle (“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self”), Bertrand Russell (“To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement”), Peter Drucker (“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”), and other figures of that kidney.

 

And then there is an anonymous quotation: “Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the high road to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction.” No attribution.

 

These are, of course, the words of Margaret Thatcher.

 

The left-wing campaign to erase conservatives from public spaces and the public discourse is without limits: It is a project that exists at Harvard and the New York Times, the big book publishers and the social-media companies — but it also descends into the picayune. I suspected that was the case for 1Focus, and, as it turns out, I was correct.

 

I wrote to the developer of the app, who told me forthrightly that “the Thatcher quote is unsourced because several users got offended and emailed me about how Thatcher was a terrible person.” He included this example:

 

Can you please take the Margaret Thatcher quotes OFF whatever list of quotes you have that shows up when I go to a blocked site? She’s a despicable human being and it makes my stomach turn knowing I gave money to a company that would acknowledge her in a supportive way like this. You wouldn’t include a Donald Trump quote would you? Please amend this. Please.

 

Companies respond to the people they hear from. I told the developer that I understood his position, and asked: “How many angry emails do you need to get from those of us who admire Margaret Thatcher to put Margaret Thatcher’s name back on Margaret Thatcher’s words?”

 

His answer: Three.

 

I think we can arrange that.

 

I don’t want to put his email out there, which I think would be bad manners, and I would be mortified if anybody took this as an opportunity to treat this man discourteously. He answered my questions honestly and directly, which is a hell of a lot more than you could say for the typical ambassador from corporate America. So, send your emails to TheTuesday@nationalreview.com, and I will forward them. Together, we will take a stand for the Iron Lady, who is not here to defend herself.

 

I’ll also offer my friend at 1Focus an inspirational quotation from our founder, William F. Buckley Jr.: “The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence rather than ‘newness’ and of honest intellectual combat rather than conformity.”

 

And, since my correspondent will no doubt be catching some grief shortly, a thought from Mohandas K. Gandhi: “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.”

What the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ Means 50 Years Later

By Armond White

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

 

A week before the Democratic National Convention in 1968, the Beatles released “Revolution,” blindsiding the generation that trusted them. The hippest pop critics resented “Revolution” because it went against the student tantrum movement. Some felt betrayed, others inferred their own anxious need to dissent anyway. Time has proven the Beatles right in refusing to go along with violence, destruction, and self-aggrandizement. It was a moment of pop-culture wisdom, but the song’s title really should have had a question mark.

 

By contrast, this week’s virtual DNC convention has met no cultural opposition. “WAP,” Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s whore’s anthem, shows the degrading values that liberal pop musicians contribute to the DNC’s convention week. The DNC pop line-up, from John Legend to Billie Eilish, is banal. (Stephen Stills and Billy Porter’s drag-queen rendition of “For What It’s Worth” was worse than banal; it was ludicrous.) Stoking the ambiguous relation of rock music and pop culture to rebellion — minus the Beatles’ warning — makes celebrity support of protests, violence, and anarchy absolutely, well, revolting.

 

Broadway’s Phillipa Soo, the token Asian playing one of the Schuyler sisters trio in Hamilton, recently advocated revolution, just like the clueless hippies who misunderstood John Lennon’s reservations as a rallying cry. While promoting her latest commercial project, Soo boasted that she was first inspired by Hamilton’s “We’re in the greatest city in the world” lyric but recently favors a different trope: “Revolution is messy, but now is the time to stand up.” This misconstrued sense of American history is absolutely in synch with Hamilton. Even worse, Soo’s comment on revolution paralleled that of congressional “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley, who vowed to MSNBC, “We need unrest in the streets. There needs to be unrest in the streets as long as there’s unrest in our lives.”

 

Neither Soo nor Pressley seems to appreciate what “revolution” means. Indifferent to the destruction occurring in Democrat-led cities, they don’t appreciate the danger that the Beatles sang about: “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out.”

 

The Beatles’ “Revolution” complicates the received history of 1968 by standing in opposition to Sixties violent unrest as proposed by vain activists. “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow” could well have been inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s anti-Maoist La Chinoise, which was released in the U.S. that same year. (Many film critics still refuse to acknowledge Godard’s skepticism.) John Lennon reiterated the point in 1980: “The lyrics stand today. . . . I want to see the plan. That is what I used to say to [activists] Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Count me out if it’s for violence. Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it’s with flowers.”

 

No doubt Lennon, Hoffman, Rubin knew more about the consequences of revolution than the superficial Soo and the seditious Pressley are willing to admit. Think about the specifics of the Hamilton lyrics that Soo (and every D.C. liberal) abides by: That “greatest city in the world” lyric expressed Lin-Manuel Miranda’s exalted view of Obama-era America, recently reduced to rubble. Now, Soo’s admiration for the “revolution is messy” lyric expresses post-Obama regret and Kalorama lust for power. Soo’s attitude belongs to the elite class of resisters — from Hollywood to Broadway to TV’s robotic newscasters — who support Antifa violence and excuse every riot as a “peaceful protest.”

 

Millennial showbiz, mostly in lockstep with the Democratic Party, twists the meaning of traditional showbiz humanism. Partisanship prevents artists from taking the Beatles’ principled stance when addressing the romance of revolution. There’s even a public-service TV commercial that misappropriates Chaplin’s The Great Dictator speech — “fight” meant something entirely different when there were actual Nazis (and Russian allies).

 

This delusion is neither personal nor a result of education. Despite being spoon-fed radicalism through media or at universities, most folks don’t know enough about communism or socialism to distinguish between Marx and Lenin. It’s just part of following media trends. One frequent concern of this column is the persistent unimaginative unoriginality of the culture world, particularly today’s one-track, simple-minded politicization and division.

 

The Beatles’ “Revolution” resounds for its challenge and enrichment of cultural consciousness, as opposed to today’s media-sponsored pro-violence consensus opinion. Millennial pop influencers such as Lin-Manuel Miranda lack moral commitment and no longer understand how to articulate feeling into art as the Beatles’ “Revolution” did.

 

Whining Taylor Swift, smug John Legend, ridiculous Billy Porter, and silly Philippa Soo represent the petulance of this cultural and political moment. When the Rolling Stones made “Street Fighting Man” to capitalize on the Sixties populism, they expressed their comfortable distance as well as their ambivalence; that’s why the Beatles quickly answered back with a definitive negation of street violence. Michael Jackson pulled together both political positions in his great 1991 “Black or White” (which begins with a “Street Fighting Man” riff and ends with a closing guitar note quoting “Revolution”).

 

This week’s pseudo (virtual) Democratic convention exploits the same social tensions that Jackson addressed in his personal manifesto, but anarchy is at play. In ’68, the Beatles’ “Revolution” anticipated turmoil, and the song remains a beacon to the conscientiousness that today’s liberal pop stars disgrace.

Mrs. Thatcher’s Last Victory

By John O'Sullivan

Monday, August 29, 2016

One of the sideshows of the Brexit campaign was a debate on the question of whether Margaret Thatcher would have supported Leave or Remain. It was a debate carried on largely by people who either knew her as a parliamentary colleague or worked for her in one arena or another, and it was therefore fairly civilized. It was also inevitably speculative. We can’t know for certain how someone would react to an event after her death; she never saw the EU reform package that David Cameron brought back from Brussels, for instance. Still, we can make informed and cautious guesses.

In my own own take on the story (“Thatcher’s Advisers Argue over Her Likely Position on Brexit”), I concluded that — whatever the uncertainties — Mrs. Thatcher would have voted for Brexit, doubtless after carefully examining both sides, but firmly and with very few doubts.

Now that the Brits both in the referendum and in government policy have adopted Brexit — in effect, now that Mrs. Thatcher has triumphed posthumously — what effect will this have on her reputation? It seems an odd question. How can events three years after her death change people’s judgments on her actions in life? But it thrusts itself forward because her record on Britain and the European Union is often cited, even by friendly critics, as the largest single blot on an otherwise splendid career of achievement. As for unfriendly critics . . . here is the judgment of Ian Gilmour, a Tory grandee whom she fired from her first Cabinet:

Although she signed the Single European Act, under which Britain sensibly pooled much sovereignty with her partners, Thatcher showed a deep-seated prejudice against the European community in all her meetings with ministers and officials, according to an adviser who was present. Nigel Lawson noted her “truculent chauvinism” in Europe, and Campbell considers Europe to have been the greatest failure of her premiership.

The Campbell in question is John Campbell, a pretty fair-minded biographer, whose picture of Thatcher on Europe shows a woman whose “truculent chauvinism” was held in check by the realities of office but who in retirement finally allowed her prejudices to overcome her judgment. She seemingly reached this stage with the publication of her final book, Statecraft, which came up to the very brink of advocating withdrawal from the EU. In his biography, The Iron Lady, Campbell summarizes the arguments in Statecraft as follows:

Europe, she had concluded after years of trying was “fundamentally unreformable”. It was “an empire in the making . . . the ultimate bureaucracy”, founded on “humbug”; inherently protectionist, intrinsically corrupt, essentially undemocratic, and dedicated to the destruction of nation states. “It is in fact a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure.” That being so, she now called, as she had never done so explicitly before, for a fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s membership, and if that failed — as it was bound to do— for Britain to be ready to leave the union and join the North American Free Trade Area instead, turning its back on the whole disastrous folly.

When Statecraft was serialized in the Times of London in 2003, the reaction of the political and media establishments was sulphurous. Campbell again:

This time the consensus was clear, right across the political spectrum, that she had finally lost touch with reality. Her reading of history was denounced as blinkered nonsense; the option of renegotiation was dismissed as fantasy; the idea of withdrawal as simply impractical. In the Commons, Tony Blair challenged Iain Duncan Smith to disown her views. “To talk about withdrawal and rule out the single currency whatever the circumstances is not an act of patriotism. It is an act of folly.”

Duncan Smith refused to disown her, as Campbell points out, but practically every other prominent Tory, respectable person, and important organization did so in extravagant terms — small-minded, xenophobic, Little Englander, etc., etc. It was made clear that Britain’s membership in the EU was an unchangeable reality of Britain’s future, support for it an establishment orthodoxy, and opposition to it an eccentricity at best. Since she was leaving public life on medical advice, she was no longer available to defend her own views. Only a handful of political allies came to her defence, and they were duly caricatured as the awkward squad, losers, fruitcakes, loonies, and so on. It seemed with the emergence of David Cameron and the self-styled modernizers to lead the Tory party two years later that Euro-skepticism was dead and would shortly be buried along with Mrs. Thatcher when her funeral took place as it did in 2013.

It was in the atmosphere of 2013 that obituarists attempting to sum up her career usually concluded that “Europe” was the main issue where she had been wrong-footed by history. Those who sympathized with her on the question, as I did, tended to argue it was too early for such a confident verdict. We advanced such tentative arguments as she was “either behind history or ahead of her party.”

Today it looks as if she was ahead of both. How did that happen? And what conclusions should we draw?

One reason is that Mrs. Thatcher always had much more support from the general population on Europe than from the political and other elites. Opinion polls from the 1970s to this year always showed that a large segment of the British population supported the U.K.’s withdrawal from the EU. This support fluctuated, only occasionally becoming a majority, but it never dipped much or for long to below 30 percent. The Euro-skeptics were treated by the media as a niche minority — which probably depressed their numbers more than fairer coverage might have done. But when the referendum rules forced the media to give Euro-skepticism fairer coverage, the Leave camp became a popular majority in less than four months. And Thatcher was an important symbol for it.

That was even truer for the Tory party than for the electorate at large. Euro-skepticism had always been the opinion of most Tories in and out of Parliament. Their leadership, on the other hand, was mainly Europhile. As a result, successive Tory leaders had to conceal from the rank and file their degree of commitment to the “European idea.” Their rhetoric was always more Euro-skeptic than their policies and intentions. Thatcher had been an exception; it was one reason she had been popular with the party faithful and why the post-Thatcher leadership had either to crush her opposition or to recruit her memory. Now, the referendum stretched Tory loyalty to David Cameron and the Europhile cabinet majority to the breaking point and beyond. Again, she was an obvious symbol — and beneficiary — of this peasants’ revolt.

Much the most important reason for the revival of Thatcher’s reputation, however, is that she increasingly proved to be right. Read the list of her criticisms of the European Union listed by Campbell above. Fundamentally unreformable? Check. All its reforms so far are attempts to consolidate its founding errors. An empire in the making . . . the ultimate bureaucracy? Check. The European Commission, an appointed bureaucracy, enjoys a monopoly power of initiating legislation, and the decisions of the EU’s courts are as binding on national governments as any Viceroy’s. Founded on “humbug”? Well, if humbug means false claims of superior virtue sustained by lies and trickery (such as recycling the European Constitution rejected in referendums as the Lisbon Treaty not subject to one), that’s almost a textbook description. [I]nherently protectionist, intrinsically corrupt, essentially undemocratic? Check, check, check. Dedicated to the destruction of nation states? That’s actually on the packet along with endorsements from numerous Euro-crats, most recently Jean-Claude Juncker. A classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure? Well, I suppose one would have to concede that the destiny of the EU is not yet fully worked out.

But the Euro and refugee crises — both resulting directly from two of the EU’s fundamental institutions, both embarked upon for largely theoretical reasons, both threatening the welfare of millions of ordinary Europeans, both stretching the loyalty of EU governments to Brussels, both posing existential threats to the EU and indeed to Europe itself, yet both seemingly endless and “unreformable” — certainly have the smell of Utopia and the Faculty Lounge about them. Both these crises, moreover, arose half a decade after Mrs. Thatcher’s criticisms of the institutions and policies that produced them. In addition to being a shrewd critic of the EU, therefore, she also counts as a highly prescient seer.

Compare that record with those of her most trenchant pro-EU critics, notably Tony Blair cited above. Blair not only advocated British membership in the EU’s single currency, the euro, when it was still a proposal, but he continues to argue for it now that it is visibly wreaking havoc across Europe. He also promised to reform the Common Agricultural Policy when he was the revolving EU president, surrendering part of the Thatcher financial rebate to win this “reform,” and he got almost nothing in return: The CAP still gets 40 percent of the EU budget. “Act of folly” does not seem a sufficiently harsh description of such blindly optimistic stupidity and failure.

Disappointed “Remainers” currently comforting themselves that the clever people voted to stay in the EU and that it was mainly “uneducated” people who opted to regain Britain’s independence should perhaps reflect on the relative reputations of Thatcher and Blair today — and on the reputations of Blair’s heirs in the modernizing wing of the Tory Party. It’s now clear that they got Britain wrong and Thatcher got her country right. What is more important, however, is that she got the EU right, too—indeed, she got Britain right because she got the EU right. She recognized that the pragmatic British would never feel comfortable inside its centralized bureaucratic structures with its over-regulation, grandiose ambitions, and lack of democracy—and that these failings would get worse and more intrusive over time. It got worse and the Brits voted Out.

Brexit repairs the largest single hole in her reputation — and tears several holes in the reputations of her rivals in all parties. Today the question is not “Why did she get it right?” but “Why did all of them get it so wrong?”

Postscript: In view of my praise for the arguments of Statecraft, maybe I should make clear that I had no hand at all in its composition. It was written by the team of Mrs. Thatcher, Robin Harris (her longtime adviser and the biographer of Talleyrand as well as of Mrs. T — the yin and yang of diplomacy, you might say), and Nile Gardiner (their researcher and now director of the Thatcher Institute for Liberty at the Heritage Foundation). My part was solely that Robin and I took Lady Thatcher to lunch in order to persuade her to write it.

As we settled down in the restaurant to read the menu, Robin leant toward Lady T and said quietly: “Don’t look up, but Mr. Heath is just two tables down from us.”

She waited a moment or two, then leant forward in the former prime minister’s direction, smiled, and waved. He nodded back, and we all turned to ordering, discussing the Statecraft project. Lady T, however, said that we must stop by Ted’s table and say hello to her great rival when we left. We agreed.

At the table between Ted and us, within easy earshot of both, were two smart well-dressed ladies of about Lady T’s age minus about five years. They got up to leave while we were still at the coffee stage, walked past our table, paused, and then did that little hesitation waltz that all celebrities must learn to fear. It conveys “should we/shouldn’t we,” and it continued for a moment as the ladies slowly turned pink in the face. Then one stepped forward and said in a pleasant soft Northern English accent: “Lady Thatcher, we apologize for disturbing your lunch, but we’ll do so only for a moment. We just wanted to thank you for saving our country.”

“That’s right,” said the other lady. “Before you, we were on the road to ruin.”

“How very kind of you,” responded Lady T. “Please join our table for a coffee.”

“No,” they replied. “We said we wouldn’t and we won’t. But thank you.”

They were as good as their word and left. Lady T said: “Well, wasn’t that nice of them. But we should leave, too. Let’s stop by and say hello to Ted.”

Ted too had been finishing his coffee only a moment before.

But Ted had gone.

After that, it wasn’t hard to persuade Lady T to write Statecraft.

The Lone-Wolf Canard

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, October 25, 2014

In Modern Times, his sweeping history of the 20th century, Paul Johnson recounts how Einstein’s theory of relativity, a strictly scientific principle, was contorted into relativism, a loopy social phenomenon, through a permanent campaign of serpentine rhetoric. It is, as Roger Kimball explains in The Fortunes of Permanence, a classic example of how a sensible concept or term of art that helps us grasp some narrow aspect of reality can end up distorting reality when ripped from its moorings and broadly applied.

Another good example is “lone wolf.”

Since Thursday afternoon, newscasters have incessantly told us that the late and unlamented Zale Thompson was a “lone wolf.” Thompson was the 32-year-old Muslim from Queens who attacked four New York City police officers with a hatchet on Thursday, breaking one’s arm and critically wounding another with a gash to the head.

Reading off the familiar script, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton insisted that “nothing we know at this time would indicate” a connection to terrorism. This, despite Thompson’s Facebook page on which he portrayed himself as a mujahed warrior superimposed on Koranic verses and called for “guerilla warfare” against the United States. Evidently, it is just one of those “violent extremism” coincidences that this “lone wolf” strike — translation: non-terrorist strike — occurred soon after the Islamic State urged Muslims in the West to “attack the soldiers of the tyrants and their police force.”

In addition to Americans, Europeans, and Australians, the Islamic State lists the “infidels” of Canada among its enemy “tyrants.” Thompson’s “lone wolf” jihad followed hard upon two separate “lone wolf” attacks in Canada this week. First, Martin Couture-Rouleau plowed a car into two soldiers, killing Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent. Then, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot Corporal Nathan Cirillo to death at the National War Memorial in Ottawa before spraying bullets inside Parliament (but fortunately killing no one else). Each “lone wolf” was killed in the aftermath, and each was reportedly a “recent convert to Islam.”

These latest atrocities follow last month’s decapitation of a woman at an Oklahoma food-distribution center by Alton Nolen, another “recent convert to Islam” whose Facebook page was a shrine to Osama bin Laden and the Islamic State. At the time, Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro noted that the Oklahoma attack was the latest of seven in the last few years by Muslim men acting alone. The count rises to eight if one accepts the Obama administration’s “workplace violence” rendition of the Fort Hood massacre, to wit: jihadist Nidal Hassan was a “lone wolf” — and therefore somehow not a terrorist — despite both his motive to prevent the U.S. soldiers he killed from fighting Taliban terrorists and his string of pre-massacre consultations with al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki (the imam who had ministered to the wolf-pack known as the 9/11 suicide-hijackers). At any rate, there are now so many “lone” jihadists we should probably start saying “clone wolf” instead.

So rote have the airbrushed news accounts of these incidents become that we could recite them in our sleep — which is exactly the condition those who write them hope to leave us in. We are to believe it is beside the point that the assailants happen to be Muslims. Sure, some may have been “inspired” by the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, but journalists, taking their cues from government officials, stress that the murderers lack “operational” ties to any recognized terrorist organization. So, presto, each is sloughed off as a “lone wolf.” 

That once useful term of art is now used to convey two carefully crafted, politically correct narratives. For government officials and investigators, the “lone wolf” label has come to mean the atrocity in question cannot be categorized as “terrorism,” no matter how many “Allahu Akbars!” are shouted as bullets fly, bombs blast, or heads roll. For the commentariat, “lone wolf” signifies that the Muslim in question — whether a lifer or a “recent convert” — has “self-radicalized,” spontaneously becoming a wanton, irrational killer.

These two story lines transparently suggest that the government has quelled al-Qaeda and that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. Though President Obama frequently makes both claims, they are delusional.

“Lone wolf” is actually a surveillance-law concept that signifies the antithesis of the government’s newfangled “no terrorism here” usage. Moreover, the term is utterly useless to our understanding of how, and by what, Muslims are “radicalized.”

The “lone wolf” concept goes back to the alarm that gripped the nation right after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. That alarm was heightened by the discovery that incompetent surveillance practices prevented the government from interrupting the plot. So after 9/11, national-security surveillance law was overhauled.

Unlike ordinary criminal investigations, which focus on penal law offenses, national-security investigations target agents of “foreign powers.” Legally, an international terrorist organization qualifies as a foreign power. So if investigators can show a person is tied to an outfit like al-Qaeda, they can get court permission to eavesdrop on him.

As a practical matter, though, many terrorism investigations do not unfold that way. Sometimes, investigators develop evidence that someone is preparing to conduct terrorist activity (e.g., he buys explosive components, he cases a bridge) before they can figure out whether he is connected to a known terrorist organization. Since involvement by a foreign power was the necessary predicate for national-security surveillance, the government’s inability to establish al-Qaeda’s role in the plot would result in the denial of authority to eavesdrop on the apparent terrorist — even though he might be on the verge of striking.

To prevent such a critical intelligence gap, Congress enacted “lone wolf” surveillance authority as part of the PATRIOT Act (see here, pp. 5–6). Significantly, the statute makes precisely the opposite assumption that government officials now make when they label someone a “lone wolf.” The law says that if a person is engaged in what appears to be terrorist activity, the involvement of a foreign terrorist organization should be presumed and need not be established. So as conceived and codified, the lone-wolf designation means the government should regard a suspect as a terrorist, not strain against all evidence and logic to regard him as a non-terrorist. 

Under the federal statutory definition, “international terrorism” happens when a person engages in activity intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population; influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.” If a person’s actions fit this definition, that is terrorism. That he may not have sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State is immaterial . . . and the fact that he is a Muslim is not a reason to look the other way.

Even more skewed than its invocation in the terrorism context is the use of “lone wolf” to explain how Muslims become “radicalized” — and, more specifically, its use to peddle the trendy nonsense that because he has acted alone, the Muslim in question must have “self-radicalized.”

No one self-radicalizes. Terrorists are radicalized by a scripturally based doctrine. They terrorize because the doctrine instructs them to do so. In sura 8:12, for example, Allah instructs Muslims that he will use them to “instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers” by having them “smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them.” In sura 9:29, Muslims are told to

    Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the People of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians] until they pay the jizya  with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. [ACM: The jizya is the tax charged non-Muslims for the privilege of living in an Islamic state.]

We could go on at great length because there are many such verses, elaborated on with even greater ferocity in collections of the prophet’s words and deeds, which also have scriptural standing. It should by now go without saying that there are ways of interpreting Islam that seek to nullify its palpable bellicosity, and millions of Muslims do just that. But there are also millions who do not. The latter are not a fringe; as recently observed by Ayad Jamal al-Din, the Iraqi intellectual and Shiite cleric, their repressive sharia supremacism represents a mainstream construction of Islam, backed by 14 centuries of tradition and scholarship.

A Muslim does not wake up one day and spontaneously decide to commit mass-murder. No one is radicalized out of thin air. Muslims are radicalized by the doctrine. To be sure, there is often an intermediary between the doctrine and the person who becomes a terrorist — it might be a terrorist organization in the field or an extremist imam in the mosque. But it could also very well be the jihadist literature a person reads while alone in his room. Such literature is liberally available on the Internet and in countless American mosques and Islamic community centers. It is a staple of Muslim Brotherhood indoctrination efforts, and the Saudi regime — to take the most notorious example — has spent billions of dollars propagating it worldwide.

New York, Ottawa, Quebec, Oklahoma, Fort Hood . . . The “lone wolf” canard no longer conceals the harsh reality: The violence in “violent extremism” is terrorism even if performed alone; and what the “wolf” is “extreme” about is Islam.