Column

Blair, Brown, Major. In 100 years they will be long forgotten. But the world will still be in awe of the grocer's daughter from Grantham
More than 30 years after she walked into Downing Street as Britain’s first woman premier, Margaret Thatcher still dominates British politics.
And with the film The Iron Lady on general release and Meryl Streep tipped to win an Oscar for her uncanny impersonation, even those too young to remember Mrs Thatcher now have a chance to discover what the fuss was about.
In many ways, though, the remarkable thing is that the film was made at all. Movies about British prime ministers are hardly ten-a-penny, and the prospect of Hollywood shooting one about Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson or John Major is about as likely as the euro making a spectacular recovery.
Even her great contemporaries, such as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, have not been celebrated on celluloid. Reagan may once have been a film star, but hell would freeze over before liberal Hollywood turned him into a hero for the 21st century.
The truth is that more than two decades after she left office, Margaret Thatcher casts a greater shadow than almost any Western politician since World War II. More than any of her rivals, she has become an icon, a cultural and political symbol, loved and loathed in equal measure.
For a quarter of a century, she dominated life in Britain. And although we might be facing very different challenges from those she confronted in the Eighties, there is still much we can learn from the most important political leader since Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.
In many respects — from the revolution in home-ownership to the power of the supercharged City of London, from the rise of women in boardrooms to the intractable problems of the inner cities — we still live in the world Margaret Thatcher made.
And the fact that no one would dream of saying the same of her predecessors Heath and Wilson, or her successors Major, Blair and Brown, speaks volumes about her extraordinary influence.
Critics of the film have remarked that it skates over the politics of the Eighties and devotes too much time to Mrs Thatcher’s personal journey from the Grantham grocer’s shop to the Downing Street front door.
Yet the emphasis on the Iron Lady’s personality is entirely fitting. Far more than any other modern politician, she was the very incarnation of the values she brought to the parliamentary arena.
As a middle-class woman fighting her way through a world dominated by upper-class men, Margaret Thatcher had to overcome obstacles far greater than any faced by today’s politicians.
Confronted at every turn by sexism and snobbery, she became the embodiment of grit, drive and determination.
Her background could hardly have been more different from the gilded childhood enjoyed by today’s privileged leaders. Born to Grantham grocer Alfred Roberts, in 1925, the young Margaret Roberts grew up above the shop, steeped in the values of thrift, hard work and good housekeeping.
This was little changed later by gaining power. In 1981, as documents released by the National Archives last week show, she was astonished by civil servants’ plans to spend £2,000 refurbishing Downing Street.
Thrifty as ever, she even insisted on paying £19 for her own ironing board. Compare that with the £680,000 of taxpayers’ money that David Cameron has spent renovating Downing Street!
What this reflected was her sober Methodist faith. As a child, she sometimes went to church three or four times on Sundays, and her political creed owed much to her Christian upbringing. ‘We were Methodists,’ she said later, ‘and Methodism means method.’
Unlike Old Etonians such as Mr Cameron or Boris Johnson, she went to her local grammar school before winning a place at Oxford. But hers was not the Oxford of champagne socialists or Bullingdon Club tearaways; she poured her energies into her work.
And in contrast to the likes of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, who were parachuted into the Cabinet after just a few years as special advisers, she faced a long road to the top. Although she left university in 1947, it took her 12 years to get into Parliament.
The truth was that in the Fifties, many Conservative MPs still thought a woman’s place was in the home. As Mrs Thatcher herself told a friend, many Tory Associations were full of ‘anti-woman prejudice’.
‘There will not be a woman prime minister in my lifetime,’ she told her local paper in 1970, after she had got into Ted Heath’s Cabinet. ‘The male population is too prejudiced.’
Looking back, it is easy to be shocked by the way Mrs Thatcher’s colleagues treated her. Her civil servants mocked her as a ‘narrow-minded nanny’, while Heath’s Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, called her ‘that bloody woman, who never listened’.
Even Heath himself used to drum irritably on his blotter while she was talking in Cabinet — and on more than one occasion, humiliated her by telling her to shut up. But she was to have the last laugh.
In 1974, amid the turmoil of an energy crisis, a miners’ strike and the three-day week, the voters kicked Heath out of Downing Street, exasperated by his failure to bring down inflation and his inability to control the unions. This was Margaret Thatcher’s chance. And while other senior Tories dithered, she seized it with both hands.
Here was the most extraordinary example of political courage in recent history. Almost everybody thought Mrs Thatcher was bound to lose: even a Tory columnist thought that she was ‘totally out of touch with anybody but carefully corseted, middle-class, middle-aged ladies’.
To the grouse-moor aristocrats at the top of the party, the prospect of an ordinary middle-class woman becoming leader seemed unthinkable.
Even one of her heroes, Right-wing maverick Enoch Powell, dismissed her chances, remarking that the Conservatives ‘wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent’.
Yet Mrs Thatcher’s ordinary background stood her in good stead. At a time when the balance within the Tory Party was shifting — from estate owners to estate agents, as one wag remarked — her middle-class values were a positive advantage. ‘My kind of Tory Party,’ she wrote, ‘would make no secret of its belief in individual freedom and individual prosperity, in the maintenance of law and order, in the wide distribution of private property, in rewards for energy, skill and thrift, in diversity of choice, in the preservation of local rights in local communities.’
Yet even after Mrs Thatcher had become Tory leader in February 1975, snobs continued to sneer.
And the Left-wing media were often astonishingly sexist. One paper called her ‘Mike Yarwood in drag’, while the playwright and TV critic Dennis Potter wrote that with her ‘small pawing gestures’ and ‘glossy head tilted at a rather too carefully alert angle’, she reminded him of ‘everyone’s favourite celluloid bitch, Lassie’.
Once again, though, she had the last laugh. In 1979, after the unions had revolted against Jim Callaghan’s Labour government in the notorious Winter of Discontent, the people decided it was time to give a woman a chance.
Crucially, Mrs Thatcher shared the ambitions of millions of ordinary people who had never voted Conservative before.
What she offered, she said, was an approach ‘borne out by the development in my own life, going to an ordinary state school, having no privileges except perhaps the ones which count most, a good home background with parents who are very interested in their children and interested in getting on.’
Those were values Labour voters could share. Indeed, in 1979 Mrs Thatcher won almost half the votes of Britain’s skilled manual workers and one in three union votes — an achievement beyond any of her privileged Tory successors.
What followed was the most colourful, dramatic and turbulent premiership in our modern history.
Her successes are well known. By standing up to the brutal Argentine junta in the Falklands War, she banished talk of the Sick Man of Europe and rekindled national pride after years of humiliation.
By taming the militant unions, she put an end to Continental sneers about the ‘British disease’.
By opening up the City of London, she ensured that our nation’s capital would become the world’s greatest financial powerhouse.
And by encouraging ordinary people to buy their own council houses, own stocks and shares and aspire to run their own businesses, she began to realise the long-standing Tory dream of a property-owning democracy.
All this did not come, though, without a cost.
For millions of people, especially in the ailing industrial North, the Eighties were desperately difficult years, with businesses heading to the wall and queues mounting outside the nation’s jobcentres.
To the Left, Mrs Thatcher became a convenient scapegoat. But the truth is that thanks to a toxic combination of complacency, mismanagement and industrial unrest, manufacturing had been dying for years; all she did was to turn off the life-support machine.
Only a fool thinks that any government is all good or all bad, and, of course, Mrs Thatcher made her fair share of mistakes. Sometimes her government seemed too keen to write off British manufacturers, too devoted to the interests of the rich and too indifferent to the plight of millions of people struggling to find jobs.
All the same, there can be little doubt that Mrs Thatcher left Britain in a better state than she found it. Who among us, after all, would want to return to the days when factories were disrupted by endless strikes and when our cities were sinking beneath a tide of festering bin-bags?
For today’s politicians, the Iron Lady’s career offers compelling lessons. David Cameron might well learn from her courage, consistency and appeal to the common man — but his gilt-edged background means he will probably never understand the anxieties of the squeezed middle, as she so obviously did.
Even Ed Miliband might draw inspiration from her leadership in the wilderness of opposition, when, under ferocious fire from her media critics, Mrs Thatcher rallied her party behind a clear, coherent message that appealed to vast swathes of the British electorate.
And politicians of all parties should learn from her determination to take on vested interests and tackle the thorniest issues.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, David Cameron laughed off suggestions that one day he might be portrayed on film by Michael Sheen, who won acclaim for playing Tony Blair, or Malcolm McDowell, who famously played the public-school bully Flashman.
In reality, the prospect of Mr Cameron becoming the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster is very unlikely, while the notion of Mr Miliband as the subject of a biopic is so implausible as to be laughable. In an age of bland, homogenous, privileged politicians, their every utterance drafted by spin doctors and focus groups, we will probably never see another Margaret Thatcher.
The truth is that whatever you think of her politics, there is no denying that she deserves a place in the tiny pantheon of truly influential and effective British leaders. For my money, she ranks alongside the Roundhead leader Oliver Cromwell and the Victorian statesman William Gladstone as the greatest commoners in our history.
All three were enormously controversial, often deeply unpopular and sometimes hated. Yet all three were deeply patriotic figures who fought against overwhelming odds for what they thought was right, guided by their faith, their sense of moral conviction and their sheer self-belief.
When she became Tory leader, few people dreamed that Margaret Thatcher would once be ranked in such company. Indeed, very few prime ministers live long in the memory.
Few people now remember Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan; soon, even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown will have receded into obscurity. But it is a safe bet that even 100 years from now, Margaret Thatcher’s countrymen will still be arguing about the grocer’s daughter from Grantham.
And that, in its way, is her greatest achievement.
By Dominic Sandbrook

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2083330/The-Iron-Lady-Well-awe-Margaret-Thatcher-years-Blair-Major-forgotten.html#ixzz1ioAJSky6
 

The leaders of France and Germany — those big bosses of Europe — announced yesterday that they are committed to redraw the continental treaty, what Chancellor Angela Merkel has called ‘a new phase in European integration’, as they fight to keep the euro as a stable currency.
It remains almost beyond belief that Mrs Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy should solemnly announce their assent to what is, in effect, a pact to agree that the Earth is flat.
But other European partners, including David Cameron, have expressed support, confronting us with the spectacle of almost the entire political leadership of the continent marching decisively towards a cliff edge.
Nobody dares to tell the truth to their electorates: that the governments of Europe are embracing policies which are both wildly anti-democratic and cannot work.
Merkel is willing to ask German tax- payers to bail out the euro, or at least its insolvent and struggling members, only if they agree to ironclad fiscal rules which remove almost all discretionary budgetary powers from national governments, and commit tens of millions of people to years of austerity.
Such a plan might keep the eurozone afloat in the short-term, but it is almost impossible to see how it provides a sustainable solution.
The truth is that the European financial crisis has laid bare the fact that Greece, together probably with Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy, are inherently unsuited to living within the financial discipline the euro requires.
They are all more or less corrupt societies, Greece especially so. Indeed, George Papaconstantinou, until recently Greece’s finance minister, memorably observed that the first thing that a government does in an election year is to ‘pull the tax collectors off the streets’.
For generations, Greeks and Italians have lived according to standards entirely different from those in Germany or Britain: in southern Europe, only stupid people pay taxes, and the law is an infinitely flexible instrument.
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s repeatedly re-elected Prime Minister, was by our values little short of a gangster. Greek governments have for years displayed consistency only in their reckless irresponsibility and unfitness for power.
Absurd
Does anyone believe that these nations can change?
Of course, their governments will agree to anything to squeeze cheques out of Germany. But it seems absurd to suppose they will stick to the new rules for longer than five minutes, any more than they would give up drink.
For the supposed Merkel-Sarkozy rescue plan to work, Germany would need to govern the southern European states as colonies, with her own financial pro-consuls in every treasury, her own monitoring officers in every government department.
As it is, and because German hegemony is utterly unacceptable for historical reasons, an equally bad outcome is proposed: power to check the books and crack the whip will be vested undemocratically in Brussels.
The European Commission and European Central Bank will have extraordinary new responsibility and authority, a million miles beyond the scrutiny or veto of humble voters.
The former British MP and distinguished political historian David Marquand has written: ‘At the heart of the European project lay an unchallenged but pervasive ambivalence about politics. In transcending the nation states, the founding fathers were also seeking to transcend — or rather to escape from — the messy, vulgar, clamorous conventionalities of political life.’
While this has been true for decades, now the leaders of Europe plan to make it much worse. They propose new rules that nobody really believes can sustain the eurozone in its present form, and which will also cripple European democracy. Indeed, it should be a hanging offence for all Europe’s leaders to continue to deceive their peoples about the viability of the eurozone.
Meanwhile, though, David Cameron seems likely to acquiesce in the proposed European treaty changes — which will require the assent of non-eurozone members — without seizing the opportunity to insist on changes in Britain’s relationship with Europe.
Why? Because he does not want to incur obloquy as the man who blocked measures which we are told are ‘indispensable to save the euro and avert financial catastrophe’.
Pressure
In the weeks and months ahead, Cameron will be under enormous pressure — not least from his Lib Dem coalition partners — to agree to almost anything the Germans and French cook up rather than then seek to use the opportunity to renegotiate Britain’s position in the EU.
But most of the British people would say that it is overdue for this country to wrest back some national advantage from Europe.
In the meantime, this crisis has exposed the simple fact that the weaker economies are inherently unsuited to share a common currency.
At the heart of much brainless thinking is the hope that we can somehow ring-fence our cosy, wildly over-entitled social model from the icy winds of Asian competitiveness. This is utter folly. To have a chance to compete with the Chinese, Indians and Koreans, we shall have to work harder, pay ourselves less, retire later, and accept major cuts in social benefits.
Scarcely any country in Europe yet accepts such realities.
Most voters — the Irish honourably excluded — are busy dumping any government which tries to prescribe harsh medicine. Never having known real austerity or the need to accept hard choices, most voters recoil from them. Our leaders, knowing this, twist and turn in all directions rather than tell hard truths.
It might seem incredible that intelligent and experienced politicians should behave like this. But we have been here before.
I am currently researching a book on 1914, the year in which catastrophic conflict engulfed Europe. Today, I fear, we are witnessing the same phenomenon: rational statesmen are sleepwalking into courses which threaten if not our lives, at least our livelihoods.
I do not for a moment suggest that this European crisis will end in armed conflict. But it seems highly likely that it will precipitate economic miseries such as we have not experienced for many decades.
We cannot ignore the warnings of the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, who spoke of looming disaster as starkly as he did last week.
As for the euro flat-earthers, every clever economist whom I know agrees that the eurozone cannot survive without dropping its weaker members.
The idea of ‘fiscal union’ (common tax and spend policies within the eurozone) cannot work in practice, and is anyway repugnantly anti-democratic.
As for David Cameron, it is now plain that the success or failure of his premiership will be decided first by whether he can revive the British economy; and second by whether he can radically redefine this country’s relationship with Europe, liberating us from its worst social and anti-competitive burdens.
We are now in a continent-wide economic predicament of which no responsible pundit feels able to predict the outcome. The only thing that is clear is that all our leaders are lying to us — and worse, maybe also to themselves — about the credibility of the ‘rescue’ Chancellor Merkel proposes.
For his part, David Cameron is heading for huge trouble with the British public if he supposes that he can be party to any new treaty with Brussels without Britain securing new terms.
Dominate
Some lawyers say that it is constitutionally impossible for us to secure any unilateral new deal. However, common sense suggests this is rubbish.
When the whole European relationship is being recast, Britain must be allowed to make its own call.
It is plain that in future, Germany and France will dominate Europe even more than they have done in the past — with Berlin paying most of the bills for keeping the euro on life support, so it will call the shots.
Britain will be a marginal player, with small influence on key decisions. But David Cameron must never sign any new European document, in the name of the British people, which institutionalises our poodle-patsy status.
We are heading towards a high noon for Europe which few of us ever expected to witness in our lifetimes, and which the Prime Minister cannot resolve by tossing down his gun..
By Max Hastings
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2070419/Angela-Merkel-Nicolas-Sarkozy-Euro-liars-stop-deceiving--themselves.html#ixzz1g9PtzLxh
 

I could have saved a life today
but chose to look the other way.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care.
I had the time, and I was there
but I didn’t want to seem a fool
and argue over safety rules.

I knew he’d done the job before.
if I called it wrong, he might get sore.
The chances didn’t seem that bad.
(I’ve done the same. He knew I had.)

So I shook my head and walked on by.
He knew the risks as well as I.
He took the chance, I closed my eye
and with that act I let him die.

I could have saved a life that day
but chose to look the other way.

Now every time I see his wife
I know I should have saved his life.
I see his kids and feel so sad.
They cry at night. They’ve lost their Dad.

That guilt is something I must bear
but isn’t something you need share.
If you see a risk that others take,
that puts their health or life at stake ..

... The question asked, or things you say
could help them live another day.
If YOU see a risk and walk away,
then hope YOU never have to say

I could have saved a life today
but chose to look the other way.

(Borrowed from the AMEC Offshore Magazine)