Margaret Thatcher remembered: highlights from around the web

Quotes from some the best of what’s been written about Thatcher in the last few days…

“…while Mrs Thatcher was fighting her lone battle against the prospective single currency abroad, she was being fatally undermined at home. Geoffrey Howe, her bitterest cabinet critic, went on television to tell the interviewer Brian Walden that in principle Britain did not oppose the euro.

In her Commons statement after returning home, she was forced to slap Howe down: “this government believes in the pound sterling.” Howe resigned, and days later delivered the famous speech from the back benches that set in motion a leadership contest.

Today, Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, first published in 1993, reads like a prophecy. It shows how deeply and with what extraordinary wisdom she had examined Delors’ proposals for the single currency. Her overriding objection was not ill-considered or xenophobic, as subsequent critics have repeatedly claimed.

They were economic. Right back in 1990, Mrs Thatcher foresaw with painful clarity the devastation it was bound to cause. Her autobiography records how she warned John Major, her euro-friendly chancellor of the exchequer, that the single currency could not accommodate both industrial powerhouses such as Germany and smaller countries such as Greece. Germany, forecast Thatcher, would be phobic about inflation, while the euro would prove fatal to the poorer countries because it would “devastate their inefficient economies”.

It is as if, all those years ago, the British prime minister possessed a crystal ball that enabled her to foresee the catastrophic events of the past year or so in Ireland, Greece and Portugal. Indeed, it is one of the tragedies of European history that the world chose not to believe her. President Mitterrand of France and Chancellor Kohl of Germany dismissed her words of caution. And when Mrs Thatcher was driven from office in 1990, a crucial voice was lost, and a new consensus started to form in Britain in favour of the euro.

This consensus stretched across the entire spectrum of the British establishment…”

And my favorite bit from this article:

“Yesterday, I tried to reach the leading politicians who tried so hard 10 years ago to abolish the pound – Heseltine, Leon Brittan, Mandelson, Neil Kinnock, Charlie Kennedy. I wanted to ask them whether they stood by their extravagant warnings. I wanted to ask them for an apology. Not one of them came back.”

More via Telegraph Blogs

Thatcher in her own words. Socialism smackdown.

From NRO.com, The Corner

 Kevin D. Williamson

“…she seemed to be having so much fun. That, I think, is what they never forgave her for. Thatcher laughed at them, mocked them, outwitted and out-debated them. That infuriated the Left: Conservatives aren’t supposed to mock, they are supposed to be mocked. They might be allowed to win a few elections, but they could never be allowed to win the argument, much less to scoff at liberals’ public pieties.

Thatcher won, in no small part because she was her own best case. Her confidence, prudence, good humor, and other virtues were those she sought to encourage in her fellow countrymen.

In that sense, we should be grateful to the odious likes of Ted Rall and Donna Brazile. As the treacly and insincere tributes from the likes of Barack Obama roll in, we should remember: They hated Margaret Thatcher. Hated her. Reviled her. Hated everything she stood for. Still do. So I do not really want to hear any tributes to her from the left side of the political aisle today. If you were not around at the time, it will be hard for you to appreciate the vulgarity and the cruelty of the attacks to which she was subjected. They hated her for the same reason they hated Reagan: She aimed to defeat socialism abroad and socialism at home, appreciating the structural continuity between domestic socialism and the idea’s full expression under the Soviets.

As we celebrate the remarkable life of Margaret Thatcher, it is fitting that we remember the most important aspect of it: She won, and she deserved to win. Those who opposed her and reviled her were on the wrong side of the most important question of their age, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with tyrants, many of them as guilty as those who manned the gulag watchtowers. And even today, when they make their pilgrimages to sit at the feet of Castro or bury Chávez, when they put leftist terrorists on their payrolls, they know: They lost. What they do not know, because they are incapable of understanding the fact, is that they deserved to lose. We should not allow them to pretend that they were on the right side all along…”

 

And from Jonah Goldberg

“…Buckley rightly identified the importance of Thatcher’s victory. “For over a generation we have been assaulted — castrated is probably closer to the right word — by the notion that socialism is the wave of the future.” The arguments between the major parties in the West had almost invariably been disagreements over the pace of descent into one or another flavor of statism. It “has always been possible for the leftward party to say about the rightward party that its platform is roughly identical to the platform of the leftward party one or two elections back.”

This was certainly true in the U.S., though Buckley may have overstated things when he wrote that “Roosevelt would have considered the Republican Party platform of Richard Nixon as radical beyond the dreams of his brain-trusters.”

What’s indisputable, however, is that the Tories and the Republicans alike suffered from an excess of “me-tooism.” From Thomas Dewey through Gerald Ford — minus Barry Goldwater’s staggering (and staggeringly influential) defeat — Republicans put forward leaders who promised to do what liberals were doing, but in a more responsible way. The pattern was even worse in Britain, which had thrown out Winston Churchill, at least partly, for wanting to trim back the welfare state.

For decades, conservatism failed to offer an alternative. This was why economist Friedrich Hayek said he couldn’t call himself a conservative. It has, he wrote, “invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.”

One reason for this tendency is that in democracies, politicians usually can’t withstand the short-term backlash that comes with meaningful long-term free-market reforms. Thatcher was expected to follow the pattern. When it became clear that Thatcher intended to actually practice what she’d been preaching, the press demanded she make a U-turn. She didn’t. She explained in a defining speech in 1980, “The lady’s not for turning.” She had promised voters, to borrow a phrase from Barry Goldwater, “a choice, not an echo.” She delivered on it, and Britain is immeasurably better for it.

It’s worth remembering that Thatcher did not destroy the British equivalent of what Americans call liberalism. She destroyed socialism, which was a thriving concern — at least intellectually — in Britain. When Labour decided to get serious about winning elections again, Tony Blair had to repudiate the party’s century-long support for doctrinaire socialism and embrace the market. Soon, Bill Clinton followed suit, bending his party to Reagan’s legacy. Suddenly, liberals were playing the “me-too” game.

That’s one reason the Left still hates her and Reagan so much. Thatcher and Reagan didn’t just force change on their societies, they forced change on their enemies, proving that the wave of the future is not so inevitable after all…”

via NRO.com