effusions of snobbery among Britainâs elites. When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theater producer Jonathan Millar replied that it was âself-evidentââthey were nauseated by her âodious suburban gentility.â The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcherâs âneat well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way thatâs not exactly vulgar, just low,â embodying âthe worst of the lower-middle-class.â This filled Warnock with âa kind of rage.â (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)
THESE ARE STILL EARLY DAYS THOUGH . . . THE ODDS ARE AGAINST HER, BUT AFTER HER STUNNING ORGANIZATIONAL COUP DâÃTAT THIS PAST MONTH, FEW ARE PREPARED TO SAY SHE CANâT DO IT. 20
Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, succeeded by the new leader of the Labour Party, James Callaghan. As leader of the Opposition, Thatcher immediately began to attract international notice, particularly for her coruscating attack on the Soviet Union, delivered at the Kensington Town Hall:
The Russians are bent on world dominance and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen . . . They put guns before butter while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one senseâthe military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms . . . If we cannot draw the lesson . . . then we are destined, in their words, to end up on the scrap heap of history. 21
This speech led the state-controlled Soviet press to give her the name by which she has since been known: the Iron Lady. It tells you something about the way Britain was perceived at the time that the communist apparatchiks who coined this phrase presumably believed this would be understood in Britain as a hurtful insult, one that would damage her prestige, not enhance it. It also suggests how divorced those apparatchiks were from the sentiments of their own citizens, many of whom from then on worshipped her as primitive man worshipped the sun.
Like the rest of the industrialized world, Britain endured throughout the 1970s the reverberating effects of the 1973 oil price shock. Inflation soared, reaching a peak of 27 percent in 1975. If real wages were diminishing, Britainâs labor leaders concluded, this was more than a hardship for the working man, it was an injustice perpetrated against him by the ruling classes. The remedy, they concluded, was workersâ solidarity and the blunt weapon of industrial action. Labor leaders of greater wisdom, or at least ones in possession of a more sophisticated economic model, might have concluded that strikes and work stoppages were the last thing Britain now needed, and indeed the one thing guaranteed to deal a death blow to an already faltering economy. Wisdom was not their forte.
During the Winter of Discontent, the question raised by Heathâ Who rules? âhung over Britain like a cold cloud. That question was understood to be the question, and it was a question to which Britainâs powerful unions had a ready answer: We do. They had, after all, with contemptuous ease brought down the Heath government. The labor barons were persuaded that although they would never lead Britain, it was within their power to run it, and they proposed to run it for their benefit, embedding in both law and custom practices that everyone beyond the union halls could see would in the end destroy Britain as a competitive economic power.
When the 1979 general election brought the Conservatives back to power, there was no widespread expectation that Thatcher could change this situation, and there has been no attempt retrospectively to suggest that there was. Her election, according to her friends and enemies alike, was not personal: It was a rebuke to the Labour Party and the embarrassing diminishment of Britain over which it had presided.
BI: She won by a contempt,
THESE ARE STILL EARLY DAYS THOUGH . . . THE ODDS ARE AGAINST HER, BUT AFTER HER STUNNING ORGANIZATIONAL COUP DâÃTAT THIS PAST MONTH, FEW ARE PREPARED TO SAY SHE CANâT DO IT. 20
Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, succeeded by the new leader of the Labour Party, James Callaghan. As leader of the Opposition, Thatcher immediately began to attract international notice, particularly for her coruscating attack on the Soviet Union, delivered at the Kensington Town Hall:
The Russians are bent on world dominance and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen . . . They put guns before butter while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one senseâthe military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms . . . If we cannot draw the lesson . . . then we are destined, in their words, to end up on the scrap heap of history. 21
This speech led the state-controlled Soviet press to give her the name by which she has since been known: the Iron Lady. It tells you something about the way Britain was perceived at the time that the communist apparatchiks who coined this phrase presumably believed this would be understood in Britain as a hurtful insult, one that would damage her prestige, not enhance it. It also suggests how divorced those apparatchiks were from the sentiments of their own citizens, many of whom from then on worshipped her as primitive man worshipped the sun.
Like the rest of the industrialized world, Britain endured throughout the 1970s the reverberating effects of the 1973 oil price shock. Inflation soared, reaching a peak of 27 percent in 1975. If real wages were diminishing, Britainâs labor leaders concluded, this was more than a hardship for the working man, it was an injustice perpetrated against him by the ruling classes. The remedy, they concluded, was workersâ solidarity and the blunt weapon of industrial action. Labor leaders of greater wisdom, or at least ones in possession of a more sophisticated economic model, might have concluded that strikes and work stoppages were the last thing Britain now needed, and indeed the one thing guaranteed to deal a death blow to an already faltering economy. Wisdom was not their forte.
During the Winter of Discontent, the question raised by Heathâ Who rules? âhung over Britain like a cold cloud. That question was understood to be the question, and it was a question to which Britainâs powerful unions had a ready answer: We do. They had, after all, with contemptuous ease brought down the Heath government. The labor barons were persuaded that although they would never lead Britain, it was within their power to run it, and they proposed to run it for their benefit, embedding in both law and custom practices that everyone beyond the union halls could see would in the end destroy Britain as a competitive economic power.
When the 1979 general election brought the Conservatives back to power, there was no widespread expectation that Thatcher could change this situation, and there has been no attempt retrospectively to suggest that there was. Her election, according to her friends and enemies alike, was not personal: It was a rebuke to the Labour Party and the embarrassing diminishment of Britain over which it had presided.
BI: She won by a contempt,
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