Um filme sobre Margareth Tatcher: a Dama de Ferro

What Would The Iron Lady Do?

Charles Moore

The Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2011

By CHARLES MOORE

"The Iron Lady" is the name of the new film in which Meryl Streep stars as Margaret Thatcher. You have only to consider the title itself to understand the impact of the person portrayed. It helps explain why, in these hard times, she and her legacy arouse even more interest than they did in the boom era at the end of the 20th century.

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Associated Press

Mrs. Thatcher at a Conservative Party Conference in 1982.

First, the word "Lady." Mrs. Thatcher was the first and only woman ever to have led a major British political party, and remains so to this day. She was the first woman prime minister in the English-speaking world and the longest-serving British prime minister of either sex since universal suffrage.

Even in 2011, only one important Western country—Germany—is led by a woman. Whatever the sterling qualities of Chancellor Angela Merkel, one must judge it highly unlikely that she will be the subject of a major feature film 20 years after she retires. Mrs. Thatcher was, in effect, the one and only woman. That unique status still fascinates.

Photos: Margaret Thatcher, Pioneering Politician

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Associated Press

Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher arrives at Tory headquarters in London on May 4, 1979, on the threshold of power as Britain's first woman Prime Minister.

And this Lady was first called "Iron" not by her admirers but by her enemies. After becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Mrs. Thatcher opened a new, controversial front in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. She questioned the then fashionable idea of "detente." Soviet communism, she argued, should not be accommodated. It should be overcome—by repairing the defensive military strength of the NATO alliance and by holding out to the subjugated peoples of the Soviet bloc the promise of Western liberty.

Not many people in the West agreed with her at the time, except one Ronald Reagan, and he was just an ex-governor of California with a dream of running for president.

After Mrs. Thatcher had made a couple of stirring speeches on this theme, the Soviet Red Army newspaper Red Star christened her "The Iron Lady." In doing so, it intended to make a satirical comparison with Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century "Iron Chancellor" of Germany and to paint her as rigid and harsh.

But Margaret Thatcher immediately saw her opportunity in the insult. There is nothing better than being feared by your opponents. "Iron" means strong. For a woman to be so attacked proved that she had graduated, before she had even become prime minister, into world politics. So she put on her prettiest (red) gown and made a speech embracing her new title. She has been the Iron Lady ever since.

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You can almost hear her well-modulated tones calling: 'I told you so.' Here, Mrs. Thatcher in 1987.

After more than 11 years in power, Mrs. Thatcher left office against her wishes (and without electoral defeat) in November 1990, the victim of a coup by members of her own party.

For some time after that, her reputation went into partial eclipse. The fall of the Berlin Wall vindicated her policy toward communism, but it also made her seem obsolete. Although her economic, financial and trade union reforms prepared the ground for the boom years of the late 20th and early 21st century, her style was out.

Gain without pain was the theme of the new generation of politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. When Mr. Blair first came to power in Britain in 1997, his signature tune was "Things Can Only Get Better."

Optimism had always been part of Mrs. Thatcher's appeal, too, but it was of a more rigorist kind. Gain comes because of pain, she believed. Nothing can be done without personal effort. Hard truths must be told, dragons slain. Hers was the politics of "either/or." As Peter Mandelson, Mr. Blair's chief strategist, liked to put it, theirs was the politics of "both/and."

“My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.”Thatcher in 1981

From 2007, when the credit crunch first loomed, it started to become clear that "both/and" was going bust in the Western world. The beliefs, the style, the leadership of the Iron Lady all began to look relevant once again. People wanted their leaders to confront problems rather than to brush them aside. They began to look for some iron.

And since 2010, as the debt problem gradually mutated from individuals to banks to entire countries, one of Margaret Thatcher's loneliest battles—her effort in the late 1980s to stop the integration of the European Community (subsequently given the grander title of the European Union)—has begun belatedly to win respect.

The euro was planned against her wishes and introduced after she had left the scene. Seventeen of the EU-27 member-states are part of the euro zone. Now some of them—most notably Greece—are plain bust, and many of them are under the threat of lower credit ratings. Last week, the EU leaders met yet again (by one count, there have now been 17 of these crisis summits) to try to rescue the entire system. They seem, judging by market reaction, to have failed once more. You could almost hear the Iron Lady's well-modulated tones calling "I told you so" from the wings.

What did she tell them? In essence, Margaret Thatcher's views about the relationship between money and politics are simple—her critics would say reductive. In 1949, when, as a 23-year-old, unmarried woman, Margaret Roberts was adopted as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for the first time, she said: "In wartime there was a slogan 'It all depends on me.' People seem to have forgotten that, and they think it all depends on the other person."

"Don't be scared by the high language of economists and Cabinet ministers," she went on, "but think of politics at our own household level."

She wasn't scared, and she never really deviated from such doctrines. They acquired great resonance in the 1970s, when inflation and excessive government borrowing and spending had become the norm. Indeed, they won her the general election of 1979. She preached that a household—and, most particularly, the woman who runs its weekly budget—knows that you cannot ultimately spend more than you earn and that you must "provide for a rainy day."

The same mythical housewife, Mrs. Thatcher asserted, also knows that if you do not provide you cannot be certain that anyone else will. Living beyond your means leads to dependency instead of independence, and dependency leads to degradation.

“In politics, if you want anything said ask a man. If you want anything done ask a woman.”1965

This was as true for nations, Mrs. Thatcher maintained, as for individuals. She was quite sophisticated enough to understand that nations can and sometimes must borrow and spend on a huge scale. She respected the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, while being highly suspicious of the subsequent generations of left-wing "Keynesians."

But she stuck to her household verities. If Britain could better align what it spent and borrowed with what it earned, then the country could trust the native skills of its people to do the rest. It would once again stand tall in the world and make its own decisions.

It would be hard to deny that Mrs. Thatcher succeeded in bringing some of this about. The top rate of income tax was 98% in 1979 and 40% by 1988. In 1979, Britain lost 29.5 million working days to strikes; by 1986, the figure was 1.9 million. When she started, Mrs. Thatcher had to deal with the most deficit-laden nationalized industries in the developed world. When she finished, the idea of privatization had become the most profitable piece of intellectual property ever exported by a politician.

What is also true, however, is that the sternly prudent housewife ushered in an era in which most citizens were much freer to borrow than in the past. She got rid of the cartel of building societies that had rationed the supply of credit to house-buyers in Britain. More people became owners for the first time, but the less happy consequence was that millions of people began to borrow heavily against their houses, leading to a bust shortly after she left office.

In her determination to open markets to the world—five months after coming to power, she abolished all exchange controls on foreign currency—Mrs. Thatcher left an ambiguous legacy. In 1986, her "Big Bang" in the City of London abolished the commission system for stockbrokers and broke up the old City club. The prohibition of proprietary trading went. The separation between commercial and investment banks ceased. Foreign banks, notably American ones, moved in. What everyone now hates and fears as "casino banking" could not have happened without these changes.

Watch a clip from 'The Iron Lady,' a new film about the life of Margaret Thatcher, starring Meryl Streep. Clip courtesy of Weinstein Co. (link)

Many accused her of promoting the greed that she personally deplored. The veteran British commentator Sir Peregrine Worsthorne encapsulated this critique of Mrs. Thatcher with vivid unkindness. She set out, he said, to reform her country in the image of her father (a hard-working, puritanical Methodist grocer) and ended up creating a country in the image of her son (a wheeler-dealer who pleaded guilty in South Africa in 2005 to charges related to helping finance an abortive mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea).

It might be fairer to say that the West today is suffering from welcoming the sunny side of Thatcherism while forgetting its minatory aspects. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took on board the ideas that markets matter, that foreign investment should be welcomed, that people should be allowed to get rich. This was new ground for a socialist party. But they ignored Mrs. Thatcher's eternal vigilance, her dislike of public spending, her obsession with personal discipline, her belief that you cannot, ultimately, avoid paying your bills.

The same happened across Europe. Even countries like Germany and France, which love to criticize the "Anglo-Saxon" culture of speculation, threw risk to the winds. Their banks lent so dangerously that today the entire Continent is cracking under the strain. The euro zone that they constructed only pretended that its "convergence criteria" for budget deficits and national debt had been met by all entrants.

There was never a solution to the problem of a one-size-fits-all currency with a common interest rate trying to yoke together radically different economies. There was never an answer to the question: "Is there a lender of last resort?" Now the initial flaws in construction are undermining the whole building.

On all of this, Mrs. Thatcher was brave and prescient. In 1988, her famous Bruges Speech, excoriated by all European leaders, warned of Europe's becoming "a narrow-minded, inward-looking club…ossified by endless regulation." To her, Europe was much wider than the EU. It included all the countries of the east, then struggling to throw off communism. Her pro-Americanism came to the fore. She spoke of "that Atlantic community—that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic—which is our noblest inheritance and our greatest strength."

Her most controversial remark was her attack on both statism and super-statism: "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels." She was fiercely opposed to European economic and monetary union.

Last week's summit in Brussels took place exactly 20 years after the Maastricht Treaty, by which the EU agreed to establish a single currency (with Britain securing an opt-out). Today, the answer in Brussels to the problems caused by centralization is to centralize some more.

This time, Britain, led by David Cameron, was so worried that it went further than Mrs. Thatcher ever did and vetoed a new EU Treaty. But the other member states will find a way around this. What is needed, Europe's leaders say, is a fiscal union. Even as the structure totters, its designers are trying to build it higher.

There are reasons why Margaret Thatcher's views on Europe, powerful as they were, failed at the time. She had become unpopular at home. Her criticisms of European policy were sometimes expressed in anti-German tones that made people suspect her motives. Above all, she seemed to be swimming against the tide of history. The wall had fallen. Germany was reunited. The old nationalisms had been conquered, people said. "Europe" had triumphed, and all of us, east and west, would now live happily together in "our common European home."

“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, butto which no one objects.”1981

In his speech resigning from the cabinet in 1990, by which he toppled Mrs. Thatcher as Conservative Party leader and prime minister, her former close ally Geoffrey Howe accused her, in her obsession with preserving the British nation-state, of living "in a ghetto of sentimentality about our past."

It does not look quite like that now. Indeed, it was Mrs. Thatcher herself, a couple of years after she left office, who identified the problem with European construction. It was, she said, "infused with the spirit of yesterday's future." It made the "central intellectual mistake" of assuming that "the model for future government was that of a centralized bureaucracy." As she concluded, "The day of the artificially constructed megastate is gone."

There is precious little sign that today's European leaders want to listen to what Mrs. Thatcher said. The manic building of a continental megastate continues apace. But Margaret Thatcher's legacy will never be one of elite consensus. As the Western world sinks deeper into obfuscation, it is her habit of tackling the hard bit of every question that continues to look good and to seem more relevant than ever.

—Mr. Moore is the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, where he is now a columnist. His authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher will not appear in her lifetime.