Eminentoes/Whither Mrs. Thatcher?
Burton, John
Washington, who died last summer, promoted for years and years. The magazine has enormous influence in the Democratic party, though you would never know it from listening to the Democratic...
...A...
...Reagan and his emissary to the Andropov funeral, George Bush, are claiming that now's the time to get nuclear arms control talks going again, thus suggesting that their collapse was some mere quirk on Mr...
...Meanwhile, the government will move ahead with a faster pace of privatization than in its first term...
...But the main blight of Mrs...
...Let me cite one unsigned editorial on foreign policy in the February 20 issue...
...The politics center on Annie, Henry's lover-wife, who is an antimissile activist...
...The economic policies pursued by the first Thatcher government (1979-1983) did notch up some successes...
...The government's reforms of trade union legal immunities and privileges, embodied in the 1980 and 1982 Employment Acts, can only be described as modest, although this legislation is likely to stop the further growth of compulsory unionism (now covering some two-thirds of blue-collar employees in the U.K...
...Not surprisingly, the reviewer for New York's Village Voice, Erika Munk, who regards Stoppard as "a clever right-wing playwright," interpreted this scene as follows: Robert Brustein, writing in the New Republic, who also identified Henry's views with Stoppard's, wrote that at the end of the play "love conquers all--even casual adulteries and messy social dissent...
...A secret Treasury report, leaked last year, suggests that, on the basis of the government's policy commitments, the size of public spending is likely to grow up to 1990...
...Given the first-past-the-post electoral system, "one party is likely to be wiped out...
...Instead, there initially hung over the returned Thatcher government an aura of indeterminacy...
...The Economist now writes that it has "always doubted" whether Margaret Thatcher was a "fully paid-up Thatcherite...
...With a stunning 143 seat majority in the House of Commons, Mrs...
...The attachment of Margaret Thatcher, and of her chancellor, to the goal of freeing British society and the economy seems to be as strong as before...
...Both have openly declared that taxes in general are far too high...
...Party activists can't get by in the real world, you know, just by reading Mother Jones or the Nation...
...The actor who is playing her brother manages to become her real-life lover by expressing real passion when he has occasion to recite the line, "How is't with ye...
...Some economists have cast doubt on the permanency of the "Thatcher effect" on productivity growth, arguing that it was a once-and-for-all jump caused by the eradication of featherbedding in private industry, the further possibilities of which are beginning to peter out...
...THE NATION'S PULSE TOM STOPPARD ON BROADWAY by Peter Shaw Tom Stoppard's currently successful comedy, The Real Thing, has been greeted nearly everywhere as a welcome excursion into the realms of love and personal relations by a writer who has always specialized in ideas...
...Who could...
...Reagan refuted the widely held assumption that such a thing was no longer possible...
...Thatcher has become a "middle-ofthe-road" politician, This I very much doubt...
...Whether or not "consolidation" will deliver the economic goods in the U.K...
...They read the New Republic, but somehow this is not enough to spur a presidential candidacy by some Jackson heir...
...Andropov's passing took the focus off Lebanon, he noted...
...Unfortunately that argument is given a surprisingly inadequate presentation on both sides--so much so that one senses a purposeful suppression of serious thought on Stoppard's part...
...In short, the Soviets are in a hole," he said...
...Her success seemed to reinforce widespread American admiration of "Maggie" for her perceived qualities of firmness and her much-stated attachment to the ideas of a free society and personal responsibility...
...Andropov's death not only obscured "the embarrassing news of the President's ill-disguised retreat from Lebanon...
...The editorial took to task an attack on Reagan's foreign policy by Columbia political scientist Seweryn Bialer in the New York Review of Books, who f had complained that "the international correlation of forces" had been altered by Reagan...
...The guy is lucky, and it drives the press crazy because it makes Reagan such elusive quarry...
...Matched against this battery of wild hyperbole, the government seemed unable or unwilling to establish its case...
...On the contrary, the conservatives had simply not given any deep thought to "where we go from here" once again in power...
...As for the rest, there was much that was disappointing and seems to be at the root of the current malaise...
...If media reports are correct, for example, the Thatcher government is seeking to protect "publicly" owned British Airways from antitrust action in the United States, following the allegations of an international conspiracy of certain airlines to destroy the competition from Laker enterprise...
...Twothirds of industrial subsidies in the U.K...
...When the government did try to reduce the real value of unemployment pay by 5 percent, a revolt by some Tory backbenchers forced it to restore the cut in 1983...
...go to such failed public _9 sector concerns, e.g., British Steel and the National Coal Board, which have made only faltering moves toward better performance...
...The magazine has enormous influence in the Democratic party, though you would never know it from listening to the Democratic presidential candidates...
...There is the political reality that British public sector lobbies, and other interest groups, remain deeply entrenched and politically powerful...
...Anyway, if one wants to step forward, he can gather up an ideology just by reading the last six months of the magazine--a pretty appealing ideology...
...In the first four financial years of office, the government raised only s billion from such "special sales of assets"-compared with the roughly s billion that it raised from taxes...
...see in Mrs...
...From 1979 to 1982 it rose dramatically from 39.6 percent of GNP to 45.7 percent...
...The rebuilding of American defenses...
...They claimed that the official Tory manifesto--a bland document, replete with vagueness-was but a cover for the real plans to destroy the unions, the welfare state, public enterprise, and so on...
...However, the strength and duration of this recovery is unknown (and unknoffable...
...The idea is to let government spending grow, but on a tight leash...
...All those involved in this and other love affairs are actors who perform in Henry's plays, the current one of which happens to be Peter Shaw has written for Commentary, the New Criterion, and other periodicals...
...Putting a heavy cart of government spending before the horse of a freer economy may be good politics, but it does not make good economics...
...Thatcher and independent economic commentators have preferred to assume that economic growth will run at a mtlch higher rate in the U.K...
...15.00 Harvard University Press Cambridge, MA 02138 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 25 "consolidationist" strategy enunciated by Mr...
...Thus Mrs...
...0 . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . , o . . . . . . . . . i EMINENTOES Reaganites were greatly heartened by Margaret Thatcher's phenomenally large victory in the British general election last June...
...Assuming economic growth is low (0.5-0.75 percent per annum), the share of national income taken by government will rise dramatically...
...As the muchrespected economics editor of the Financial Times described it, this was "probably the largest increase in the tax burden in British peacetime history...
...And he added that the cocktail dip smeared over the features of the badly mannered prole in The Real Thing is a custard pie heaved in the face of all that unpleasant political dissent people were forced to endure in the 1960s and 70s...
...And yet if one looks carefully it emerges that the conservative Henry does not really have the best of the political argument...
...Despite such touches, neither the play's line-by-line wit nor what amounts to a triumph of British-style acting by a partly American cast can keep the handling of ideas from being a disappointment...
...If the rot cannot be stopped in Britain, where the premier has indisputable power, what hope is there for the Reagan revolution...
...It is true that Henry speaks for Stoppard when he ridicules the ideas in Brodie's 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984...
...The Reagan administration was carrying out a policy devised by its Democratic predecessor...
...Thatcher would hardly have to put up with the obstacles that have hobbled the passage of Reagan proposals in Congress...
...He proves to be witty-which, however, is like saying that a minor character of Shakespeare proves to speak in verse...
...There are also signs that some sort of economic recovery is under way in the U.K...
...First she acquires as a prote'g~ a young soldier who has been jailed for setting a (harmless) fire during a peace demonstration...
...So when Yuri Andropov died in February, Steven R. Weisman of the New York Times wrote that "for the third time in recent months, President Reagan has found himself facing a foreign policy crisis, only to have public attention diverted--at least momentarily--by sudden developments elsewhere...
...The performance of the Thatcher government on other economic issues has been no more heartening...
...Thatcher's goals...
...British agriculture remains grotesquely pampered by subsidy, amounting to about s per farmer or s per job in agriculture (the industry is also exempted from local property taxes and from more than 90 percent of the excise tax on fuel...
...In order to stick to the targets for government borrowing and monetary deceleration, this meant that the Thatcher government of 1979-1983 had to increase sharply the overall tax burden of the U.K...
...Public spending continued to rise-and even overshoot its growth targets--while the vested interests in the public sector kept up an immense chorus about the "cuts" in public spending...
...Virtually every reviewer has been able to single out a subtly brilliant felicity not mentioned by anyone else...
...Her supposedly new "let's talk to the Russians" line is nothing new at all...
...With faster economic growth, the share of government in national income will thus fall...
...The apparent changes in Mrs...
...The third success...
...It is Mrs...
...There has been her fumbling of the Grenada affair, and more important, the thrust of her economic policies has begun to drift, so much so that commentators are starting to question her commitment to her own program...
...Faced with this nightmare scenario, both Mrs...
...she then arranges to act in it herself...
...Thus private industry has been forced to face up to the issue of restrictive union practices, leading to radical changes in work rules and manning arrangements...
...Things happen to him for the good at just the right time, like the opportunity of the Grenada invasion arising right after the explosion that killed 241 Marines in Lebanon...
...The Spectator of London, meanwhile, notes that "though she speaks the rhetoric of the free market, it is less obvious that she sincerely wants us to be free...
...In other words, the consolidationist strategy is a reflection of political worries and considerations, not a change in Mrs...
...Thatcher from transforming Britain over the coming four years from an over-regulated and over-taxed mixed-up economy into a free enterprise zone of national proportions...
...The classic example is provided by what has happened in Britain's nationalized health service...
...In all this they have often been supported by senior Tory MPs such as Norman St...
...This new strategy has created a widespread impression that Mrs...
...British national interests have always dictated that peace (although not at any price) is preferable to war with the Soviets...
...The targets for reducing government borrowing were also, broadly speaking, adequately secured over 19791983...
...Simply put, the New Republic is giving liberal anti-Communism a good name again...
...is another question...
...Thatcher's economic policies the cure for the "British disease" of stagflation, and they believe her measures are causing the structural changes necessary to restore Britain's international competitiveness as a major economic power...
...In the teeth of fierce resistance, the best that Mr...
...And yet the play's ideas--or more precisely its political attitudes--have drawn sharp criticism from at least two reviewers...
...In fact, no such secret manifesto existed...
...But both have yet to do anything substantive about any of this...
...As a result there are intricate parallels between art and life, and these seem largely to replace the usual Stoppardean intricacies of speculative argument...
...The monetary targeting strategy eventually brought down inflation--though some economists argue that it was more a matter of luck than of good judgment by the Bank of England-from a high of 22.5 percent per annum in 1980 to around 5 percent last year...
...Reagan did...
...Thatcher's tactics that have changed, not her goals...
...Thatcher's government...
...It might be recalled that in the 1983 general election campaign the Labour party made much play of the purported existence of a "secret Conservative manifesto...
...Army was able to overcome a platoon of Cuban teamsters, but that an American President could gain the support of the country for intervention against a particularly obnoxious regime aligned with the Soviet Union," the editorial said...
...The social welfare "industry"-forecast to eat up s billion of taxes by 1986-7--is palpably out of control, yet the government recoils at the thought of anything more than limited trimming of this machine for inducing mass withdrawal from productive economic activity...
...Its unyielding support of Israel--and a pro-Israel policy by the United States--may not be fashionable, but it is certainly an antidote to much of the reporting from the Middle East in the Washington Post and other papers...
...This thing about Reagan's luck happens to be a clich~ that is true...
...Reagan's arms control policies...
...Thatcher herself has never by John Burton made any ~gcret of her view that it would take her two full terms of ofrice (around ten years) to rescue the British economy from the malaise induced by decades of uninhibited government intervention, subsidization of state industry, bureaucratic growth, and Keynesian macro-management...
...Already, Mr...
...Unlike an American President, the British prime minister has executive power by virtue of control over and allegiance of the majority in the legislature...
...The Japanese also tend to admire Mrs...
...In the play's love story the playwright, Henry, has an affair, divorces, and then discovers that his lover--now his second wife--is having an affair of her own...
...Yet it is hard to think of a single Democratic candidate for President who would have toughed it out the way Mr...
...are of unrelated origin...
...Mrs...
...More important, Brodie is also decidedly unpleasant...
...For example, Henry and Annie are given to communicating as lovers by asking one another, "Are you all right...
...The revenues acquired from these asset sales will provide a (small) extra margin for reducing taxes...
...Thatcher feels constrained to edge forward at an extremely cautious pace on economic policy...
...about infidelity...
...T h i s is not to say that The Real Thing's reputation for verbal brilliance is undeserved...
...The prospect of any sense of economic reality being established in this mismanaged and tax-financed industry now appears increasingly remote...
...But then, chillingly, something happens while Annie is rehearsing the role of the incestuous sister in a revival of "Tis Pity She's a Whore...
...Last year the government dropped a restrictive practices case against the operation of a price cartel on dealing commissions by brokers in the stock exchange (in return for some accepted changes...
...next she takes as her lover a working-class, leftish young actor who disapproves of her husband's dismissal of class realities...
...The prote'g~, Brodie, has written a protest play...
...If soaring inflation and/or much higher levels of government borrowing (meaning high and stultifying interest rates) were then to be avoided, the rise in taxation would have to be draconian: a 15 point increase in the standard rate of income tax...
...To date, both the prime minister and her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, have reiterated their commitment to come to grips with the juggernaut of public spending growth...
...She had demonstrated that a forceful conservative leader could win a second race...
...Is there enough iron left in the "Iron Lady...
...Just when he is pinned down and vulnerable to a thrashing, he slips away...
...In another article a few weeks later, Brustein agreed with Erika Munk's contention that the play's success rested on what he now termed its "profound political conservatism...
...Robert Brustein put it that Stoppard is "tone deaf before the dissonant inflections of Western political protest...
...over the period up to 1990...
...To which the New Republic responded, "Sounds good...
...Thatcher's first term, with the government often retaining about a 50 percent stake in the "privatized" concern...
...And where else were the self-serving autobiographies of Wilfred Burchett and Pete Seeger criticized correctly as the work of Soviet apologists...
...My impression (shared by many other commentators) is that on Grenada she made a mistake or miscalculation from which--once having staked herself to it in Parliament--she has had difficulty in backing down...
...The only other critic to have commented on the hero's politics, Mimi Kramer in the New Criterion, also takes them to be Stoppard's, but finds herself in agreement...
...Brodie, freed from jail, appears onstage in the last scene at Henry and Annie's...
...But thanks t o her smashing reelection last year, conditions seemed ideal for Mrs...
...Thatcher's foreign policies that have caused puzzlement and concern in the U.S...
...Lawson has so far been able to do is to conduct a holding operation: He has managed to rein back the overshooting of public spending above the announced cash growth targets for it...
...A considerable number of Mrs...
...There are in fact some grounds for arguing that the output figures for Britain have been understated recently and do not reveal the true growth performance for 1982...
...What has happened is that the Cabinet has opted for a version of the P. T. BAUER Reality .and Rhetoric Studies in the Economics of Development "One of the most distinguished development economists in the world...
...Moreover, in 1981 and 1982 the formation of new enterprises in the U.K...
...K. Sen, New York Review of Books Here is the culmination of P. T. Bauer's observations and reflections on Third World economies over a period of thirty years...
...The British budget deficit, as a 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APR|L 1984 proportion of the nation's GNP, is now the lowest of any Western country...
...Wicker doesn't really understand about luck, though...
...achieved levels previously unseen...
...In doing so, Mr...
...it opened up political opportunities so astute a politician won't be slow in seizing...
...John Stevas and Sir Ian Gilmour...
...John Biffen, the leader of the House of Commons, against the cutting-taxes-and-spending approach that the chancellor would have preferred to adopt...
...In 1983, the secretary of state in charge of this concern proposed to reduce jobs in it by less than 1 percent of the work force, in order to trim back marginally on inefficiency...
...Thatcher to administer a stronger "Part II" of her recovery ministrations...
...The severity of the recession in the private sector of British industry has brought about a significant change in attitude: Despite the record level of corporate bankruptcies in recent years, the Thatcher government has not adopted a general policy of bailing out or nationalizing the private sector...
...This miniscule measure was variously described by left-wing politicos and union spokesmen as a "massacre," "hacking the NHS to death," and "strong-arm brutality...
...When President Reagan next meets Margaret Thatcher he will not be meeting some changed lady with new political and economic susceptibilities...
...The old sports adage fits here, namely that the good teams make their own luck...
...And there are further richnesses if one reads the text...
...It has perhaps not been stressed enough that in its decisive victory last June the Conservative party's share of total votes was actually smaller than in 1979...
...The Thatcher policy of privatizing state concerns, in order to inject commercial vim and vigor, was also modest in Mrs...
...But it would be more accurate to say that the deafness belongs to Henry, the character Stoppard has created...
...He is author, most recently, o f American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Harvard...
...Nonetheless, the editorial said Reagan has achieved "three significant and obvious achievements" in foreign affairs, despite the"clich~" of the Democratic presidential contenders that he has scored a goose egg...
...From 1979 to 1983 government spending on this inefficient and overmanned industry rose by 17 percent in real terms, while by the end of 1982 _9 employment had risen by 6 percent...
...Thatcher's first term was her government's failure to control let alone reduce government spending...
...Both of them have complained of the playwright-hero's unfriendliness to anti-nuclearist, antiestablishment activism...
...These changes helped bring about a Japanese-like level of productivity growth...
...The second success was Grenada...
...Although overtly committed to reducing the role of the state in British economic life, she in fact presided over a considerable rise in aggregate state expenditures-mounting in 1982 to over 47 percent of GNP...
...Whereas the private sector has been forced to adjust (or go into liquidation) in recession, the large loss-makers in stateowned industry have been propped up by Mrs...
...The government has fully acceded to the EEC's operation of a steel cartel...
...He'd have sought a resolution from the OAS, not an invasion...
...Recent developments, however, suggest to many that something is amiss...
...First, there is the Euromissile victory," the magazine said...
...From the last quarter of 1980 to the second quarter of 1982, per capita output grew at 7.6 percent annually (compared to an annual average of 2.2 percent for the decade 1971-1981...
...The success was not that the U.S...
...Andropov's part, rather than a calculated Soviet response to Mr...
...Many Japanese businessmen John Burton is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London...
...And since this character is manifestly autobiographical, they have criticized Stoppard for supposedly holding the same opinions...
...Annie now rejects him, and though he is not the one she has been having an affair with, her freeing gesture of dismissal (pushing a container of cocktail dip in his face) seems to be the trigger for a lovers' reconciliation with Henry...
...On paper, then, there is nothing to stop Mrs...
...Now, remember that the political and journalistic environment in which the New Republic and its editors circulate is not friendly to President Reagan...
...Jimmy Carter, had he been faced with the same opportunity, wouldn't have been lucky...
...The demonstration that it is possible has already had salutary effect in places like Surinam, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union...
...Thatcher's backbench " s u p p o r t e r s , " moreover, are ideologic*ally opposed to--or politically scared of--doing anything to reduce the government sector, a reluctance in part caused by recent changes in Britain's party politics which have become a three-cornered fight of very uncertain outcome at the next general election...
...Annie gets Henry, despite his contempt for the play, to rewrite its pedestrian language...
...Reagan was lucky in the case of Grenada, for instance, not because the opportunity to invade arose but because he ordered the invasion...
...T. It is a common observation in Japan that Britain always achieves greatness under a woman, as during the reigns of Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria...
...Maddest of all is Tom Wicker, who wrote in his column that Reagan's luck "is not to be discounted...
...The government has so far avoided competitive reform of the professions, and in Parliament has opposed a private member's bill to end the solicitors' monopoly on the transfer of real estate...
...One of the reigning cliches about Ronald Reagan is that he is lucky in the political sense...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
