Thatcherism at Two
GELB, NORMAN
BLOODY BUT UNBOWED Thatcherism at Two BY NORMAN GELB London At least every five years, the government here is required to advise the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. If the...
...Unless a specific report from a minister has been commissioned, she speaks first, summing up problems and suggesting strategies...
...Thatcherism is not working...
...But unlike her predecessors Harold MacMillan, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Thatcher does not rely heavily on staff work or advice...
...Similarly, despite a deep respect for her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carring-ton, she ignored his advice to tonedown her warnings about Soviet intentions during her visit to America earlier this year...
...Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that the woman whom the Russians dubbed "the Iron Lady" is showing signs of metal fatigue...
...Her refusal to bow to international pressure in the case of Bobby Sands is not really a good example of this obstinacy because her position on the IRA hunger strikers is shared by Labor Party leader Michael Foot and most other responsible political figures in Britain...
...Plastered on billboards across the country, and repeated constantly on television, it was accompanied by pictures of long unemployment lines-ostensibly the victims of the incompetence and mismanagement of the ruling Labor government...
...The Prime Minister put an end to that practice when she fired the moderate Conservative Leader of the House of Commons, Norman St...
...Today, however, those lines are even longer and unemployment levels threaten to rise higher still in the months ahead...
...Norman Gelb reports from London for the Mutual Broadcasting System...
...Her unshakable stance infuriates the Labor Opposition...
...Some British analysts claim that Thatcher's austerity is on the brink of paying off, that the economy will improve next year, or almost certainly by the middle of 1983...
...She is a woman of great determination and intensity, openly contemptuous of opinions she does not share...
...It is not that the Cabinet consists of nonentities...
...On principle, she does not have much regard for compromise...
...In any event, the cold facts at present are that more people are being made "redundant" every week, and more businesses are going under every day...
...The Western world's first female head of government has been putting on an extraordinary political performance, but in the eyes of Britons...
...She thrives on work and has allowed herself no extended vacations from the burdens of office...
...No one on her small staff plays a central role in the development of ideas, policies or strategy...
...More polite Labor spokesmen revile her as unfeeling and blind to the distress of more than 2 million jobless British workers and millions of others hurt by cuts in public spending...
...It has been traditional at British Cabinet meetings for members to speak first, providing a body of views for the Prime Minister to consider together and then either accept or reject...
...The Conservatives' most successful slogan then was " Labor Isn't Working...
...That's not the way Thatcher runs the show...
...Indeed, her monetarist steeliness toward slumps in the business cycle, and her wage raise-limiting conviction that "we cannot pay ourselves more than we earn," have been a source of bafflement...
...Her official foreign excursions, far from being used as opportunities for taking time off, have invariably been marked by endless activity and much controversy...
...She does not permit herself to get flustered, sidetracked or outflanked...
...This procedure so inhibited some ministers, that they leaked their dissident views anonymously to press cronies, rather than engage in pointless presentations at Cabinet sessions...
...On her visit to the Gulf, she proved herself a successful supersales-woman for Britain's armaments industry...
...British politicians who have had experience coping with complex situations that do not yield to easy answers confess to being frustrated...
...Convinced she is right, she assures Britons that it is always darkest before the dawn...
...Still, Labor scored victories in local elections across the country last month, revealing how widespread voter dissatisfaction is...
...But there are moments when flashes of shrillness slip through her facade of coolness and British un-flappability...
...Meanwhile, local property levies have soared, in some cases almost doubling over the last two years...
...And during her trip to the United States, she seemed to some people at home bent on out-Reaganing President Reagan in standing up to the Russians...
...If they are right, Thatcher would have a year to tidy up matters before she is obliged to face the voters again...
...If the political omens are favorable, the Prime Minister does not wait that long...
...A better indication of the Thatcher tenacity is her insistence on pursuing the monetarist economic policies that have already caused widespread distress...
...Not only does Thatcher dominate her government politically, which is natural, she dominates it very personally too, which is virtually unprecedented...
...Whatever her sins or virtues, the Prime Minister is undoubtedly an extraordinary individual...
...Businesses are plunging deeper into trouble, including such seemingly invulnerable giants as International Computers Limited and Courtaulds, the textile multinational, not to mention thousands of smaller enterprises across the country...
...Afterward the ministers offer their comments, and their arguments have to be extremely forceful if the Prime Minister is to be shifted even a smidgin on major issues...
...The Prime Minister's pre-political training was in law and chemical engineering, two quite different disciplines that have helped hone her remarkable capacity for quickly assessing the significance of problems and conjuring up straightforward solutions...
...Instead, an auspicious moment well before the legal deadline is picked for summoning the voters to the polls and taking advantage of the prospect that a new five-year mandate will be won...
...Only the Labor Party's destructive internal schisms have prevented it from mounting a more effective campaign against the Tory government...
...It is simply that the most influential men are those who share Thatcher's philosophies: Defense Minister John Nott, Industry Minister Sir Keith Joseph, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Geoffrey Howe, and-several key disagreements notwithstanding in his case?Lord Carrington...
...Not since Winston Churchill has British politics been exposed to such a sustained display of bulldog stubbornness...
...Not yet anyway...
...She herself never feels called upon to hem and haw or fabricate excuses, and sees no reason why anyone else should...
...For underneath, Thatcher has never been either cool or unflappable...
...The suggestion that few solutions can be straightforward in politics strikes her as offensive and silly...
...This kind of unrelenting activity might appear to demand a large, active staff and close coordination with Cabinet ministers...
...They consider many of Thatcher's notions simplistic...
...Although she has acquiesced to Employment Secretary James Pryor's slowly-slowly approach to trimming back union privileges and immunities to the law, the Prime Minister has made her unhappiness with it plain...
...Promised reductions in taxes have not proved overly impressive, except for the well-off...
...It is highly unlikely at the moment that Margaret Thatcher will be tempted to opt for early balloting...
...John Stevas (who may have been totally innocent of leakage) and made clear that others could expect similar treatment if they stepped out of line...
...On the other hand, that facade has always had to be carefully maintained...
...But there has of late been a lot of misleading punditing in Britain...
...Among its less genteel members, it is not uncommon to come across such vituperative slogans as "Ditch the Bitch...
...While in India, for instance, she made no effort to shy away from the former colony's objections to Britain's increasingly restrictive immigration laws...
...Thatcher continues to perform with unflinching confidence and articulateness in confrontations with the Opposition in the House of Commons and in her rare broadcast interviews...
...She has been at 10 Downing Street two years now, and her Conservative Party will probably need all of the remaining three years to try to revive some of the popular support that enabled it to gain a solid parliamentary majority in the spring 1979 general election...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 11
