Seductions of the Iron Lady
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Seductions of the Iron Lady Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era By Peter Jenkins Harvard. 417 pp. $25. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Peter Jenkins is a disappointed...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Peter Jenkins is a disappointed man of the rational Left...
...His hero was Anthony Crosland, whose 1957 The Future of Socialism was an eloquent manifesto of moderate radicalism that joined egalitarian aspiration with gaiety...
...Without the Falkland issue, she triumphed a third time in 1987 in the context of a small economic boom that at last began to reduce unemployment...
...All that was required to restore the Labor Party and retain or regain power (depending on the year) was a bracing dose of planning and nationalization...
...Her opposition accommodatingly split the anti-Thatcher majority...
...With fine impartiality the miners brought down the Conservative government of Edward Heath and Callaghan's Labor government...
...The Wilsons and Callaghans had forsaken true Socialist principles...
...But there is more to the singularly unlovable Mrs...
...British Labor, the party of socialism, depended on the unions for votes and financial support...
...A rapidly growing economy guided by a watchful government would simply allocate to the masses larger shares of each year's GNP increment...
...Jenkins tells his sad story beautifully...
...It is equally difficult to avoid the depressing thought that our own Democrats have similarly become the party of losers in a society that adores only winners...
...In a conversation I had with him and his attractive American wife afterward, he apologetically explained that while I was free to utter whatever outrageous notions entered my head, he had to be careful lest Harold expel him entirely from the Cabinet...
...Slow growth meant that the cost of the welfare state became increasingly burdensome...
...Nor was the New Jerusalem to be attained by redistributing wealth from the rich to the workers...
...Thatcher thus shrewdly enlarged the community of winners to embrace a substantial fraction of the working class...
...No matter...
...More and more Labor became the party of losers, a shrinking fraction...
...Deeply distressing to Jenkins is the evidence that her policies strongly appeal to Labor's traditional constituency...
...Jenkins relates the saga of the two Davids with particular verve...
...By 1979, when Margaret Thatcher took power, Labor was a spent force, unable either to govern competently or to resolve the bitter quarrel between the party's moderates and its hard Left...
...Unfortunately, the British economy proved less and less able to deliver the goods...
...So was the opportunity she provided, again at bargain prices, to purchase shares in newly privatized industries...
...They got nowhere...
...No need to describe my attire...
...The disaffected Labor heavyweights who founded the new party included Shirley Williams (a former Education Minister), Roy Jenkins (one of Crosland's protégés, and once an innovative Home secretary), Dr...
...Thatcher's dominion over British politics than the weakness and dissension of her opponents...
...Led by Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who had renounced his hereditary title to join the workers, an increasingly militant Left raised thecry of betrayal...
...He delivered a notably temperate speech...
...In both the middle and the working classes, far more Britons than Americans live in public housing, and the Prime Minister's offer to sell these units to their occupants on highly favorable terms was wildly popular...
...It is hard to disagree with his subtitle...
...In each election Thatcher's percentage of the vote was in the low 40s...
...Thatcher has written finis to the Socialist dream...
...Hospitals, schools, pensions, unemployment benefits, and social services—generally endorsed by the public—took bigger and bigger tax bites out of manual as well as middleclass pay packets...
...David Owen (Foreign Minister in Callaghan's Cabinet), and William Rodgers—inevitably labeled the Gang of Four...
...In 1979, the Liberals collected many votes and few House of Commons seats...
...Tony was impeccably dressed in a pinstriped three-piece suit emphatically not off the peg...
...In European terms, Crosland was a Social Democrat quite content with private markets so long as their fruits were distributed in harmony with social justice...
...Aided by the Falkland factor, Thatcher won again in 1983 even though her policies had pushed unemployment over 3 million...
...In 1976, in the midst of Benn's quasi-Siberian exile, we shared a platform in Tokyo as guests of the International Metalworkers Federation...
...Union bloody-mindedness complemented managerial incompetence...
...You needn't wear a cloth cap and drink warm bitters at the local pub to enroll under his banner...
...A Socialist need not be stripped of his credentials because his tastes ran to fine claret, gourmet food and entrancing women, as Crosland's did...
...Analysis, narrative and astute personality sketches of major players are artfully woven together...
...All said in the ineradicable accents of Oxbridge...
...For a giddy moment in 1981, an alliance of Liberals and brand-new Social Democrats showed signs of pushing Labor into third place and giving Thatcher a real run for her money...
...Two Labor Prime Ministers in the 1970s, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, implored their union allies to retreat from inflationary demands and cooperate with their government and even their employers in the interest of economic revival...
...Wedgie, who implored one and all to callhim Tony, was a somewhat implausible proletarian, as my brief encounter with him attests...
...In 1975 Harold Wilson demoted Wedgie from the Department of Industry to the Department of Energy, the nearest British equivalent, Jenkins mordantly observes, to exile as director of a Siberian power station...
...Alliance hopes foundered upon the divergent agenda and personal animosity of Owen and David Steel, the Liberal leader...
...To make matters far worse, British unions demanded and usually received wage increases outrageously larger than the modest productivity improvements registered by an inefficient economy...
Vol. 71 • December 1988 • No. 22
