Opinion

Thatcher’s victories

As the obituaries are repeating today, Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s greatest peacetime prime minister in the 20th century and the second-greatest overall after Winston Churchill.

They list her achievements, which are many and remarkable.

In foreign policy, she was the most consistent friend to Ronald Reagan and the United States in the final struggle with totalitarian communism. In that role, she helped to bring about the downfall of Soviet communism in the 1980s, and to liberate millions worldwide from tyranny.

She revived the British economy and the spirit of the British people in the 11 years of her premiership. By 1990, when she was forced out of office, she had made Britain the fourth-largest economy in the world. She pioneered a worldwide revolution of privatization and free market that have lifted literally billions of people out of Third World poverty.

These achievements were not without cost — especially in domestic politics. In order to defeat inflation and bring labor unions under the law, Thatcher had to overcome strong opposition from vested interests and a series of strikes by unions resisting reform. As a result, she is still hated by sections of the British Left — whom she defeated not only on policies but also on their treasured grounds of theory and philosophy.

I witnessed the birth of these Thatcher revolutions at first hand. After 6 p.m. in Downing, I helped to write political party speeches for her. Civil servants could only help write official government speeches. Tory Party speeches were therefore written after hours, well into the night, without the help of civil servants, including cooks, waiters and typists. Dinner and drinks had to be provided by the prime minister herself. At times, Mrs. Thatcher would bustle into the kitchen and come back with a frying pan of her own bacon and eggs.

These occasions afforded a much more relaxed, direct and personal atmosphere. No one wrote speeches for Mrs. Thatcher; they wrote speeches with Mrs. Thatcher. With her speechwriters, she engaged in candid discussions over the whole range of government policy, in order to work out a broad political agenda — and her Thatcherite philosophy.

Thatcher’s three election victories entrenched that philosophy and her economic and labor reforms as the new consensus of British politics. The economy was characterized by change, profitability, growth, the better allocation of resources (including labor) and the emergence of a new industries — indeed of an entirely new economy, based on the information revolution.

That transformation didn’t stop at the Atlantic’s edge. She also changed the world economy by virtue of the demonstration effects of Thatcherism. It provided the world with successful models of free and deregulated economies. Once the command economies of the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989, revealing the extraordinary bankruptcy of state planning, it was the Thatcher model that the new democracies mainly sought to emulate.

Yet the revolution of Thatcherism was also a moral revolution. All the apparently economic changes arose from a revival of what Shirley Robin Letwin, the distinguished Anglo-American political theorist, called the “vigorous virtues.” These are such qualities as self-reliance, diligence, thrift, trustworthiness and initiative that enable someone who exhibits them to live and work independently in society.

Though they are not the only virtues — compassion might be called one of the “softer virtues” — they are essential to the success of a free economy and a civil society, both of which rely on dispersed initiative and self-reliant citizens.

And as Mrs. Thatcher used to point out, the softer virtues such as compassion cannot be exerted by people who lack the vigorous virtues of self-reliance and thrift. Her favorite saying from John Wesley was, “Earn all you can; save all you can; give all you can.”

And in her response to criticism from Angican bishops, she argued that the Good Samaritan could have given very little help to the Jew attacked if he had had nothing in his purse.

The reliance of charity upon the vigorous virtues may not be a theological novelty, but it is an important social insight.

This moral victory over the left’s collectivism was one of the things that caused her to be most hated — but not the last thing.

Perhaps her most surprising achievement was to be a visionary, since Mrs. Thatcher always seemed a very practical person. Yet she was a visionary precisely because she was practical — and she showed it most clearly in a matter where most statesmen disagreed with her.

She fell from power, indeed, partly because she opposed the Euro and its earlier form, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, or ERM, and the idea of federal European government in general. Her opposition was rooted in highly practical economics: She said that a one-size-fits-all European currency would never suit the 27 nations of the European Union.

She proved to be correct almost immediately. Only two years after her warnings, Britain was forced out of the ERM after suffering two years of needless recession. At once the UK economy began to recover and, indeed, to flourish for another decade outside the Euro.

Today, when Europe is riven by a long-running crisis over the single currency, with unemployment levels running at 25 percent and more in southern Europe, she looks even more prescient. If Britain and Europe had followed her advice in 1990 and later, they would all be more prosperous and friendly today.

Mrs. Thatcher was a great statesman. What future generations may appreciate more, however, was that she was a visionary social and geopolitical thinker, too.

John O’Sullivan is a former Post editorial-page editor.