What is first class post? It is certainly not a guarantee of next day delivery. You have to pay a lot more for that. But as ScotRail returns to public ownership, first class stamps are going up to 95p, and everyone is talking about energy independence.
Like Mary Whitehouse, opponents of Thatcherism more conscious of being so than she was was have not only come to be recognised as wrong only on this or that detail while fundamentally right all along, but as having passed the Newman Test.
That is when, like Saint John Henry Newman, one's enemies, opponents, critics and rivals are remembered either only in relation to oneself, or not at all. No one would write a book about Ian MacGregor or Hugh Carleton Greene, or make a documentary or a drama about him, any more than anyone would do so about Joseph Blanco White.
Give it 50 years, and Margaret Thatcher herself will be remembered only for having pursued economic policies that were ruinous of her professed social and cultural views, and for having been spectacularly wrong about a British coal industry that was once again thriving in the same public ownership as the rail service that it contributed significantly to generating the electricity to power.
The antiwar movement will pass the Newman Test.
ReplyDeleteIt is already well on the way to doing so.
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