Rumour has it that tomorrow, the Government will release some of the Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein documents, conveniently just after Prime Minister’s Questions. Presumably, they will relate neither to Mandelson’s selection of the vast Labour intake in 2024, nor to his conduct of the 2025 Ministerial reshuffle. If Britain were not in the Epstein Class’s war with Iran, then Keir Starmer would no longer be Prime Minister. But while half of that Class’s London operation pretends that he had bravely kept us out of it, even though the British commanders in the Gulf boast nightly on social media about their participation in their hosts’ missions, the other half screams that we had not gone far enough into it, making Starmer “no Margaret Thatcher” and “no Winston Churchill”. They ought to be pleased.
The only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons.
Thatcher’s humble origins are greatly exaggerated. She was the daughter of a major local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around. Even the people who love her can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery. She gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massive increase in benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth for “severe fetal abnormality” that did not have to be specified, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and that is just the start. Her only Commons defeat was when she tried to make Sunday just another shopping day. The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? For having publicly set fire to the Quran, Martin Frost and Hamit Coskun were both charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? Three years later, Thatcher’s supporters wanted to use that provision against those who had publicly set fire to The Satanic Verses.
The stockades of working-class male employment were destroyed, and a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State was created, by the politician who proclaimed the self-made man and the self-made woman, a proclamation of which the inexorable logic is gender self-identification. Just as Thatcher emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, so a comparable figure, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman. Thatcher has already been played by a drag queen at least once on British television, and specifically on Channel 4, which she created, meaning that one of her most abiding legacies is that Britain has two state broadcasters, one of which nevertheless carries advertisements. Thatcherism in a nutshell, as has always been clear from the output.
Was Thatcher “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had Nicholas Ridley negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth by effecting a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union?
In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan had delighted Thatcher by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, but was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? Thatcher’s continuous contact with the IRA, universally assumed at the time, has long since been confirmed. Four of the Hunger Strikers’ Five Demands were granted on 6 October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. The Lady was as Iron about that as she was about most other things, namely not at all.
Thatcher was, though, true to her assurance in 1979 and in 1983 that, although until 1985 the Ulster Unionist Party remained affiliated to the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, there would be no return to office for Enoch Powell. But then, when told that Thatcher professed to have been influenced by his books on economics, Powell replied that, “She couldn’t have understood them, then.” He baffled her by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. That wider conversation was about what was then the recent Falklands War. While Powell had supported it on his own principles, Thatcher had seen it as an example of her dictum that, “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” Many years later, when asked her greatest achievement, she replied, “New Labour.” Quite. Thatcher has been named as her political heroine by Shabana Mahmood, who would issue us all with digital ID, and who would make people who had lived here for at least 10 years earn indefinite leave to remain by performing both paid and unpaid work to her satisfaction.
In 1981, Thatcher did impose an absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud, a ban that lasted until the General Election of 1997, when Patricia Hewitt was made Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, having only just entered Parliament from her position as Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. And in 1988, Thatcher and Nigel Lawson did correct the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings until, in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain and vice versa. But if those moves made Thatcher a better social democrat than New Labour, then their reversal made New Labour better Thatcherites than Thatcher or even Lawson.
The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us, and she really did, that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Even more damagingly, and that is quite a feat, she endorsed the vugar illiteracy that the currency-issuing State had no money of its own, and could therefore “run out of other people’s money”. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said that it was, even though before her, it never had been. Specifically, Thatcher sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector, fully 40 per cent of the British economy, to an unprecedented level of central dirigisme.
Thatcher continued public subsidies to private schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three, then as now, would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether private schooling, agriculture, nuclear power, or mortgage-holding is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, and is not.
Thatcher’s assault on council housing created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class?
It is thanks to Thatcher that the Conservatives have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.
Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.
In 1979, Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. In 1988, she expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state.
While all of that was to her credit, that would not be the view of her flamekeepers today, any more than they would approve of her attitude when visiting Kiev in June 1990, when she said that Britain would no more open an embassy in Ukraine than in California or Quebec. When the Soviet Union did collapse anyway, then she ludicrously pretended to have brought it down merely because she had happened to be in office at the time. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa, and by refusing to recognize either the Muzorewa-Smith Government or Joshua Nkomo, thereby paving the way for Robert Mugabe. Known as “the Peking Plotter”, she never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Mugabe, to Nicolae Ceaușescu, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge, putting in the same boat as Noam Chomsky, but making her worse, since he had no power to deploy Special Forces.
And it was Thatcher who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina, armed by Begin’s Israel, to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the starved Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. Until the eve of the invasion, Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina.
Unlike Thatcher, although like the American Old Right, when the British New Right was still new, than it had little or no time for Churchill. Andrew Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955 as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. Rightly or wrongly, that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party. And Churchill’s role in the coup of 1953 makes him the last Briton who should ever be invoked in relation to Iran.
In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Great Contemporaries was reissued in 2024.
In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with last September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.
So much for those who would use Churchill to make the case for continued support of the Ukraine of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. The Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.
All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War with Japan was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, or the Red Army would have carried on marching in the summer of 1945. Still less was the USSR willing or able to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.
The electorate was under no illusions while Churchill was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. Churchill coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.
Churchill presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. He wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, he redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause. The Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. By contrast, before anyone brings him up, Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia.
In such circles, the great cause of the moment is withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet in May 1948, when the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights in The Hague, then it was Churchill who dubbed “the Voice of Europe” that assembly of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they. In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. It was written into British domestic law by Blair, whom, as we have seen, Thatcher identified as her own greatest achievement.
The famous dipping of the cranes for Churchill’s coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes. But it is equally true that once the Attlee Government had a record on which to be judged, then it was barely reelected in 1950, and although it did win the popular vote, it lost office in 1951. For 75 years and counting, the Labour Party has dined out on a mere six years that did not impress the electorate at the time. If Churchill and Clement Attlee were the twin giants of the Golden Age, then that was lost on the voters who lived through it. They did not think much of either of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment