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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 24, 2002
Let my people go
Baroness Thatcher was taken ill this past week and I've been asked to write her obituary as a precaution. (This isn't it.) I happily agree to most such assignments for when I write an advance obituary the subject invariably survives; lives so many years that my essay is eventually lost in the files. I attribute the longevity of Ronald Reagan the Pope and the Queen Mother to the obituaries I wrote of them back in the 'nineties. On the other hand I now deeply regret having written an obituary of Osama bin Laden. But Margaret Thatcher as she then was prime minister of Britain 1979-90 was also in the news for a happier reason. Her new book Statecraft has come out which I've been following from excerpts in the London Times. It's purpose is best described in her own clear words: "I wanted to write one more book -- and I wanted it to be about the future. In this age of spin doctors and sound bites the ever-present danger is that leaders will follow fashion and not their instincts and beliefs. That was not how the West won the Cold War nor how we created the basis for today's freedom and prosperity. If we wish to make our achievements secure for our children and grandchildren the West must stay vigilant and strong. In this book it will be my purpose to show how that can -- and must -- be done." I love the "must". Her general advice to politicians was encapsulated in a superb line: "What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner 'I stand for consensus'?" She is among the few politicians I have met who did not strike me as craven and spineless (though some like our present prime minister also exude the qualities of the small town hoodlum). Even at that her history in office was one of routine compromise. And yet she came to power in a country mired in socialist dysfunction and turned it around. She almosty single-handedly inspired the attitude change that made Britain again a dynamic successful free-market powerhouse while setting an example copied all over the world. Her remarks in Statecraft contribute to a widening debate within Britain on the country's future within the European Union. The British Conservatives today have no stomach for the issue; the governing Labour Party considers it a fait accompli. It is Thatcherite to put the big issue on the table rather than skirting it with recriminations about matters of no significance at all. What Lady Thatcher is saying is that the federated Europe now emerging is something Britain needs to escape before all the ancient institutions of British freedom have been assimilated and there is no way out. That it is time for Britain to realign its fortunes with the democratic capitalism of America and pull itself free of the deepening European bog. That Europe is to trade with not be owned by. The little men -- and few today have come to stand shorter than Neil Kinnock and the whining Chris Patten Britain's European commissioners -- have already responded to her argument with disdain. Mr. Kinnock among the more droning products of doctrinaire Labour from the party's grim industrial past forgettably called Lady Thatcher a "pub bore". This is the calibre of argument that supports the cancerous growth of the new European bureaucracy. For Britain with all the other members is being sucked deeper and deeper into the bowels of that unelected and unchallengeable bureaucracy with its chambers for standardizing and regulating and homogenizing the smallest details of everyday life gradually digesting and dissolving all inherited freedoms in its powerful gastric juices to produce the one uniformly unpleasant product and the corruption spreading everywhere. Vast monetary agricultural fisheries and other schemes have been amassed into the largest most cumbersome political leviathan in the history of our planet ratcheting ever forward. But as Lady Thatcher has pointed out this is not the worst of it. Europe is increasingly held hostage to the dreams of power and glory of the Eurocrats from its old fascist core: Germany France Italy Spain. What they have come to envision is a new superpower as a rival to the United States and they openly fantasize about a huge integrated military force that would be "outside NATO". Fortunately they seem unprepared to pay for it and so by indecision continue their free ride under the American canopy. ("They're a weak lot some of them in Europe you know as Mrs. Thatcher once said on a similar occasion. Weak feeble.") She is among the few able to see the thing large. (She is paradoxically accused of being parochial of being a "Little Englander" when she is the opposite.) Her opponents are obliged to do all their thinking "inside the whale" because they have come to accept the monster they are creating as something inevitable. Moreover she grasps two things lost on others: that Britain after centuries of democracy and laissez-faire does not share culturally in the dark control-freak obsessions of "Mitteleuropa"; and that neither do the Slavic countries (though for other reasons) now being pulled into the EU from the continent's east side. For there is another much broader Europe with great variety of economy and culture. And even within the Mitteleuropean core there are also "liberal" or freedom-loving traditions albeit most of the exponents have always been outside the mainstream parties of both left and right. Britain belonged in the defunct European Free Trade Association set up from the beginning as an alternative to the intrusive Common Market. It belongs today in an expanded NAFTA -- a North Atlantic Free Trade Area that could admit smaller countries around the edges of Europe if they sought to escape the iron embrace of the EU imperium. Nothing will be accomplished immediately by Mrs. Thatcher's new book because her old Tory colleagues haven't the courage to face down the European juggernaut. But she is helping to make an opening for the truth and for candid discussion. The political situation in Britain is strangely parallel to our own. For as an Ottawa friend observed The Brits vis-a-vis Europe are now like the Canadians have been vis-a-vis the United States. Schizophrenic. Except the English fear they will lose their freedom to bureaucrats, whereas the Canadians fear the loss of their regulated bureaucratic society. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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