Europe's Thatcher Clones Reap What She Sowed
Politics / European Union Apr 14, 2013 - 07:01 PM GMTBy: Andrew_McKillop
LAYER CAKE OF ILLUSION
The European press and media has given massive attention to the death of Thatcher, her funeral arrangements and who pays for them, the outbreak of a lot less than respect for her memory in Britain, and the supposed "like her or loathe her" game-change that Thatcher's brand of liberal economic policies produced in Britan and Europe. This past week, you could often tell the political slant of a newspaper from its treatment of the issue, and even the choice of Thatcher's picture that editors made for their front page. UK paper ommitted to exalting Thatcher, like the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail carried pictures of Thatcher against a dark backdrop with what looked like a halo around her head.
France was relatively slow to crank up the for-and-against copy and content, but the French Hollande-supporting daily Liberation, owned by the Rothschild family gave a full front page to Thatcher's picture with the title 'La Grande Faucheuse' followed by the word play "de Sauveuse en Faucheuse". The Grim Reaper who tricked the Brits into thinking she was their Saviour.
To be sure and certain, Thatcher was never an ally of their 14-year president Francois Mitterand, despite his application of every Thatcher trick in the book, when it concerned de-industrializing and financializing the economy of France under his Parti Socialiste regime.
THE NEW POLITICS
The so-called Iron Lady forced through the same set of economic and social policies as other Europeans did, a safe time after she cleared the way. The British public was sufficiently apathetic and divided, its middle classes were sufficiently egoist and greedy for "the bitter pill" to be pushed through with ramrod force. Today's downsized, de-industrialized British economy - vastly behind still-industrial Germany in economic output - is what the British voting public got. One rarely mentioned additional spinoff from the Thatcher years, in Britain, was that Scottish Nationalism became a major force simply because public opinion in Scotland was always violently opposed to Thatcher and all she stood for. When or if Scotland fully separates from England and breaks the Union, as is likely, this will be yet another "feat" or legacy of what many Scottish called the Bent Metal Lady.
Ironically, this brings us to the heart of the matter - the reason why Thatcher's "new service sector economy" could give apparent signs of being a success, and why Thatcher could, with joy, completely destroy the coal industry and its unionized labour. North Sea oil and gas, and its tax spinoff for the UK Exchequer enabled the ever-growing trade gap to be financed, and drove the GB pound to extreme "petromoney" highs, making the ever-growing imports cheaper. Coal was finished - on a highly provisional basis. The UK is now one of the largest coal-importers in Europe.
Thatcher's de facto social economic policy was to make the rich richer, and the poor porer, the cult of "creative inequality", envy, and greed. Called "deregulation and privatization" this started as crony capitalism, and got worse. By endlessly chanting the "amrket mantra", by instilling the idea of the all-powerful and disembodied market, Thatcher was far ahead of the ratpack in allowing the banks to do just exactly what their rogue traders wanted: play the casino tables all day, lose, and then whine and threaten to get government bailouts of taxpayers's funds. Cash from the Common People to feed the casino tables and one-armed bandits of the phony finance racket.
JIMMY SAVILE'S LADY ADMIRER
The unhealthy, to say the least, BBC disc jockey and "celebrity person" was lightning quick to sniff Thatcher as his Soul Sister for wreaking longterm mischief. Starting with his celebrated Open Love Letter to Thatcher of 1980, which was only finally made public 30 years later by application of the UK Freedom of information Act, Savile was a permanent fixture at every one of Thatcher's 11 official New Years Eve celebrations and was beknighted by Thatcher's chosen clone prime minister, John Major for his "wonderful services" to Britain. Germany's Der Spiegel commented from London this week that Thatcher was the U.K.’s “uber-mother figure,” who “reveled in her role as the island’s unbending dominatrix.” With Savile in tow, this had excitingly perverse and immoral meanings!
Germans, unlike the French who have used the event of Thatcher's death to examinine their own slide into Thatcher's World of Crazy-Nomics, a de-industrialization rout on the back of ever-growing income inequality, have taken a skeptical view. Die Zeit brushed her aside as "certainly no Feminist", but above all an eccentric revolutionary. Her pleasure in parroting "No, no, no" anytime she was in Brussels was for Germans especially tasteless when she extended the "No Mantra" to any idea of German reunification - only motivated by her petty English jealousy and fear of a bigger Germany.
The Irish Times with little surprise focused Thatcher’s role in Northern Ireland and the dark years of conflict and terrorism that preceded the peace process, which was impossible in her time in power, and only began only after Thatcher departed from power. Thatcher's supposed "Churchilian" stance on Northern Ireland and Irish reunification - No, No, No - resulted in her losing a close friend, Airey Neave to IRA terrorists in 1979. She herself narrowly escaped death at the hands of the IRA in the 1984 bombing of her Brighton hotel. This only hardened her virulent anti-Irish line, leading to Thatcher’s refusal to bend to public pressure when IRA prisoners starved themselves to death in hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981, making the IRA itself more intransigent and rejecting any “political alternative” to their campaign of violence. Thatcher prolonged the Ulster conflict for years.
The Irish Times wrote this week: “While it took too long for the republican movement to accept the logic of politics over paramilitarism there is no gainsaying that Mrs Thatcher’s obduracy over the hunger strikes – – provided them with that political opportunity which they grasped so well". To be sure, only when she had quit power - thrown out by her own Conservative clones and favourites.
Spain's El Pais carried a report from its correspondent in Argentina. Reactions to the death of the woman who defeated the Argentines in the Falkands War of 1982 are with little surprise rarely of sadness or respect - and one key decision of Thatcher in the war still surfaces. El Pais discusses the sinking of the Argentinian ship the Belgrano, with the loss of 323 lives. Thatcher's decision to order the attack remains controversial today because the ship appeared to be sailing away from the Falklands at the time. “She killed a lot of innocent people,” the paper quotes Argentine radio journalist Victor Hugo Morales as saying. “That is why we are not going to shed a tear for that woman.”
We can be sure ex-Communist European media was broadly pro-Thatcher, as for example the comment of a former Italian leftist intellectual published by La Stampa. Gianni Rotta, now a columnist for La Stampa noted his personal recollection of a visit she made to Italy after leaving power, to launch the translation of her memoirs, of which he was the translator. Later, she thanked him and said: "It is very nice to talk about liberty here in Italy with you, because as soon as you have freed your economy from bureaucracy and subsidies no one in Europe will know how to compete with your talent.” The Italian economy and state finances since Berlusconi, who loudly proclaimed how Thatcher "inspired", show the real meaning of Thatcher was saying in the early 1990s. After the subsidies - crony capitalism, the casino economy, and runaway meltdown of public finances.
NO LEGACY - NO FUTURE
Some non-British persons affect surprise that huge crowds in the UK are celebrating Thatcher's death with open pleasure. Hated persons, when they die, excite that reaction.
By a fatal progression of events, the anarchic rout of deregulation, privatization, de-industrialization and wealth inequality, social envy, and crowd violence that Thatcher decided or her policies sparked, have since 2008 created Britain's sombre prospect of No Future. To a large extent this was "not her fault", she had to deal with the 1979 emergency situation, in the UK produced by the apparatchiks of the English Labour Party. This economic management was at least as bad as anything Thatcher could throw at the UK economy, which was a lot.
Her policies swept away the sometimes-Fabian paternalist aspects of the Labour Party philosophy which by the late 1970s was in any case clinically dead. Thathcer simply reverse-videoed the British economic and social mess - and with no surprise the result was another mess. Admitting this today is a difficult process for the Brits, but their Street Celebrations of Thatcher's death are we can hope a part of the healing process
By Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
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