Niall Ferguson,
Odyssey Editions, 2013,
ASIN: B00CEFF88S; 34 pages.
Review by Kevin Baldeosingh
Although an extended essay rather than a book proper, economic historian Niall Fergurson's defence of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died in 2013, is an especially useful corrective in the wake of the Brexit vote which has had the chattering classes chatting so much in the past few days. Additionally, there are hints here as to how T&T might tackle its present economic malaise.
"Above all, however, Margaret Thatcher was right about Europe," Ferguson writes, asserting that she was correct to back the Single European Act of 1986, which facilitated free trade on the continent, but equally right in opposing the single European currency.
Thatcherism is now a metaphor for bad governance, yet it is a metaphor which owes more to ideology than to either historical or economic facts. Ferguson notes that in the late 1970s Britain was in a dire state. "Nothing worked, The trains were always late. The payphones were always broken...The inflation rate...was 27 per cent," he recalls. The fault, as with Venezuela now, was socialist policies.
"As early as 1975 she had come with a wonderful line about the Labour Party: 'They've got the usual Socialist disease–they've run out of other people's money'," writes Ferguson.
He argues that Thatcherism was "a painful but necessary change of policy regime" needed to tackle chronic inflation, industrial unrest, and unemployment. And it worked.
"The gap between the UK and its European and North American peers had been enormous in the post-war decades. It was in the 1980s that the gap disappeared."
Why it is, then, that three years after her death and a quarter-century after her Prime Ministership ended with her forced resignation, Thatcher, who during her premiership was called "The Iron Lady," continues to be perceived negatively. Ferguson hints at a likely factor when he notes that, "most intellectuals detested Margaret Thatcher," so it is those voices which dominate the discourse.
Perhaps more importantly, though, he argues that, "naive economists look at the wrong indicators when trying to assess the Thatcher achievement. They fail to see that the project to restore British capitalism should be measured by capitalist, not socialist standards."
But what about Thatcher's alleged racist policies in respect to apartheid and immigration? Ferguson provides a more nuanced take, arguing that Thatcher was a political realist which is why she didn't support sanctions against South Africa, but, "at her meetings with PW Botha and his successor FW de Klerk, she urged them to free Nelson Mandela."
And, Ferguson adds, "When she finally met with Mandela himself, she urged him in turn not to go down the road of nationalisation of the economy." The lesson of Zimbabwe should be clear here, but isn't to many people.
Ferguson also notes that, although her administration made it harder for would-be immigrants to marry their way in or secure work permits and ended the claim to UK citizenship of former colonial subjects, the tide of migration turned on Thatcher's watch because her economic policies made Britain attractive to immigrants once again.
Thatcher's reputation, then, disproves the old saw that you can't argue with success.
