Summary: Margaret Thatcher’s passing reopens many of the often acrimonious debates and controversies we thought had been fully and fairly litigated a generation ago. It will take a long time to figure out Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy. Those of us who swing more Labour than Tory will bring our own severe critique of her domestic performance to bear, but we may still remember with some pleasure and amusement the sheer vivacity and joie de vivre she brought to the cut and thrust of politics in the House of Commons. Yet, as much as we remember her effervescent personality, her sheer joy of combat, and her almost Saxon pleasure in wordplay, we also remember that it was Margaret Thatcher who stood up to the Argentine junta and said in effect “no, we’re not going to let the Falklands become the Malvinas.” By making the decision to fight for, and ultimately liberate, the Falklands, Thatcher sent a signal to both Buenos Aires and Moscow that the long retreat of the West was over, and that the West would be willing to take up arms against further incursions and adventurism. It was an act of great political courage, for which the West owes Margaret Thatcher a debt of gratitude. Britain will not see her like again.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, died this morning at 87.
Though Benjamin Franklin wryly and rightly pointed out that life’s only two certainties are death and taxes, the passing of Great Britain’s first woman prime minister certainly serves to reopen many of the often acrimonious debates and controversies we thought had been thought fully and fairly litigated a generation ago.
I was in high school, in the 10th grade to be exact, in the spring of 1979 when embattled Labour PM James Callaghan went to the Queen and asked for a dissolution. The general election that followed became as much a referendum on gender as it did on the divide between Labour and the Tories. I can recall, in an in-class discussion of the upcoming vote, the teacher opining that Labour would carry the day because Britain was not yet ready for a female prime minister.
Of course Britain was ready for a female prime minister, and the Tories performed quite creditably at the polls. Watching the results of the British election come in, I can remember prescient political pundits here in America predicting that Ronald Reagan would be the next President of the United States.
As much as my teacher was wrong, the pundits were right; Ronald Reagan masterfully played --- as Mrs. Thatcher had done --- to the pervasive sense of discontent palpable in both the British and American bodies politic. Both Thatcher and Reagan were masterful politicians, skilled in the art of framing issues and challenges in such a way as to convince their electorates that they, and they alone, stood between the West and the looming menace of aggressive Soviet adventurism.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher certainly benefited from James Callaghan and Labour’s serious charisma gap. The generation of Labour leaders that had emerged under Clement Attlee following the Second World War had largely played itself out. Callahan himself appeared grim and gray against the effervescent Mrs. Thatcher.
While Jim Callaghan never made Jimmy Carter’s mistake of speaking of a national “malaise,” he offered the British public little more than a vision of plodding forward into certain doom.
Once installed in Number 10 Downing Street, the Iron Lady wasted little time in applying what she considered a dose of strong conservative medicine to British society. The baleful effects of Margaret Thatcher’s domestic legacy will no doubt be debated for generations. Even today, the very mention of Margaret Thatcher’s name is enough to provoke both here and across the pond often visceral, eye-bulging, vein-throbbing, table-pounding rage from those who remember Mrs. Thatcher’s apparent indifference to the North of England, and her apparent antipathy toward the party opposite.
That Mrs. Thatcher possessed an effervescent personality and seemed to truly enjoy the cut and thrust of political combat in the House only enraged her opponents more. Though, on principle, they were more often right than she, the prime minister handled them with a deft expertise of a matador working a bull in an afternoon corrida, often reducing them to spluttering, sputtering, splenetic and inarticulate paroxysms of peevishness.
From the standpoint of one who tends to have a preferential option for Labour and not for the Tories, my view of Baroness Thatcher’s legacy and accomplishments is necessarily a critical one. Those of us who swing Labor more than Tory will bring our own fairly sharp critique of her performance to bear. Nonetheless, I could appreciate the vivacity and even playfulness with which Mrs. Thatcher did politics. Unlike her Labour predecessor James Callaghan, or her Conservative successor, the breathtakingly dour and colorless John Major, Margaret Thatcher was fun. Not funny, fun.
You didn’t have to approve, as I didn’t, of her politics to appreciate the way in which she livened things up “around the old place.” One could appreciate the joyful deftness of her utterly English, Saxon wordplay, beautifully exemplified at a Conservative party conference when, in response to suggestions that she might have taken a U-turn on a policy issue, responded “you turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” Thatcher’s riff on the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 romantic comedy the Lady’s Not for Burning brought the house down.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher was about a lot more than clever wordplay in the House or the sheer joy of political combat. There are other aspects of Thatcher’s legacy worth appreciating, not least of them her ironclad determination not to allow the Falkland Islands to become the Malvinas. Thatcher’s decision to use force to expel the Argentine troops who had attempted an April, 1982 coup de main against Britain’s isolated colony at the bottom of the South Atlantic came as something of a shock in both Buenos Aires and other Western capitals.
For the West had been perceived to be in retreat for a long time. Since the end of World War II, the West had had its collective nose bloodied in a series of often humiliating retreats and withdrawals. Beginning with the dismantling of the British Raj in India and Pakistan, to France’s humiliation at Dien Bien Phu, the fiasco of Suez in 1956 and Aden in 1967, right to the final frenzied retreat from Saigon in 1975 (and who can forget the immortal image of refugees frantically clambering from a rooftop onto a hovering helicopter as Saigon collapsed?), the West had suffered a generation of very public, very humiliating, reverses. Was it any surprise that, given the perception of Western weakness, Soviet adventurism should have reached its apogee during the 1970s?
The apparent impotence of the West emboldened regimes in the third world and the global South to want to try conclusions with the former imperial powers. In Argentina, an unpopular military junta, facing a domestic crisis of confidence and legitimacy, cynically appealed to the natural tendency of a divided public to unify around national leaders in wartime. The decision of the Argentine junta ---Lt. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, Adm. Jorge Anaya, and Air Force brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo--- to invade the Falklands was driven entirely by domestic political considerations.
Buenos Aires no doubt imagined that the British lion had been declawed and de-balled, and that its roar would be little more than a tame meow betokening tacit acquiescence. Even were Argentina to undertake a coup de main against the Falklands, the junta assumed that London’s response would take the form of an appeal to the UN and a few tepid economic sanctions, coupled with some handwringing and a few embarrassing questions for the prime minister in the House.
Buenos Aires certainly did not expect Mrs. Thatcher to unleash the still considerable power of Her Majesty’s armed forces to undo the effects of Argentina’s aggression.
Indeed, had Argentina waited just six more weeks to act, Defense Minister John Nott’s planned draconian cuts to the RN would have left the Navy without resources to contest the Argentine invasion. Mirabile dictu, the UK let it be known that it would fight, and that it was sending ships and troops to chastise the uppity Argies.
Though the uppity Argies knew, like Paul Revere, that the British were coming, their defense of the Falklands proved insufficient, and by mid-June, 1982, the Falkland Islands were “once again under the form of government desired by their inhabitants (God save the Queen.)”
Admiral Sir John Woodward, the RN task force commander during the Falklands conflict, has suggested with considerable justice that the retaking of the Falklands sent a message not only to Buenos Aires but to Moscow as well that the long and humiliating retreat of the West had come to an end, and that further incursions against it would provoke a military response.
In retrospect, the Falklands represented a foreign-policy triumph for Margaret Thatcher and HM Government. Certainly, Thatcher adroitly exploited the victory in the South Atlantic when she secured a dissolution and went to the country at elections the following year, elections that returned an even larger Tory majority than she had enjoyed.
It would overstate the case to say that Margaret Thatcher saved the West, but having sent the Argentines packing, she certainly faced the Soviet Union with enhanced credibility, and, to some extent, may have put a certain fear of God into the old men who made up the Soviet leadership. After all, if she was crazy enough to stand up to the Argentines, what would she not be crazy enough to do?
Yet, for all of the anger that Margaret Thatcher and her often objectionable policies engendered, we can still say that she did make at least one supremely right decision, and for her choice to resist, and for demonstrating that the British lion could still roar, and that it is still muster sharp teeth and testicular fortitude, she deserves the appreciation not just of Britain, but of the West at large, for it was an act of great political courage, for which the West still owes Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, a debt of gratitude.
Britain will not see her like again.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral city, California. He remembers being in London at the beginning of 1982, shortly before the invasion of the Falklands, and remembers the down at heel, post-postwar seediness of the place, and a sense of morale deficit. Things have changed greatly since then. The views contained herein are his own, and will certainly get some of his fellow Democrats (particularly thin-skinned fight-pickers and umbrage-takers) wanting to read him out with bell, book, and candle for not subscribing closely enough to the so-called party line. The views herein set forth are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
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