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Assaying the Iron Lady
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15605 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1989 |
2,823 Words |
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Paul M. Weyrich
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MRS. THATCHER'S REVOLUTION
The Ending of the Socialist Era
Peter Jenkins
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988
417 pp., $25.00
THATCHER
Kenneth Harris
Boston: Little, Brown & Company
248 pp., $19.95
There has been much talk in America and elsewhere about the Reagan Revolution. History may well reveal that the revolution was more rhetoric that reality. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher's revolution is not only real, it may well affect British politics well beyond her lifetime.
Two recent books, Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution by Peter Jenkins and Thatcher by Kenneth Harris, although vastly different in style and sympathies, similarly tell the story of the end of the socialist era in Great Britain and assert that the Thatcher Revolution is a profound and long-term phenomenon.
Harris is the associate editor of the Observer and a leading television journalist in Britain, while Jenkins is associate editor of the Independent, perhaps the liveliest of London's many newspapers.
While writing from different perspectives, both authors agree that Margaret Thatcher is shaping Britain's future more profoundly than any prime minister since Clement Attlee (1945-51), the Labour prime minister who is remembered for defeating Winston Churchill just after the Allied victory in the Second World War and who introduced Britain to the modern-day welfare state.
Harris believes that Thatcher's standing now is above any British leader in modern times, even though he acknowledges that she is not the most popular leader the country has had. He attributes her success to her steadfastness:
One of the reasons for the standing Mrs. Thatcher has
acquired today is that whereas successive premiers since
Attlee seemed to their electors to renege on many of the
promises they made when they were in opposition, Mrs.
Thatcher has striven to do what she said she would do, and
with very considerable success. Her main three
undertakings were to bring down drastically the rate of
inflation, the main complaint of the British people for
most of the post-war years whether they voted Labour,
Liberal or Conservative; to curb the power of the trade
unions, which had become a threat to democratic
government and the freedom of the individual; and to
denationalize the basic industries, whose losses and
inefficiencies had
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