Charles Moore -- The Legacy of Margaret Thatcher

welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson uh be sure to join us on facebook at facebook.com forward slash unc knowledge uh you can submit questions comments suggest guests facebook one of britain's most distinguished journalists charles moore is a former editor of the daily telegraph and sunday telegraph newspapers and of the spectator magazine mr moore is the authorized biographer of the right honorable the baroness thatcher of kesteven perhaps better known simply as margaret thatcher charles moore welcome segment one the iron lady until the second world war britain represented the richest nation in europe the most powerful nation on earth and the ruler of an empire that covered a quarter of the globe by 1979 three and a half decades later britain had lost its empire become a power of the second rank and had seen its living standards drop below those of germany italy france briefly to set the scene to set the stage as it were before the iron lady enters what accounted for that decline and what did it feel like you were starting your career at this period in the 70s well peter in starting my career i saw this very clearly because i came in to fleet street journalism in october 1979 which was just after mrs thatcher became prime minister um and so there was all the mess that she just taken over what it meant was for example very high inflation um and perhaps above all a very very um severe control of uh labor by the labor unions so um industry functioned very badly um you couldn't bring about change you couldn't uh sack people you couldn't create new jobs um and the trade unions were highly political so their leaderships were trying to run the country and it was believed by many people that you could only run the country through a deal between the politicians and the leaders of the labor unions and so you get the labor unions trying to sort of decide what economic policy would be and there was any amount of clothes shot restrictive practices so it did feel very much as as if there was very little hope and we had these enormously uh wasteful nationalized industries coal steel shipbuilding shipbuilding the cars were effectively almost all the motor industry was effective so striking about that you mentioned coal steel and ship building and those were the industries that had been dominant a century before yes but the socialist policies had in effect frozen british industry uh into a into a 19th century position in the second half of the 20th i think that's right i think i think what happened was that for political reasons it was felt that you had to if an if an old heavy industry was doing badly the thing to do was to quite save it which in fact meant not allowing development change taxing the productive segments of this of the economy exactly so and the tax rates were correspondingly high of course so that if you the tax rate on unearned income so-called unearned income um uh when mrs actually came in was uh right up in the 90s and and uh even on um so-called earned income was up in the 80s so it was uh enormously burdensome and restrictive enter margaret thatcher mr chairman mr president ladies and gentlemen i stand before you tonight in my red star chiffon evening gown my face softly made up and my fair hair gently wave the iron lady of the western world the iron lady that sobriquet comes from what uh mrs satcher made a very powerful speech in which she attacked the principles of de tont and said that we were ignoring the dangers from the soviet union um and the uh red army newspaper red star um came back at her um you know obviously controlled by the communist party and it said she's the iron lady and this was the best compliment ever paid you by a critic by an enemy because um they meant it to say you know how hard and unfeeling and dreadful she was but of course that's exactly what she wanted to be seen as in relation to the soviet communism now charles i want to get to the policies to the events of the thatcher years but first where did this come from that self-possession the toughness there she was this is as i recall this speech was delivered a year or some months before she became prime minister yes years before she became prime minister and here she is taking on the soviets and equating with the soviets the labor government this is a breathtaking act of defiance and this is this woman was raised over a grocery shop in grantham a medium-sized non-descript town in middle nondescript england you're right but i think by the way you've described it you've fastened on to why she felt able to speak in this way it was precisely because she came from this what you might call wrong side of the tracks background and because she was a woman in a man's world that she had a very independent approach she never thought i must go with the crowd right back in grantham her father a grocer a local politician and a methodist lay uh preacher he would say things like to her like dare to be a daniel b hold stand up for what you believe don't worry about what the crowd says and she would have taken that to heart very much and then as she made her way through life she's essentially acting alone she's not there's no big group of pals helping her she's not a part of the old boys network absolutely not neither by sex nor by character and um and of course very ambitious but she had very strong beliefs and i think what most struck her um as she grew up and matured in politics was the horror of her country going downhill and of the sense of failure and what margaret actually cares about so much is the idea that her country has enormous potential and that needs to be brought out and for the conservative party above all the conservative party of which she was a member to fail in that was a which she felt it had done in the mid 70s was a terrible rebuke a segment to the falklands april 1982 you're a young journalist so you will remember all of this vividly argentina invades and occupies the falklands i happen to be in britain myself at the time and it was a complete shock the first the first question was why would they care why would anybody want these fox that's what i remember people saying to each other describe to us prime minister thatcher's response well um the invasion of the falklands was among other things completely unexpected except by a very few people and so the british government didn't actually know that it was going to be invaded by argentina until a day before the event took place and therefore obviously there were virtually no preparations and here we are we have by the way i should say the falkland islands are in the south atlantic about 250 miles from the coast of argentina yeah and about 6 000 miles yes more i think more than six well six thousand or more miles from the united kingdom yeah right um and uh the faltland islands are a british colony where and are a british colony but a colony unlike many where everybody in it wanted to be they were all of british descent and they wish to continue to be with britain and so the question what here is an as an act of a military aggression um what do you do about it and uh basically mrs thatcher understood that um if you didn't respond the government would fall because the indignation was was total by british public opinion and the marines that we had we had a very small garrison out there they were captured so complete humiliation and so the question is what do you do and um mrs thatcher didn't know what to do in the sense that there were no preparations for this um uh the logistics are terrible um the politics unprecedented if i recall you you may correct me on this but as i recall there's an especially vivid scene in her autobiography in which she's being briefed on all of this and john knott who's the minister for defense who has earlier that day rounded up the admirals and said what's going to be hap what can we do and presented to mrs thatcher the view of the defense ministry that essentially the falklands were lost and there was one man but fill in the city this is essentially correct by chance almost all the main people are supposed to help with these decisions were out of the country that day and that turned out to be a good thing because um mrs thatcher was sitting in the house of commons having a sort of long-running meeting trying to work out what they could do drafting a letter to president reagan asking for advice and assistance and so on one admiral the first sea lord was in town and he'd just been inspecting naval positions so he's wearing his his uniform and he heard this meeting was going on he wasn't asked to it and he came bursting into it uh in the house of commons was it not leech she was called henry leech and um and he sort of found his way through and mrs hatch was very very pleased to see him because she always respects the armed services and she didn't know you know what to think about all this from a military point of view and so everyone was very gloomy including john not the defense secretary who you mentioned and she said well first see lord what could we do and he said well prime minister we could send a task force and she said because she had very little military experience at this point early she said what's a task force so he said uh explained and she said how long would it take to get ready and he said three days and uh she's and she said how long would it take to get to the falklands and he said three weeks uh and she said you mean three days don't you he said no no three weeks three weeks she had no idea of the geographical right and uh and she said can we do it can we reconquer the islands and he said um yes prime minister we can and though it's not my not for me to say i think we must and so she got interested and and she said why why do you say that and he said because if we don't do it we will be a country whose word counts for nothing in the world and of course then she was really on her metal and suddenly she'd been given the the sense that it was possible because no matter what her ambitions if she's advised by everybody that it's not physically possible she has to give up but ah it's possible so she said right well let's make ready the task force and the cabinet agreed to that on the friday night big debate on the house of commons on the saturday night which she survived there was some difficulty and the task force set sail on monday and once once it's in the sea on the way or on the sea i should say um uh very hard to turn it back and what mrs actually then had to to manage was an incredibly difficult diplomatic situation when you're trying to uh see if you could get a non-military solution without conceding the crucial points and she had to hold off people who wanted to appease argentina and everyone as i recall everyone i say everyone the economist the financial times the whole diplomatic core i mentioned that these small islands were much closer to argentina than to thousands of miles from britain only a few hundred miles from argentina the population was a few thousand many many thousands more than that of sheep yep but the population was only a few thousand so the yeah the the notion that you cut a deal was overwhelming it was overwhelming uh in the minds of diplomats but in the opposite feeling in the minds of the british people because she had the people with her more or less from the get-go yes but of course it could have it could have died because of sheer military failure apart from anything else so the loneliness of her position in this and the difficulty of trying to work out what to do and the you know and leech was not representative really it was almost by us kind of a sweet miracle that the one man who had metal happened to find his way into the meeting at that moment that's right i mean to be fair to the others they did have metal but they were just very very aware of the difficulty it was a very very serious logistical strategic difficulty and um you know how would you land on the island's terrible weather um no cover so you get attacked by very effective argentine air force and so on um however um mrs sanchez saw that you had to do this uh unless you could get a piece with with honor and argentina was so stupid that it didn't offer that and she had a lot of chewing and fro with the united states often very tense it wasn't always very easy with secretary hague president reagan slightly hedging his bets because there was a genuine very understandable u.s fear of resurgent communism in in south america but in the end um the strength of her our alliance with the united states and her personal friendship with president reagan meant that they came down on the british side um so we had all the logistical and sort of diplomatic backup we needed and then it was a wonderful military achievement and the british forces distinguish themselves and they won and uh with a relatively small loss of life and virtually no i think two or three civilians died in the whole they were i believe there were two or three civilians on the belgran belgrano the argentines lose the belgrano the british lose the sheffield in other words two ships went down 907 killed 74 days of conflict but britain wins and it's great britain marvelous forces every single one of them it's just been it's just been everyone together and that's what matters we knew what we had to do to me what's so striking about that is that the you can hear the crowd singing real britannia yes in the background just off downing street which of course now they wouldn't be allowed to do because of security apartments exactly segment three the strike 1984 the national coal board which is the government body that oversees britain's nationalized and heavily subsidized coal industry announces that the game is about to change instead of subsidies without end and accommodation with the unions without end it intends to close 20 unproductive unprofitable mines 20 000 jobs will be eliminated in certain towns in the north virtually the only source of employment is about to come to an end the national union of mine workers is led by a man called arthur scargill tell us about arthur scargill and what he chooses to do well in a way arthur's cargo was the best gift to mrs thatcher because there'd been a long history of confrontation with the national union of mine workers but before that they've been led by fairly moderate people um who were very difficult to argue with politically because they had a sort of moral stature arthas cargill was a hard-line communist not actually member of the communist party but a ultra extremist and he called himself a marxist it was as i recall there was no that's right right you're not casting aspersions and he um had a declaratively political agenda he wanted to defeat and overthrow the thatcher government and he also actually had um money which was later exposed from soviet russia and from libya so you were up against something that really was subversive of the political order um but the tories have had a history of losing and all of this and indeed mrs thatcher herself had given in to the miners in 1981 with a similar comparable dispute because she wasn't ready and by this time she was ready she got the coal stocks prepared to at last out a strike and she changed the law about picketing so that the the uh union could now be held liable in the courts for secondary picketing and that made it much easier to distrain the union funds let's let's take a look at her response to arthur skargle on the strike you talk about the ruthless manipulating few now will you not negotiate with them ever i will never negotiate with people who use coercion and violence to achieve that objective they are the enemies of democracy they are not interested in the future of democracy they are trying to kill democracy for their own purposes pretty tough the strike lasts about a year as i recall and in the end it just fizzles the miners go back to work yes another great advantage mrs thatcher had in this was that arthur scargill never had a ballot for the strike because he knew that if he did he wouldn't win it that's why she gets to talk about a small minority of manipu manipulating the larger exactly she always knew that um he didn't have all the miners with him and right through the strike a third of them went on working and as in the later parts of the strike that grew to half and so on um but he called on union solidarity to make the strike happen and of course it was very dangerous very hard going and there was a point um about halfway through where it really did look as if she would lose it and uh but she she pulled through in this knowledge that he didn't really have the legitimacy and so though a lot of people hated it because it was all very tough and unpleasant and bitter um she did essentially have the moral argument on her side as well as the economic and political argument and that was sort of tacitly acknowledged even by people who didn't like her and once she won everything changes the whole this this this had lifted the incubus which had been on british governments uh about trade union power in 82 gives her stature and in 84 she uses it she changes britain is that fair that's fair and in between she won a huge majority in the general election in 1983 and so she felt she had a real mandate charles once again this question of con well really a question of courage an old-fashioned virtue of courage falklands first 1956 prime minister anthony eden bungles the brief suez operation against egypt in the suez canal and it ends up costing him the premiership she knows as she goes to war in the falklands that if that fails she's gone yes there's a clear precedent in british history yes her government her job her entire everything is at stake she does it anyway yeah and then we come to 1984 in this national union of mine workers strike just a decade earlier they'd gone out on strike with edward heath edward heath had been prime minister her predecessors tory prime minister he had been putting in place some free market reforms he'd been tough by the standards of the day they bring the country to its knees and force him to reverse himself and it costs heath the government and the premiership she within 24 months she risks everything twice where did this come from this metal this courage well it's innate in her character but it's also to do with the fact that she's at this point that she's all alone so she knows that no excuses are going to be made for her if anything goes wrong there are no pals to cover up for her hold her in office after any disaster uh she and she would always say this that you know a woman's only got one chance and um so so in a way she done what you're not supposed to do in politics which is if you're in a hole um stop digging she it was in the hole and went on digging in in the sense that um she knew only by playing the game as hard as you could could you win segment for the cold war even under mrs thatcher britain remains a power of the second rank it's not a superpower not a nation that can in any way conceivably set forward its military as a counterweight to the soviet union or its economy as a counterweight to the united states and yet ronald reagan and mikhail gorbachev and every right-minded historian of whom i'm aware recognizes that she played a central role in the end of the cold war yes why is that recognition accorded to her what uh i think because she knew when to hold them and when to fold them um and um and also to do with the alliance with reagan because essentially she and reagan had analyzed the situation correctly in the 70s when they were not yet in office which was that soviet power was becoming more and more threatening and he had both political and military consequences and uh the thing was in the balance and she led the the fight in western europe to install cruise and pershing missiles to counter the soviet uh nuclear missiles in the early 80s 1983 the united states places missiles it deploys missiles in britain and west germany and i think there were a coup a small deployment in italy as well if i'm not mistaken and she takes an anti-nuclear demonstration in hyde park as i recall that as i recall was to that's that point the largest public demonstration in british history uh certainly very big and um but it turned out in the 1983 election that the labor belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament had helped them to lose very big um and she she realized simple point but important that if you use the word unilateral not many people know what it means but if you say one-sided they do know what it means and she would say once labor wants one-sided disarmament and um this proved to be very very effective for her so once she carried this with the european allies uh with her own electorate um she's in a very strong position to think well what happened next happens next we've pushed the soviets back on this what happens next can we i'd just like to play a clip from her eulogy uh she she recorded it about 18 months before president reagan died but it was played at his funeral there are a couple of points about this that i'd like to ask you about charles yes he did not shrink from denouncing moscow's evil empire but he realized that a man of good will might nonetheless emerge from within its dark corridors so the president resisted soviet expansion and pressed down on soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of those pressures and its own failures and when a man of good will did emerge from the ruins president reagan stepped forward to shake his hand and to offer sincere cooperation she met gorbachev still a junior member of the police bureau about three months before the unexpected death of chernenko and gorbachev's elevation to general secretary as i recall they met at checkers the prime minister's country residents they were scheduled to meet for about an hour it ran five hours and she made a point of saying publicly soon thereafter i like mr gorbachev we can do business together and here in this eulogy she calls him a man of good will now what's so striking about the event as it takes place in 1985 i like mr gorbachev and this eulogy a man of good will here we have margaret thatcher the unreconstructed unrepentant anti-communist cold warrior par excellence and she sees gorbachev and changes her thinking or at least recognizes something in other words you get a remarkable intellectual agility no i think that's correct she she never thought that um soviet communism had anything good about it but she detected in gorbachev a readiness to recognize reality um and she she thought that conversation you mentioned at checkers was vital because if you read um well sorry you can't yet do so but uh people will eventually be able to read the conversation and they tremendous argument they have with one another where they're very very frank and each attacks the other system and so on but this actually builds up a basis of trust nobody's conceding points of principle but they enjoy the talk and it's very frank and clear and they then see that there are actually things that they can think about together and so as some sort of human rapport is established and some idea that well you know we don't have to be threatening one another all the time and from that um mr such as all right we can move she had the confidence that the western system would ultimately prevail both economically and militarily and politically uh and that confidence pushed her forward to think well you can also negotiate and so off she went to president reagan that very weak um flew via p king and hong kong um and pearl harbor she dropped in on the way in the middle of the night by the way to washington saw president reagan to talk about this to tell him because the reagan administration needed some persuading on this matter and a lot of people who admired mrs hatcher in the administration did not agree with her about this um that this was worth pursuing and when she got to him reagan did yeah and of course that was the key thing that reagan did and um what she was trying to do all the time was to keep the alliance together um prevent gorbachev from driving a wedge between western allies but help move president reagan on and so when in that tribute she was talking about gorbachev as a man of good will um that's a good phrase because she wasn't saying he was right about anything but she was saying that he he had the necessary will you could have the conversation with him charles let me ask about one um this is frustrating because even if it's a web and we can talk i'd love to talk for i'd like to have a five hour conversation with you i like mr moore we can do business together but let me ask about one aspect of her relationship with ronald reagan and this is this is to me it's so fascinating because it's a disagreement and there's policy and it was questions of uh analysis but also the friendship all bound up in this reagan strategic defense initiative or star wars now she doesn't like it and in fact there's i can't remember the year 84 perhaps she flies to camp david it hammers out this agreement four points which was yes this was the same occasion as she was saw him about gorbachev yes yes and and and um uh one of the four points was that the strategic defense initiative would be used to enhance deterrence rather than undermine it and as best i read the situation president reagan just said well whatever her form of words will please her let her have it but she she wanted to to tie the strategic defense initiative into the status quo which wasn't the game he was playing at all he wanted to overturn the status quo reykjavik 1986 reagan almost agrees to gorbachev sweeping proposals to reduce nuclear weapons and walks out in the end because gorbachev says you must limit sdi to research only no deployment mrs thatcher in her autobiography on reykjavik it was like an earthquake there was no place where you could put your political feet and yet later she writes that the decision to pursue the strategic defense initiative was the most far-reaching and consequential of reagan's administration put all that together for me will you well i think i think it can be done i mean she was she was very shocked not not by sti but by reagan's belief that you could just do away with nuclear weapons she did not agree with him about that she she thought that nuclear weapons were the best guarantee of peace in a wicked world because of the deterrent effect and whenever he said let's get rid of the whole lot this this really frightened her she was worried about sdi for similar reasons because she thought this was a utopian idea about how you could supersede all existing but she also could see its great political utility um and and it's it's capacity to uh make the russians feel they couldn't keep up so when she was doing all this stuff about you can have the research but not the deployment what she was trying to do was to get a line which all the allies could agree on so that there wouldn't be a terrible bust up between the other allies and the united states um she was very happy that reagan pushed sdi forward not as an actual reality of exactly what you're going to do but as a sort of concept that would terrify the russians charles segment five last segment to last what she leaves us 1990 margaret thatcher's final appearance in the house of commons as prime minister after 11 years they made her the longest-serving prime minister since lord liverpool and that's a test of how long ago it was because nobody remembers lord liverpool uh so question is she worn out is she weary is she fatigued take a look i give way to the honorable gentleman i'm extremely grateful the the prime minister is aware that uh i detest every single one of her domestic policies and i've never had that and i think that the honorable gentleman knows that i have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of east europe have experienced it i think i must have had the right nail on their head when i pointed out that the logic of those policies are they'd rather have the poor poorer once they start to talk about the gap they'd rather the gap was that down here that not that she's for superb so long as the gap is smaller the longer the smaller they'd rather have the poor poorer you do not create wealth and opportunity that way you do not create a property owning democracy that way she won the falklands war she played a central role in the western victory in the west victory in the cold war she led the conservative party to three victories in general elections behind germany italy and france in living standards when she took office britain is essentially pulled even by the time she leaves office and it's she set policies in place that permit britain to overtake all three in the following decade her own colleagues in the conservative party turfed her out why well my own interpretation of is that it was a top-down revolt rather than a bottom-up revolt and i think it was really because her colleagues were fed up with her being in charge of them for so long and she was not always polite to them uh and also a lot of she did not mellow no she didn't mellow no and in fact she probably got more arrogant with the passing of the years and she also had a profound difference of opinion with them about the european union because she believed that the european union was going to take away british sovereignty um and uh become the united states of europe of a very dangerous kind and many of them disagreed and so they capitalized on her wider unpopularity which was more to do with a particular tax that she'd introduced and the fact she'd been in for so long and they led a sort of coup against her even in that coup against her which was a leadership ballot of her members of parliament she won she got more votes than her opponent but not enough to prevent a second ballot and and therefore she was advised that uh this was unwise to push it any longer there wasn't enough backing and she went and she was probably right to do that but it was an extraordinary thing because i saw her shortly afterwards and i said she was going to write her memoirs which of course she did and i said what are you going to call them and she said undefeated and the reason for that was of course that it was absolutely true that she was undefeated she won as you say all those election and she'd actually won the leadership ballot which caused her to leave but it also expressed her character because she felt she prevailed in the matters in which she wished to prevail charles her legacy mrs thatcher wants the united kingdom rule from the palace of westminster she defeats the unions in 1984 she completes a thousand years of british political development the house of commons rules britain and now we have an assembly in scotland an assembly in wales that have taken sovereignty away from the house of commons and still more to the point a constant leeching of sovereignty to brussels she wanted a britain that was proud of its own identity today we're well into multiculturalism and with the 20 years of immigration and high birth rates among the muslim population there are neighborhoods particularly in the north where sharia law is a is a an alternative to british law she wants free markets she wants constant pressure on the welfare state today the conservative prime minister david cameron talks incessantly about social services he sounds more like edward heath than like margaret thatcher she wanted a britain that was strong as strong as was reasonable based on its the size of its economy and this past spring prime minister david cameron a conservative her successor as conservative prime minister even as he was calling on nato to commence operations in libya he was shrinking british defense spending and decommissioning the last british aircraft carrier the ark royal which by the way in this morning's news they put it up for auction and a hong kong firm wants to buy the ark royal and turn it into a floating shopping mall what did she leave that lasts uh well i would say that she left first of all a huge change in um economic ideas so that nobody wants to go back to all the state subsidy union power um nationalized industries and this became a global concept that she exported of which privatization is the best known so that is common ground even with the moderate left these days i mean they don't really like it but nobody wants to go back secondly i think she left an idea which in my opinion will go on as much as one can say ever say in politics forever all over the world which is a certain robust idea of freedom a sort of active idea of freedom um and a sense that if you work hard enough at this you can prevail it's true that the immediate legacy of sort of 20 years on is very contested and mrs hatch is a very very controversial figure and she um never took any prisoners so there were people who were horrified by what she did and wished to overturn it and so there's she's someone who stirs up tremendous emotions there was an element of damage in that but it was a price worth paying i think for her belief that you must tell the truth and that the trouble with democratic politics is that illusions tend to prevail because it illusions are easier now i noticed that as we're in an era of deficits and massive debt problems and massive government spending problems i noticed because i've been working on this for some time that her reputation is growing very much in the united kingdom having been having been gone quite low at one point because people see how much she tried to deal with real problems and what they tend to notice is that current politicians are not dealing so much with real problems and i and i detect a similar debate going on in the united states i i think there's a feeling and you often get people say not people who necessarily agree with her but they say we need a maggie thatcher so she is a substantive achievement yes i think it's very much if you think rising generation something to hold on to everything to do with margaret thatcher is not not precisely ideological it's very much to do with character as well it's to do with how can somebody here and here's this example of this woman all alone tackle the problems that need tackling uh margaret's actually is a titanic figure in the history of britain and i think she has already entered myth and so as you know the the the symbols of monarchy in britain are the orb and the scepter um but the symbol of power with margaret thatcher is the handbag and this this thing um could could come to mean so much and this thing's wielded by her uh the symbol of power tells you a huge amount about the change of the role of women in society the importance of character and the importance of a particularly british approach to political rule which i think will continue to mean a lot for centuries final question margaret thatcher summed up ronald reagan's place in history in one sentence ronald reagan won the cold war without firing a shot you've produced a book on margaret thatcher could i ask you to try for one sentence what should we what should we hold on to about her she had the courage of her convictions and her convictions were proved right by the course of history charles moore journalist and biographer of margaret thatcher thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson and before i say goodbye i'd like you to know that for access to thousands of historical documents relating to mrs thatcher and her time in government you can visit the thatcher foundation at easiest web address in the world to remember margaret thatcher one word margaret thatcher.org and now peter robinson for uncommon knowledge saying thank you

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Length: 39min 12sec (2352 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2011