Samizdata

Nicholas Wapshott, a columnist and book author about Reagan and other historical figures, has seen the film, “The Iron Lady” (about Margaret Thatcher). I am going to see the film this evening with my wife and two friends, both of whom are pretty big fans of the lady. Wapshott, writing over at Reuters, hated the film. (Reuters carries signed columns these days, and its writers can be far more open about their biases, which is all to the good).

“But it is the chilling image of a once dominant leader reduced to a fumbling, mumbling old crone that is the movie’s main theme and, while it may pass muster as a sly piece of brutal political theater, as a record of Thatcher and her many achievements, both for good and ill, it is a pitiless, poisonous travesty. Streep has lent her extraordinary acting skills to perhaps the most shameful and cruel piece of political revenge ever to have made it to the screen.”

“Would Henry Fonda have volunteered his name and faultless reputation to “The Deranged Mr. Lincoln”? Anthony Hopkins dignified Oliver Stone’s somber “Nixon” by trying to get beneath the skin of the paranoid president brought down by his private demons. Even Josh Brolin in Stone’s hilarious “W” made America’s most contentious president in recent times a likeable, surprisingly complex eldest son yearning to show his father he was worthy of winning the White House.”

Another paragraph from later in the review:

“It is in the context of Thatcher sharply reducing the size of the state that the violence between picketers and police and the poll tax riots that punctuated her reign can be best understood. There is a high political price to be paid for redrawing the boundaries between the private and public sectors, and for deliberately provoking a recession, in the face of well organized opposition. In “The Iron Lady,” the newsreel shots of cars burning and mounted police beating miners with batons are left unexplained.”

Wapshott’s review is interesting because, as I noted a few weeks back when discussing a review I read in the Spectator, some reviewers from the left have had their brains scrambled by a film that makes them sympathise with a person who has lost some of her mental powers.

So, having read this review, I am still going to see the film with an expectation that this will be an interesting production. For the subject of this remarkable person continues to fascinate, a fact no doubt given heightened interest due to how, for example, the disaster of the eurozone has given some of her old skepticism about the hubris of Eurofederalism new relevance. Her old preaching about the importance of thrift, saving and hard work is hardly irrelevant.

The changes that Margaret Thatcher wrought in the UK are profound, but it is also worth pointing out that she fell short of what she might have hoped for on a number of fronts. The state continues to take a huge chunk of our money; our higher education system, much of the media and chattering classes are reflexively anti-capitalist and at odds with some of the key features of Western civilisation. Even today, there are those who pine for the old, brutal certainties of Soviet-era collectivism. And from a libertarian/classical liberal point of view, the Thatcher era disappointed: no real change to the Welfare State; erosions of certain civil liberties; imperfect privatisation; missteps on Europe (such as, arguably, the Single European Act). Welfarism and the associated creation of an underclass of feral, uneducatable youngsters, was not really addressed during her time in office (but then again, it has not been addressed for the past 20 years, hence the kind of violence that hit the UK last summer).

And yet those of us old enough to remember what a mess Britain was in during the 1970s, with its hideous inflation, endless strikes, shabby goods and services, eroding willingness to confront foreign aggressions and general crapness, cannot fail to be struck by the scale of what was achieved in Thatcher’s term of office. In the private sector, the union closed shop is no more; inflation, while still a serious problem (as this blog often points out), is not in the double-digit levels it used to be. Some of the old, inefficient state-run industries have been put into mostly private hands; the City of London, despite some criticisms that can be made of the “Big Bang” deregulation, is unquestionably one of the greatest financial hubs on Earth. And consider this detail although it comes across as a bit crass at times: even a state broadcaster such as the BBC has a show called “Dragon’s Den”, which is about would-be entrepreneurs pitching for venture capital funding on TV. Such a celebration of business would have been unthinkable on such a channel 30 years ago. Mrs Thatcher told the British that it was okay to make the most of yourself. For all her faults and errors, that is one of the “vigorous virtues” (to use a term from a book on Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin) that endures.

And to call oneself a socialist is still, let’s not forget, not nearly as easy for a politician to do today if he or she wants to get elected. Somewhere during the 80s and 90s, I think, that term was discredited to a significant degree. Not just by Thatcher, granted – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the associated discrediting of Soviet-style central planning did for that. But her relentless attacks on socialism and central planning, and her championing of the free market, played a significant part.

Here is a good book on Mrs T by Claire Berlinski, published some time ago. Recommended. Another book worth checking out is the new opus on the history of the Conservative Party by Robin Harris. Charles Moore, whose biography of Thatcher comes out after she dies, has a good column up at Vanity Fair.

Anyway, I’ll write about my own impressions at a suitable point.

“Putting Meryl’s performance aside – I’ve raved about it enough, plus it was only a pie, and there was no custard – you do not get any sense of Thatcher’s political coming of age. Why did she believe what she believed, and why so vehemently? Why go to war, for example, over an island no one in Britain cared about? You also get no sense of the human cost of her policies, how she disadvantaged the poor and took a hammer to the society she did not believe in.”

Deborah Ross, writing a review of the film, The Iron Lady (about Margaret Thatcher), page 88, The Spectator (behind the paywall). Here is the Spectator link for those who pay for the thing.

It is quite amusing, in a grim sort of way, to see how a writer such as Ms Ross is torn by her admiration for the film as a piece of moviemaking art and its sympathetic portrayal of Lady Thatcher, and her own leftist opinions concerning the alleged impact of this person on the United Kingdom (her remarks about the Falklands presumably indicate Ms Ross would have let the Argentine junta just take the Falklands, but she never tells us in the short space available).

As a free market liberal, I certainly do not revere this politician (the government share of GDP at the end of her time in office was barely different from at the start and some thumpingly bad domestic legislation, like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, got passed), but it is nevertheless rather striking how certain film critics have had their heads messed by this film.

I am definitely going to see it. US-based movie reviewer Kyle Smith really liked it, and for the sort of reasons that, I suspect, upset Ms Ross.