Margaret Thatcher Has Some Fun

With the passing of the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest political leaders of the post WWII world, let's take the opportunity to watch a portion of her last appearance in the House Of Commons as Prime Minister in 1990.  She's quite clearly having a good time responding to questions (if you've ever watched her other Question Time appearances you will know she was a formidable debater).  At the end of this video you can see the reference to the single currency.  It is thanks to Margaret Thatcher that Britain did not join and thus does not face the crisis that the rest of the EU is currently facing.  As yesterday's Business Insider noted, she predicted that the euro would be a disaster. 

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Thatcher was her ability to provoke her opponents in ways that revealed more about them than they intended.  British politics and society had always been class and status obsessed (and hostile to women) but by the time Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister in 1979 the opposition Labour and Liberal parties had become the home of the chattering classes (BBC, media, academics, the Oxbridge crowd and the younger generation of inherited wealth).  It drove these groups crazy that someone like Thatcher, who did not go to the "right" schools, and was a shopkeepers daughter(!), was not only Prime Minister, but refused to accept the assumptions embedded within the liberal shibboleths they had learned to faithfully recite and would instead attack their very premises.

Another topic that induced cognitive dissonance with her opponents was the subject of coal.  There is a whole genre of British films over the past thirty years glamorizing coal towns and miners (see, for instance, Billy Elliot) and explicitly or implicitly condemning Thatcherism.It's quite odd when you think about it since coal is the chief villain for those who see global warming as priority #1 and who tend to be the very people who make the movies celebrating coal as long as they can take a poke at Thatcher.  There's a further oddity here.  Margaret Thatcher was the first political leader to raise concerns over human activities raising global temperatures after she has persuaded by her scientific advisors of the potential threat in the 1980s.  The opening of the natural gas fields in the North Sea and the closure of much of the coal industry, strenously objected to at the time by the British Left, significantly reduced CO2 emissions by Britain.

And, of course, the greatest irony is that the largest reduction in CO2 emissions in the past 50 years was when the policies of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (see, Tear Down This Wall) led to victory over the Evil Empire in the Cold War.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe caused the largest reduction of CO2 emissions in human history.  The scale is really quite enormous.  From 1990 to 1995, global CO2 emissions increased by 4%.  However, in Britain (transitioning to gas), the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe emissions were reduced by 26%!  This reduction amounted to 1.6 billion tons a year or more than Japan or India currently emit in a year and which far exceeds the reductions achieved by the European Union in the 15 years since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol.

In fact, without Thatcher's closure of the British coal industry and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there simply would not have been a Kyoto Protocol.  So, if global warming is your top priority give Thatcher (and Reagan) a big thanks.

If you'd like to read more here is a wonderful tribute from Andrew Sullivan, who writes of the pre-Thatcher Britain of the 1970s:

To put it bluntly: The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. . . . .And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete.