by Mark Steyn
Nevertheless, she won. In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail. . . . The government owned every industry—or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants, and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.
Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles—although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and the United Kingdom’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.
Mrs. Thatcher saved her country—and then went on to save an enervated “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off—as so much had already been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a western nation to go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV, embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in 1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more formidable?
And, even when Mrs. Thatcher won her victory, the civilizational cringe of the west was so strong that all the experts immediately urged her to throw it away and reward the Argentine junta for its aggression. “We were prepared to negotiate before,” she responded, “but not now. We have lost a lot of blood, and it’s the best blood.” Or as a British sergeant said of the Falklands: “If they’re worth fighting for, then they must be worth keeping.”
Mrs. Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, at a time when everyone else assumed decline was inevitable. Some years ago, I found myself standing next to her at dusk in the window of a country house in England’s East Midlands, not far from where she grew up. We stared through the lead diamond mullions at a perfect scene of ancient rural tranquility—lawns, the “ha-ha” (an English horticultural innovation), and the fields and hedgerows beyond, looking much as it would have done half a millennium earlier. Mrs. T. asked me about my corner of New Hampshire (90 percent wooded and semi-wilderness) and then said that what she loved about the English countryside was that man had improved on nature: “England’s green and pleasant land” looked better because the English had been there. For anyone with a sense of history’s sweep, the strike-ridden socialist basket case of the British Seventies was not an economic downturn but a stain on national honor.
A generation on, the Thatcher era seems more and more like a magnificent but temporary interlude in a great nation’s bizarre, remorseless self-dissolution. She was right and they were wrong, and because of that they will never forgive her. “I have been waiting for that witch to die for thirty years,” said Julian Styles, fifty-eight, who was laid off from his factory job in 1984, when he was twenty-nine. “Tonight is party time. I am drinking one drink for every year I’ve been out of work.” And when they call last orders and the final chorus of “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” dies away, who then will he blame?
During the Falklands War, the Prime Minister quoted Shakespeare, from the closing words of King John:
And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
For eleven tumultuous years, Margaret Thatcher did shock them. But the deep corrosion of a nation is hard to reverse: England to itself rests anything but true.
THE REFORMATION OF MANNERS
Maclean’s, March 19, 2007
“WILLIAM WILBERFORCE,” WRITES Eric Metaxas in his book Amazing Grace, “was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that’s ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again—and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.”
What did Wilberforce “cure”? Two centuries ago, on March 25, 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the passage by Parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty’s realms and territories. It’s not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic—a SARS or bird flu that flares up and whirrs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system teaches it as such—as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition.
In reality, it was more like the common cold—a fact of life. The institution predates the word’s etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas puts it, “Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.”
I’m not sure whether Amazing Grace the movie is the film of the book or whether Amazing Grace the biography is the book of the film. But Metaxas’s book does a better job of conveying the scale of the challenge than Michael Apted’s film. The director of Gorky Park and 007’s The World Is Not Enough and the ongoing “7 Up” TV documentaries, Apted has made a conventional period biopic—men in wigs sparring with each other across the floor of the House of Commons, some rather flat scenes with the little woman back home, the now traditional figure of the “numinous Negro” (in Richard Brookhiser’s phrase), although for once he’s not played by Morgan Freeman; and a lot of argument by empathy—the chains in which slaves are transported to the Indies being slapped down dramatically on the tables of London dining rooms. In between come irritating slabs of plonkingly anachronistic dialogue—Wilberforce has to choose between doing “the work of God or the work of a political activist”—and more subtly so: Pitt the Younger rebukes his friend with the words, “I warn you as your prime minister”—not a phrase the King’s first minister would have used back then.
But the costume dramatics and the contemporary emotionalizing miss the scale of the abolitionist’s achievement. “What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,” says Metaxas, “something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.” Ownership of existing slaves continued in the British West Indies for another quarter-century, and in the United States for another sixty years, and slave trading continued in Turkey until Atatürk abolished it in the Twenties and in Saudi Arabia until it was (officially) banned in the Sixties, and it persists in Africa and other pockets of the world to this day.
But not as a broadly accepted “human good.”
There was some hard-muscle enforcement that accompanied the new law: the Royal Navy announced that it would regard all slave ships as pirates, and thus they were liable to sinking and their crews to execution. There had been some important court decisions: in the reign of William and Mary, Justice Holt had ruled that “one may be a villeyn in England, but not a slave,” and in 1803 William Osgoode, Chief Justice of Lower Canada, ruled that the institution was not compatible with the principles of British law. But what was decisive was the way Wilberforce “murdered” (in Metaxas’s word) the old acceptance of slavery by the wider society. As he wrote in 1787, “God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”
The latter goal we would now formulate as “changing the culture”—which is what he did. The film of Amazing Grace shows the Duke of Clarence and other effete toffs reeling under a lot of lame bromides hurled by Wilberforce on behalf of “the people.” But, in fact, “the people” were a large part of the problem. Then as now, citizens of advanced democracies are easily distracted. The eighteenth-century Church of England preached “a tepid kind of moralism” disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of Don Juan, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blasé even to be shocked. The Paris Hilton of the age, the Prince of Wales, was celebrated for having bedded seven thousand women and snipped from each a keepsake hair. Twenty-five percent of all unmarried females in London were whores; the average age of a prostitute was sixteen; and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of fourteen. Many of these features—weedy faint-hearted mainstream churches, skanky celebs, weary provocations for jaded debauchees—will strike a chord in our own time.
“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” remarked Adam Smith. England survived the eighteenth century, and maybe we will survive the twenty-first. But the life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. What we think of as “the Victorian era” was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce which he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We, children of the twentieth century, mock our nineteenth-century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it’s because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a “social conscience”: in the 1790s, a good man could stroll past an eleven-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the Nineties as the “broken windows” theory: “The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.”
The Victorians, if plunked down before the Anna Nicole updates for an hour or two, would probably conclude we’re nearer the 18th century than their own. A “social conscience” obliges the individual to act. Today we call for action all the time, but mostly from government, which is another way of excusing us and allowing us to get on with the distractions of the day. Our schoolhouses revile the Victorian do-gooders as condescending racists and oppressors—although the single greatest force for ending slavery around the world was the Royal Navy. Isn’t societal self-loathing just another justification for lethargy? After all, if the white man is inherently wicked, that pretty much absolves one from having to do anything. And so the same kind of lies we told ourselves about slaves we now tell ourselves about other faraway people, and for the same reason: because big changes are tough and who needs the hassle? The hardest thing in any society is “the reformation of manners.”
POSTSCRIPT
EVERYONE’S A CRITIC
THROWAWAY LINE
The Daily Telegraph, January 5, 1987
MOSS HART, THE American playwright, used to say that the most satisfying moment for a writer was when he had finished something and nobody had yet seen it. I agree. Nothing beats the exhilarating feeling of punching that last typewriter key.
Of course, one’s happiness may be only fleeting. But, for the moment, there’s no one around to say it stinks—or, worse, “I appreciate that it was only meant as a ‘humorous’ article, but I should point out that that type of bird is not, in fact, found in Western Samoa.”
I’m not so sure I still agree with that Moss Hart line, and I do like to hear from Samoan ornithologists now and again. One of my favorites in that vein was prompted by a casual aside about the strange misapprehension of the British that the rest of the world wishes it had a health service just like theirs—with its two-year waits for hip replacement and C difficile–infested hospital wards and all the other delights. Here’s what I wrote:
The Daily Telegraph, September 3, 1993
To any outsider, the capacity of the British for self-delusion is amazing.
“The National Health Service is the envy of the world”: really? Maybe to a yak farmer in Bhutan, but not to anyone I’ve ever spoken to in Western Europe, North America, or Australia.
A couple of days later, the following missive appeared on our letters page:
Bhutan’s health service better
SIR—Mark Steyn’s off-the-cuff remarks about yak farmers in Bhutan being the only ones in the world to envy the NHS cannot be allowed to pass without comment.
Bhutan, although small and poor, has devoted a large proportion of its resources to provide free, comprehensive health care for its scattered population, including the yak farmers, who incidentally constitute a small minority of the population.
Starting from scratch in the Sixties, Bhutan had achieved 90 per cent coverage of primary health by 1991. . . .
I may not be a “yak farmer” but I am a Bhutanese. I regret to say that my experience with the NHS has been disappointing. Both my parents-in-law, who are British citizens, have had to wait more than two years for operations, after being turned away several times for lack of hospital beds.
However basic the Bhutanese health service is, it has not yet come to this sorry state.
SONAM CHHOKI
Say what you like about Bhutanese yak farmers, but they don’t have to worry about Obama tearing up their plans.
MY FAVORITE WAHHABI
The Daily Telegraph, September 28, 2002
I AM SORRY to hear that Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, has been “recalled” to Riyadh. Like many Spectator readers, I enjoyed his recent laugh-a-minute interview with Boris Johnson, in which he demonstrated to Boris the best technique for lashing sodomites and adulteresses and gleefully mocked the idea that the west could transform Iraq into the kind of democracy where Boris would “inherit a safe seat in Basra South from Michael Heseltine.”1
At this point, I should declare an interest. In the last year, among the torrent of dreary missives from leftie terror apologists accusing me of being a “hatemonger,” Ghazi (as I like to think of him) was the only critic I looked forward to. It started quietly after one of my routine calls for the overthrow of the House of Saud. His Excellency wrote to The Spectator to say that “ever since Mark Steyn, maps at the ready, threatened to dismantle Saudi Arabia, our population has been living in a state of high anxiety and fear. Our children are having nightmares and our old men and women are quaking in terror. We promise,” he added, to “drink our own oil,” “teach nothing in our schools except pornography and devil worship, and refer to all Muslims, ourselves included, as either ‘Islamofascists’ or ‘Islamabaddies.’”
Well, the following week I made some passing reference to “that famous Saudi sense of humour”
and Dr. Algosaibi wrote back to mock another “riveting spectacle” by “Mark Steyn, the dismantler of sovereign nations and destabilizer of whole regions”—which I liked so much I’ve had it put on my business cards (“Consultations by Appointment”). After the Saudi World Cup team lost eight–nil, I mused in this space on whether the entire squad were Mossad Jew infiltrators. His Excellency wrote to The Telegraph denying this “interesting theory” and offering the alternative claim that the U.S. team were knocked out by “a Wahhabi Islamofascist masquerading as a German player who used his terrorist head to score the goal.”
A couple of weeks later, I wrote a column pronouncing Osama bin Laden dead. Ghazi responded by noting my “obsession” with “Osama bin Laden’s ‘trouser department.’ Mr. Steyn is looking for a dirty bomb, and he is looking in the right place.”
My obsession with Osama’s trouser department is as nothing to Sheikh Algosaibi’s obsession with me. Me in general, I hasten to add, not my trouser department. They’re not big on that in Saudi, and I wouldn’t want Ghazi landing back in Riyadh to find them sharpening the scimitar for him.
But, if you have to pick a London envoy to get into a feud with, I reckon I did better than Barbara Amiel with her French ambassador.2 My guy’s a non-stop laugh-riot: he could be the first Wahhabi to play the Catskills, which is more than you can say for the Saudis’ oleaginous man in Washington, Prince Bandar.