This extraordinary review (in the London Review of Books) of the 1,000 plus page Volume III (!!!) of the Thatcher biography informs us, rather less than directly, how Thatcher ensured the later European Union's weakness, arising from her hostility to a European project, and then wanted to expand the European super government to Eastern Europe, which is what led so many of them to freely move to Great Britain, England and Wales largely, that set up the backlash in those two areas.
The reviewer, David Runciman, has buried the lede in my not humble view, but I understand how he was more caught up in the Tory male led coup against Thatcher in 1990 and John Major, her protege and then heir apparent for the personal enemies she made, ascending to the prime minister position. I get why he would focus on the fourth term win for the Tories over a divided Labour Party with a leader who overestimated his ability to overcome the challenges he faced. But in the end, it is disappointing he did not recognize more directly how Thatcher's right wing politics continue to infuse and energize British political diminution and eventual self-destruction. He sort of says this at the end of his piece, but he seems to not understand the anti-Establishment impulse that led to Corbyn's ascension into the leadership of the Labour Party is a harbinger of more divisions among the working and middle classes inside Great Britain, at a time when the finally coming Brexit will highlight and exacerbate those differences.
Elsewhere in the LRB is Susan Pedersen, reviewing two other books about the Thatcher-Blair era, and recognizing the continuities, much as I have long recognized the continuities between the Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama eras. Here is an early paragraph showing her astute understanding of the past forty years and our roles as Boomers in this devolution on both sides of the Atlantic:
"We have a term, then (i.e. neo-liberalism) but we’re only now beginning to have a history. It leans towards intellectual genealogy (neoliberalism traced to the Mont Pelerin group, or to Austrian economists, or American neocons) or to institutional analysis, as each element of our global order (tax havens, financial markets, welfare-to-work systems, enterprise zones) is brought under the microscope. But there is a bottom-up history of neoliberalism to be written too: a history, perhaps, of how the most common and human desires – for decent homes, better schools for our children, better healthcare for our parents, richer and happier lives – were used to help bring a solidaristic social order down under the rubric of ‘choice’. How on earth do we understand that? These two smart, forensic, geographically situated, and analytically complementary accounts of aspects of the postwar order offer some clues. (I should say that I know both the authors.)"
As I have said about us Boomers, and the addled Oldsters, we are all complicit. And here is another source of proof for my observation about mass complicity among us Boomers and Oldsters. I give you Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who stole from the Red Line mass transit money for Baltimore and handed it out to whiter and wealthier suburbs for infrastructure work, all while self-dealing.
