Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [483]
My aim in going to Poland was to continue that strategy towards the eastern bloc countries which I had first begun in Hungary in 1984. I wanted to open up these countries — their governments and peoples — to western influence and to exert pressure for respect for human rights and for political and economic reform. But Poland’s recent past demonstrated how dependent events in such countries were on the intentions of the Soviet Union. Whether one regarded General Jaruzelski as a patriot stepping in to prevent worse things befalling his fellow countrymen or just as a Soviet puppet, the circumstances under which martial law was imposed and Solidarity crushed in 1981 were an unforgettable lesson in the reality of power politics. Now the political and economic bankruptcy of the Jaruzelski Government was again apparent and its authority challenged by a revived Solidarity. The role of the West — above all of a visiting western leader — was to give heart to the anti-communists, while urging on them a carefully calculated response to the opportunities they had to improve conditions and increase their influence; and in dealings with the Government it must be to combine straight talking about the need for change with an attitude which avoided outright and counterproductive conflict. It would not be an easy task.
For their part, the authorities were determined to make it harder still. On the eve of my visit the Government announced their intention to close the Lenin Shipyard at Gdansk, the home of Solidarity. It was a trap and one no less dangerous for being clumsy. The communists hoped that I would be forced to welcome the closure of uneconomic plant and to condemn Solidarity’s resistance to it on the grounds of ‘Thatcherite’ economics. Some commentators fully expected me to fall for this. For example, a leader in The Times on the eve of my visit noted:
The Prime Minister sets out today on a visit many will say she should not be making. Her trip to Poland was always a questionable proposition, capable of being interpreted as a gesture of succour to the Jaruzelski regime. Now it is doubly so.
In fact, even the official published figures suggested that although the Lenin Shipyard was in a very weak economic position it was not making the greatest ‘losses’, which clearly implied that the decision to single it out had been politically not economically motivated. Anyway, since 90 per cent of the work at the shipyard was done for the Soviet Union, its viability depended on little more than the exchange rate between the rouble and the zloty. Where there is no real market there can be no real estimates of ‘profit’ and ‘loss’. But there was far more to it than that. I was convinced that you cannot expect people to shoulder the kind of economic responsibility which would be expected in a western economy unless they are granted the freedoms we expect in a western society.
In the light of these manoeuvrings I was glad that from the beginning I had insisted that there should be an unofficial as well as an official side to my visit. I was not prepared to be prevented from meeting Lech Walesa and the leading opponents of the regime. To his credit, I felt, General Jaruzelski did not raise objections to my doing so. Otherwise, of course, I would indeed