Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [6]
I held these conclusions very tentatively at the war’s end. But they hardened into firm convictions in the 1940s and ’50s when, in the face of the Soviet threat, those institutions like NATO which represented international co-operation between strong nation-states proved far more effective in resisting that threat than bodies like the United Nations which embodied a superficially more ambitious but in reality weaker internationalism. My concern in 1979 was that the resistance of NATO to the latest Soviet threat was less adequate than I would have liked precisely because national morale in most NATO countries, including Britain, was so depressed. To resist the Soviet Union effectively it would be necessary to restore our own self-confidence (and, of course, our military strength) beforehand.
I recalled a similar collapse of national morale from my first days in active politics as a Young Conservative fighting the 1945–51 Labour Government. Some nostalgia for the austerity period apparently lingers. That is, I believe, an exercise in vicarious sacrifice, always more palatable than the real thing. Seen from afar, or from above, whether by a socialist gentleman in Whitehall or by a High Tory, socialism has a certain nobility: equal sacrifice, fair shares, everyone pulling together. Seen from below, however, it looked very different. Fair shares somehow always turn out to be small shares. Then, someone has to enforce their fairness; someone else has to check that this fairness does not result in black markets or under-the-counter favouritism; and a third person has to watch the first two to make sure that the administrators of fairness end up with no more than their fair share. All this promotes an atmosphere of envy and tittle-tattle. No one who lived through austerity, who can remember snoek, Spam, and utility clothing, could mistake the petty jealousies, minor tyrannies, ill-neighbourliness and sheer sourness of those years for idealism and equality. Even the partial dismantling of the ration-book state in the early 1950s came as an immense psychological relief to most people.
I particularly remember the political atmosphere of those years. Although the Tory rethinking associated with Rab Butler and the Conservative Research Department was important in reviving the Tory Party’s intellectual claims to office, there was a somewhat more robust and elementary rethinking going on at the grass roots. Our inspiration was less Rab Butler’s Industrial Charter than books like Colm Brogan’s anti-socialist satire, Our New Masters, which held up the moral pretensions of socialists to relentless and brilliant mockery, and Hayek’s powerful Road to Serfdom, dedicated to ‘the socialists of all parties’. Such books not only provided crisp, clear analytical arguments against socialism, demonstrating how its economic theories were connected to the then depressing shortages of our daily lives; but by their wonderful mockery of socialist follies, they also gave us the feeling that the other side simply could not win in the end. That is a vital feeling in politics; it eradicates past defeats and builds future victories. It left a permanent mark on my own political character, making me a long-term optimist for free enterprise and liberty and sustaining me through the bleak years of socialist supremacy in the 1960s and ’70s.
I was elected to the House of Commons in 1959 as the Member for Finchley, and later served