The logical conclusion of this position, of course, went way beyond
skepticism. It was that Britain had no place in the EU. Though she
did not dare say so explicitly, Thatcher was now intimating to the
British that they should contemplate leaving the EU. Nationalist
statements on these lines started to appear in the British press. "Up
yours, Delors" ran a famous headline in a British tabloid.

Amusing though this knock-about act was, it also represented the
point at which Thatcher lost contact with broad public opinion and
thus launched her party on its nose-dive. The poll data should have
made this obvious to her. Starting from the 1975 referendum, British
voters--whether in real votes or in opinion polls--have almost always
rejected the idea of withdrawal, usually by significant majorities.
The 1975 referendum went 67-33 against withdrawal. This pattern was
the rule throughout the Thatcher years. Whereas at the height of the
1980 budgetary crisis opinion split 26-65 against continued
membership, this attitude was not sustained. By 1991 opinion had
reversed itself, and despite eleven years of Thatcher's Euro-bashing,
opinion ran 62-28 in favor of continued membership. These numbers
have now narrowed, but 1997 polls still show support for outright
withdrawal at under 20 percent. The risible showing of the rabidly
anti-EU Referendum Party in the May election reinforces the point.

None of this means that the British are enthusiastic about the EU--as
their answers to specific questions make clear. On monetary union,
for example, or the powers of the European Parliament, the British,
including the committedly pro-EU Liberal Democrats, betray a fair
degree of suspicion toward EU institutions. But this does not imply
that the British came (or come) anywhere near to accepting Thatcher's
implied line that they are better out than in.

Over the years the British have significantly changed their views on
their national priorities. In 1969 they ranked the United States and
the Commonwealth comfortably ahead of Europe as "most important to
Britain." By 1993, Europe outranked the Commonwealth and the United
States by factors of three and four, respectively. Even in today's
climate of EU gloom, Europe is ranked in first place by twice as many
people as the Commonwealth andthe United States. They may not find
the EU warm and cuddly, but they have a clear notion of their
national interest.

As Thatcher's anti-EU fanaticism caused her to stray ever further
from that notion, her downfall became merely a matter of time. In
1989 the Conservatives suffered a significant set-back in the
elections for the European Parliament. When Britain's EU isolation
became plain to see at successive meetings of the European Council in
Dublin and Rome, the time for action had come. Howe's devastating
House of Commons speech of November 13 of that year, in which he
accused Thatcher of presenting the country with a "false antithesis,
a bogus dilemma" on EU matters, launched the Tory leadership contest
that was eventually won by Major.

Thatcher learnt nothing from her rejection. Instead, she went onto
the offensive. In her writings and speeches, particularly in the
United States, she drew a highly tendentious contrast between the
disintegration of central planning in Eastern Europe and its supposed
reemergence in the EU. In taking this tack, she gave succor to the
least responsible elements in her party. This, in turn, caused Major
to flub his opportunity in 1992 to restore sense to Britain's EU
posture. At that time, fresh from his surprising election victory, he
could have secured parliamentary ratification of the Maastricht
Treaty with a two-thirds majority. His failure to do so had the
effect of delivering the Conservative Party to the
Euro-rejectionists--and to the fratricidal strife that led to the
1997 debacle.

Of course, Thatcherism was and is about more than the EU. Her
achievements on trade union reform, privatization, and the assertion
of liberty will outlive her EU mistakes. Nonetheless, her perversity
in this area has a long reach. It precipitated the first major crisis
in Labour policymaking and will ensure that Britain is not among the
first wave of EMU members. This means that, yet again, countries
other than Britain will enjoy first dibs on setting the rules and
habits of an EU institution that in the fullness of time Britain will
undoubtedly need to join.

As the Tories begin their painful process of rebuilding, they need to
ponder the Thatcher legacy dispassionately. A cool head will tell
them that, thanks to Thatcher, they are at present saddled with an
untenable European policy. In effect, this means their domestic
policy is also untenable. With the opinion polls moving against
Europe, they may be tempted to continue along this path, but the
history of Britain's relationship with Europe strongly suggests that
this will be a dead end.

Hague has inherited an unelectable party. The September 15 referendum
on Scottish devolution (with Thatcher's opposition cited by The
Scotsman as one of the reasons for the strong positive vote) showed
that the party has not yet touched rock bottom. The turmoil following
Hague's decision at the October party conference to commit the
Conservatives to opposing Britain's entry into the European Monetary
Union demonstrated that the party's internal divisions run as deep as
ever.

On becoming Labour's leader in July 1994, Tony Blair faced a
similarly dire situation. Having purged his party of its socialist
undesirables, Blair now sits in Downing Street. If Hague really
wishes to oust him, he needs to mete out the same treatment to his
Thatcherite holdovers and diehards. Otherwise, British
conservatism--together with the principles into which, before her
anti-European aberration, Margaret Thatcher breathed so much new
vitality--will join the ranks of the stuffed curiosities in the
Natural History Museum.

John O'Sullivan:

Jonathan Clarke claims that the Tory Party lost the recent election
(and is now unelectable) because Mrs. Thatcher foisted an unpopular
"Euro-rejectionist" policy upon it. Among the difficulties with this
theory are:

Mrs. Thatcher ceased to be Prime Minister seven years before the
election defeat. In the intervening years, she had little or no
influence on government policy. Those who sympathized with her views
on Europe were excluded from ministries which dealt with European
issues. And her speeches critical of the government's European
policy--to which Clarke now attributes an irresistible power--were
widely (and I think unfairly) dismissed as inspired by personal
bitterness at the time. By themselves, these facts should be enough
to demolish Clarke's argument. But there is more.

Those who determined policy for most of this period--namely,
Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, and Deputy
Prime Minister Michael Heseltine--were strong supporters of European
integration and the single currency. (Prime Minister John Major can
best be characterized as a weak supporter of the same things.) They
remained in charge of policy until election day. Surely that suggests
some culpability.

Their best way of evading responsibility for defeat would be to argue
that the Cabinet's European policy began to fray in the last two
years of office, and that it disintegrated entirely in the election
campaign. Why did this happen? Very simply: support for "Europe" and
the single currency was increasingly unpopular with Tory MPs, the
Tory party in the country, the general public, and even a majority of
the Cabinet. (You would never guess this, incidentally, from Clarke's
use of opinion polls, which is worthy of Willi Munzenberg. He cites
the 20 percent support for the most extreme anti-European position,
but not the majority opposition to a single currency and to further
European integration.) There was strong pressure for a change in
policy. But Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine vetoed a clear
statement of opposition to a single currency. Tory MPs--facing
certain defeat and knowing from their canvassing that opposition to a
single currency was almost the only popular policy available to the
Tories--panicked and rebelled. Over two hundred Tory candidates
declared themselves personally opposed to the euro. The party
splintered publicly. Insofar as Clarke seeks to excuse John Major and
his colleagues as policymakers from responsibility for the defeat,
however, he condemns them as party managers.

Blaming this on Mrs. Thatcher is not analysis; it is astrology. As an
occasional intellectual valet to the lady, I would be delighted to
attribute the change in opinion to her speeches. Individuals may
indeed have been influenced by them; I hope so. But mass or even
party opinion is no longer swayed by Midlothian orations. The
catalyst for the public was events--such as the European ban on
British beef exports and the Spanish "poaching", sanctioned by the
courts, of British fish stocks. For Tory politicians it was that
"Europe" had gone from being an obstacle to socialism in the
Seventies to being an obstacle to deregulated capitalism today.
Perhaps they are wrong, but many German businessmen seem to agree
with them.

Anyway, "Europe" was only a minor theme in the great symphony of Tory
collapse. There were far more important reasons for it, including an
epidemic of Tory scandals, both sexual and financial, that continued
right up to election day; the loss of the crucial tax issue following
several tax-raising budgets in the Major years; a general weariness
with the same ministerial faces after eighteen years; the rise of an
acceptable opposition party in the form of "New Labour"; and above
all the fact that the Tories had thrown away their reputation as the
party of economic competence and so were unable to benefit
politically from the robust state that the economy had achieved by
1997. They destroyed their economic credentials in 1992 only months
after their election victory; that destruction (or self-destruction)
kept them at unprecedentedly low levels in the polls from then until
now, and it involved something which is mysteriously absent from
Clarke's account: namely, Britain's membership in the Exchange Rate
Mechanism (ERM).

Essay Types: Essay