Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Ah, the small pleasures of life. Arrived home to find that the postman had delivered the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Being a back-to-front magazine reader, I didn't get very far into the publication as there was Mark Steyn's obituary for the former British Prime Minister James Callaghan (1912-2005). Given today's general election in Britain, it makes for apposite reading.

As Styen points out, the Britain of the 1970s was a foreign county, "a banana republic without the weather. Inflation was up over 25 percent, marginal tax rates were up over 90 percent, and the only thing heading in the other direction was the pound..." Along with an enfeebled establishment and an incompetent government, the main culprits were the unions: "In Britain union leaders were household names, mainly because they were responsible for everything your household lacked. In the seventies if you opened The Times (when the print unions weren't on strike)..." Trading under acronyms such as ASLEF and SOGAT and NATSOPA and NACODS, the unions paralyzed the country and their leaders were...

"...being received by the prime minister as if they were heads of state, which in a sense they were. Britain's system of government in the seventies was summed up in the phrase 'beer and sandwiches at Number Ten' — which meant the union leaders showing up at Downing Street to discuss what it would take to persuade them not to go on strike, and being plied with the aforementioned refreshments by a prime minister reduced to the proprietor of a seedy pub, with the cabinet as his barmaids. The beer and sandwiches went only so far, and would usually be followed a day or two later by chaotic scenes on the evening news of big, burly blokes striking for their right to continue enjoying the soft, pampering workweek of the more effete Ottoman sultans."

Sounds like Germany, France and Italy today! Styen connects past to present when he recalls a pub incident where punk poet Seething Wells had a go at Carol Thatcher, the Iron Lady's daughter. After reciting the Leaderene's "crimes against humanity", Wells fumed, "Basically, your mum just totally smashed the working classes." And, says Steyn:

"Today if one hears that term in Britain, it's usually from a polytechnic Marxist or a socialist rock star. But twenty-five years ago there was a real 'working class,' even if it seemed less and less interested in working. Jim Callaghan was a product of that authentic working class, and so was his party. He was the last 'old Labour' prime minister, and when he fell, his comrades lurched left and into the wilderness for two decades. By the time they re-emerged, he was far more of an anachronistic relic of a class-bound society than the queen. His successor, Tony Blair, is a quintessential post-Thatcher politician: the country is in the longest period of economic growth since records began, in 1701. No one now thinks that the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in state housing — though what seems obvious to all in 2005 required extraordinary political will by a handful a quarter century ago."

Today, Britain works without a working class, enjoys a global role comparable to the days of Churchill and is a governable society. It is, in other words, everything that James Callaghan's country wasn't. Thatcher's disciples have a lot to be grateful for. They will be rewarded today at the ballot box.