LETTERS Ungenerous ideas
Sir: Enoch Powell's review of Peter Jenk- ins's book, Mrs Thatcher's Revolution (5 December) raises some fascinating questions of historical interpretation.
Mr Jenkins argues (in Mr Powell's sum- mary) that Mrs Thatcher's success must be attributed to her identification of declining economic competitiveness as the central national problem, to the appropriateness of the strategies she has developed to address that problem, and to the deter- mination with which these solutions have been pursued.
To this Mr Powell retorts that in politics all is flux, the play of hazard and contin- gency. The secret of Mrs Thatcher's suc- cess is her luck: nothing more serious than that.
The trouble with Mr Powell is that he believes too much in the power of his own reason, too little in that of others. Future historians with access to papers will no doubt find this issue at the centre of their interpretation of our period. But I feel sure that they will incline more to Mr Jenkins's view than to Mr Powell's.
Mr Powell affects to believe that nation- al decline is not a problem. This is curious coming from a man who has ,recorded how he withered and agonised on the night of 31 July 1947. In fact the overtaking of Britain by her economic competitors — including recently, it is alleged, Italy — has been the fundamental topic around which British politics has revolved at least since the late 1950s.
For a decade and a half — with the brief interlude of `Selsdon Man' — both parties sought to address this problem by reinforc- ing corporatism. This approach crashed in the miners' strike of 1973-4, and its formal bankruptcy was sealed at the hands of the IMF in 1976. Mr Powell likes to think that what in fact happened was that his personal intervention in the election of February 1974 supplied the crucial element of 'fluke'. Once again, it is curious to find such an interpretation coming from a man Who had consistently argued for the inhe- rent incoherence and untenability of the corporatist approach. Mrs Thatcher's success derives from the insight — partially derived from Mr Powell — that enabled her to grasp the bankrupt- cy of corporatism, the intelligence which enabled her to formulate a more promising approach, and the energy which has seen that approach through to a powerful mea- sure of success. It is a tribute to Peter Jenkins, coming from the social- democratic 'world of ideas and values' as he does, that he has been able to take these truths on board, unpalatable as they must be to him. And it is sad that Mr Powell Should be so bogged down in the misadven- ture of his own Irish 'world of ideas and values' that he cannot rise to the same generosity. of judgment.
Robert Jackson
House of Commons, London SW1
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