Sunday 11 December 2011

Britain & the EU threat - Margaret Thatcher relives Churchill's "Wilderness Years"

There are so many reasons to admire and respect Churchill, but, for me, his defining period was his "Wilderness Years", isolated from his party and the general public, increasingly unpopular and out-of-step on India and his willingness to back Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis. Churchill was dismissed as yesterday's man. Yet it was at this time that he, almost uniquely, recognised that the greatest threat to European security was Nazi Germany. His speeches in the 1930s made for sober reading in the 1940s.

Churchill sprang immediately to mind when, today, I chanced upon some of the speeches delivered by Lady Thatcher (then Mrs. Thatcher) in the 1990s.  Listening to Thatcher denounce the European Union and its dream in 1992, 93 or 94, I couldn't help but reflect on the prophetic similarity with Churchill.  Like Churchill, Thatcher was disdainfully dismissed as an out-of-date confrontational reactionary. Twenty years later, her comments sound extremely prescient and entirely prophetic.

I post two such examples for your consideration, the first contains her inflammatory speech at The Hague in 1992 in which she spookily forecasts precisely what we are experiencing now: high unemployment and national resentment. 


In the second interview she attached the system of European diplomatic negoation (for which direct comparisons may be drawn to the negotiations that took place during the recent EU summit) and why they are wrong and she is right: 



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