Margaret Thatcher

It may seem odd to hang Lady Thatcher’s portrait in the Hall of Blame. After all, the Iron Lady was famous for her opposition to the creation of a United States of Europe.

Yet the truth is that it was under Margaret Thatcher’s premiership that the drive to a more centralized, European super-state sharply accelerated.

The Single European Act, signed in 1987, marked a giant leap towards European Union, or what the architects of a United States of Europe call greater ‘integration.’

This is the very opposite of what Margaret Thatcher, and the overwhelming majority of the British people wanted.

In her Bruges speech in 1988 she advanced the idea that ‘the willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community.’

What Thatcher failed to comprehend at the time was that this kind of Europe had never been on offer.

With the benefit of hindsight, she was able to see things differently. In her book Statecraft, she recognized that the architects of the new Europe had no time for nation states, and that she had been wrong to think that this was even a possibility. And this is what she warned:

‘What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.

Lady Thatcher was and is a good European. She understands that Britain’s character has been shaped by its relationship with the people and history of Europe.

But she doesn’t make the mistake of thinking that Europe and its diverse peoples is the same as the European Union.

Again, in Statecraft she recognises that the European Union for what it is:

 ‘a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt.’