John Micklethwait ponders the potential end of a 37-year-old Thatcherian revolution and shares his insights with Bloomberg Businessweek readers.
Thatcher may have called herself a Conservative, but her inspiration was the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, centered on free commerce and individual freedom and what we now call globalization. It sat at the heart of the first great Victorian age of globalization, which came to an end in 1914. For Thatcher these ideas were channeled through thinkers like Friedman. She wasn’t always as idealistic as she claimed, but the direction she set—and John Major and Tony Blair followed—was clearly toward open markets.
As a result, Britain has arguably been the big Western economy most comfortable with the current age of globalization. Not as successful as the U.S., to be sure. But we have usually been stauncher supporters of free trade and more at ease with foreigners buying our companies or running them, with privatizing government services, with the move from manufacturing to services, especially finance, and with foreigners playing for our football clubs or taking over our cuisine. And alongside that has grown a laissez-faire attitude toward individual freedom, from gay marriage to stem cell research. …
… The fact that we were at the free-market end of a sclerotic union increased our relative attractiveness. London has become the commercial capital of Europe and its talent magnet. Britain’s soft power has not been greater for decades.
What went wrong? The obvious rejoinder is liberal Britain worked a lot better for some Britons than for others. That is true. Many Brexiters also felt that they had been lied to repeatedly about immigration. Others see the EU as a doomed project—and think we are best out of it. Add in shameless political opportunism, a Euroskeptic press that told voters there was no cost to voting Leave, and polls that showed Remain was in the lead (so a protest vote was just that), and you get to 52 percent of the electorate.
The chaos could pan out in a liberal direction. A few Brexiters believe they are Thatcher’s heirs, rejecting the EU leviathan. But most of the Leave voters want less globalization, not more. And Europe is hardly in a mood to give special favors to perfidious Albion. The revolt against the age of globalization could well spread. In terms of soft power, Britain’s reputation as a tolerant, stable haven is being shredded, day by day.
Hence the fear that the years 1979 to 2016 will be seen as the great exception—a brief revival in the centurylong decline of a former Great Power.