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fairly be said that if Britain was no longer the greatest power on earth, it was at least a pivotal one. But in 1945, bankrupt, bled white, and exhausted after fighting two world wars, Britain retreated into itself. Undefeated by Hitler, Churchill was defeated in Britain. Clement Attlee, an earnest socialist who promised to reward the nation for its sacrifices by building in Britain a New Jerusalem, won the 1945 general election. His Labour government was by no means one of Bolshevik extremism, but it nonetheless radically changed the character of Britain, nationalizing major industries and public utilities and introducing both the welfare state and the culture to which such a state gives rise. This transformation—known as the postwar consensus—was accepted by Britain’s Conservative Party and remained unchallenged until Thatcher’s ascendancy.
    Britain retreated from the world stage. The United States and the Soviet Union now dominated the world. The Empire commenced inexorably to dissolve. In 1956, the humiliation at Suez made it clear that Britain was no longer even a great power, no less a superpower. It is not an accident that British literature of this century is known for such titles as Decline and Fall, not Rise and Shine.
    By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded—choose your favorite cliché—as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable, and a living warning to Americans that the wages of imperial sin is death. “Britain,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remarked to President Gerald Ford in 1975, “is a tragedy—it has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing.” It was “a scrounger.” “A disgrace.” 6

    In the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun once rose and set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labor unrest shut down public services, paralyzing the nation for months on end. At the height of the crisis, Thatcher, as leader of the Opposition, delivered an acrid speech to the House of Commons. Although obviously partisan, it is also accurate in every particular:
    . . . basic food supplies are being stopped. The Road Haulage Association confirms that picketing is affecting the supplies of essential goods. The Freight Transport Association also reports a new problem—shortage of diesel fuel, particularly in the South-West, because of picketing at the oil terminal at Avonmouth.
    British Rail reports quite simply: “There are no trains today.”
    The British Transport Docks Board, the nationalized ports sector, says that, on average, traffic at its ports is down 40 percent in and out of Southampton. The rail strike has added to the burden.
    The report from the Confederation of British Industry is that many firms are being strangled. There is a shortage of materials. They cannot move their own products. Exports are being lost. It says that secondary picketing, picketing of firms not in dispute, is very heavy all over the country. It is particularly affecting such items as packaging materials and sugar and all vital materials necessary if industry is to keep going. Lay-offs known to the CBI are at least 125,000 already, and there are expected to be 1 million by the end of the week. There are telegrams and telexes from many companies saying that their exports are not being allowed through and that they might lose the orders forever . . .
    The strikes today are not the only ones we have experienced recently . . . We have had the bread strike, hospital strikes, strikes at old people’s homes, and strikes in newspapers, broadcasting, airports and car plants . . . nearly half
our factories [have] had some form of industrial conflict, stoppages, overtime bans and go-slows in the past two years; and nearly one-third suffered from all-out strikes.
    This is the picture in Britain today. 7
    Britain had recently become the first country in the OECD to supplicate for a loan from the International