William Safire on Thatcher

Before we come to the big news – I ought to say what looks like the big news – about the American-Soviet agreement to limit strategic arms, I really must add a PS to last week's talk on the British election.

It's a rollicking piece written by a man you might call the resident bad boy of the New York Times because, while the Times is dependably liberal in its editorial policy and so are its house columnists, James Reston, Anthony Lewis, Tom Wicker, the Times was moved a year or two ago by a noble impulse to give some space regularly to a professional non-liberal. They hired William Safire, a mischievous and gifted fellow, just crowding 40, who once wrote speeches for Vice President Agnew and for Mr Nixon, who then quit and set up his own store to hawk colourful and very funny, little statuettes of liberal gods and goddesses. 

I hasten to say that I speak in metaphors. Nothing delights Mr Safire more than to read the Times' editorials and the deep thoughts of its columnists and then write a devastating and always merry piece making great fun of the Times's heroes and the Times's point of view. Mr Safire is even more of a professional conservative than the Times's columnists are professional liberals. He's also a first-rate student and mocker of the language of politics and its standard jargon. He has in fact put out a fat and funny book called, 'Safire's Political Dictionary'. 

Well, with those credentials well established, I hope nobody's going to huff and puff when I quote a few passages from the column he wrote after Mrs Thatcher's triumph was authenticated. He called his piece, 'The British Voter Arrests Robin Hood'. Safire begins by noticing that Robin Hood has been a hero of British and American folklore ever since he was mentioned in the fourteenth century in Piers Plowman. It's typical of Safire, by the way, that before he starts shooting from the hip, he's careful to establish the fact that he knows more about the man he's going to knock off than the man's own disciples. I'm pretty sure Safire boned up on Piers Plowman before he dashed off his column. 

Well, he says, Robin Hood's fame is based on the fact – and I'm now quoting – 'that Hood and his motley crew of early socialists, Little John, Friar Tuck, Alan-a-Dale and Maid Marian, the Jane Fonda of her day, robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. That is now called income redistribution and has had a good press for five centuries.' Safire goes on to suggest in what he calls a 'revisionist' theory that Hood and his band were well-meaning villains who did more harm than good to the poor. And this is the way Safire figures it. The Hood system was to waylay rich merchants and take their goods on a progressive basis, and that's to say the more successful the merchant, the more he had to pay back to the Hood system. Then the proceeds were handed to the poor as welfare payments. And now a Safire collaborator comes in, in the person of an American economist Arthur Laffer, a big proponent of California’s tax-cutting Proposition 13. 

The Safire Laffer theory goes this way: what did the merchants do? They hired security men to see them through Sherwood Forest or they bypassed Sherwood and went the long way round, so naturally the costs of producing and shipping the goods went up. They added the costs to the price of their goods, inflation grew its kangaroo head and thus, says Safire, the distributions from Robin Hood could not keep pace as merchants avoided the forest. This is known as the shrinking of the tax base, while in robbing from the rich, adding to costs, stealing incentive, Hood and his Piers Plowman pinkoes ultimately hurt the poor. Mr Safire guesses, or assumes, that the original Hood, who was probably the Earl of Huntington in disguise, your typical elitist do-gooder, was bled to death by a woman, the Prioress of Kirkley. Significantly, he notes, it has taken another woman, the redoubtable Mrs Thatcher, to nab the modern Robin Hoods and roll back the welfare state. 

Well, come out from behind his Punch and Judy show. Mr Safire notes correctly that while Mr Carter and his advisers are saying nothing about Mrs Thatcher and her promised domestic reforms, they are wishfully thinking that the conservative campaign rhetoric will soon soften as it applies to foreign affairs. They have in mind particularly, of course, British policy towards Rhodesia or should I say Zimbabwe, Rhodesia. The State Department – which, I think, would have a severe case of the shakes if Britain moved soon to recognise the new Rhodesian government – the State Department has been very profuse with its assurances that Mrs Thatcher and Lord Carrington will not dream of doing anything about Rhodesia before the Commonwealth conference in August. 

At this point, we come back to Mr Safire. Being a fervent conservative with a temperamental dislike of compromise and moderate reform, he says poignantly, 'I wonder, to paraphrase Churchill, Mrs Thatcher was not elected to become the Queen's first minister because she is made of cotton candy'. The Safire gift for satire is not suppressed under the force of his yearning for a big, bold Boadicea of a prime minister. 'If', he says, with something of the bloodshot passion of his liberal puppets, 'If she is ever going to count for anything at home or in the world's councils, she is going to have to establish a reputation for boldness and soon! If she temporises on the need for income tax reduction or if she tries too hard to accommodate the foreign policy of an American administration already afflicted with terminal lame-duckedness, her monument in British history will be made of vanilla ice cream.' But he doesn't think, he doesn’t dare to hope, rather, that she will move over to the middle. She now sees the tide that Safire sees all the time. 'Robin Hood,' he ends on a note of wishful triumph, 'stands exposed as a villain. In the next remake of the film, a dashing Errol Flynn-type will play the good guy, Sheriff of Nottingham.' 

I added these more solemn thoughts of Mr Safire after his fun and games with the old legend because nobody should assume that the convictions of Mr Andrew Young about Rhodesia are shared by a majority of, for instance, the United States Senate. Mr Young is the United States ambassador to the United Nations and he has survived many a gaffe, most notably his scornful, offhand remark that Britain started the colonial racket, and his other remark – which raised a tornado of protest here – that no doubt the United States, so busy condemning the imprisonment of political prisoners, had hundreds of political prisoners of her own. After a very hurt telephone call from Mr Carter on that one, Mr Young said he'd been misunderstood. 

The Young idea is that the recent election in Rhodesia is at least suspect but there are powerful forces in the Senate, and even more powerful lobbies within call of the Senate, who are anxious to lift all sanctions. Without going into it any further, I'd say that Rhodesia is one of the two issues which Washington sees as likely to be affected by the British election. The other is the status and strength of the North American Treaty Organisation and here the administration takes heart. Even though Mr Carter is about to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union on limiting strategic nuclear arms, I don't believe the administration has lost any of its desire to see the NATO allies in Europe lift their heads from the sand and see the massive build-up of Soviet conventional arms on that continent. 

Which brings up an intriguing move just made by the Russians and one that's going to take all the Kremlinologists in America and Europe to analyse correctly. It's just come out that, in recent weeks, the Russians have been holding secret conversations with the Americans with the aim of reducing the numbers of Western, and Eastern, troops stationed in Europe. The move was reported in the New York Times in this surprisingly bland sentence: 'With the two countries expected to sign a new strategic arms treaty at a summit meeting next month, officials said that Washington and Moscow have expressed the desire to make headway on concluding a companion accord that would cut back the presence of Soviet and US ground and air forces stationed in Europe.' 

Is this possible? Has the Soviet Union, after 20 years of creating an irresistible, mighty army in Europe, repented and now wants to turn her swords into ploughshares? Could it be with the arrival of spring that the time of the singing of birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land? It is beyond my powers to say. I can offer only the reminder that the Russians are the world's best chess players. 

The big, roaring domestic topic this week is the sudden shortage of petrol. On Wednesday, the Senate voted by 66 to 30 to approve President Carter's request for a 'stand-by' petrol rationing plan if things get really bad and of course it will have to go to the House. Whatever the cause, there has been a sudden, unexplained shortage of petrol and in the state that uses it more than any other, California, the governor brought in a rationing system of his own whereby you can't buy petrol unless your tank is less than half full and you can get it only on odd or even dates, according to the last figure on your licence plate. California, you have to remember, is 200 miles wide and 900 miles long (from roughly Edinburgh to Milan) and it has a very, very sparse public transport system. So, last week there were queues at petrol stations, two, three, literally five miles long. 

Now here, again, is a very complicated topic, far more complex than 99 citizens in a hundred care to discover. It's resolved itself into a clean-cut and passionate debate. One side says the energy shortage is an invention of the oil companies. The opposing side – much smaller I may add – says that there is a real and spreading shortage. 

Whether you are simple or sophisticated doesn't seem to matter in choosing up sides. One thing is for sure. Most people shy away from Mr Carter's sad conclusion at the end of the first year of his presidency, 'I had no idea that government, governing was so complicated'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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