Brexit and Thatcherism

I wondered how Margaret Thatcher would feel about the country of which she was once Prime Minister being taken out of the European Union by a member of her own party, and I found contradictions. She campaigned in favor of the UK joining the European Economic Community in 1975 but twenty years later scolded her successor John Major for agreeing to join the EU because she felt it ceded too much sovereignty to the Union.

She was apparently anti-federalist at least for Europe, believing that power should remain in the hands of the nation-state. That would imply she would dislike the EU as presently constituted. At the same time she wanted a free market among all the countries of Europe, which the current EU certainly provides. By 2002 she flipped again, deciding that agreeing to join a single market was “a terrible error”.

I can’t decide whether she’s spinning in her grave today from glee or from disappointment.