Welsh Journals

Which brings us to Mrs. Thatcher, dissections of whom are likely to stock a good few library shelves. Morgan makes a good preliminary incision, tracing various components of the 'ism'-privatization, monetarism-back to the Callaghan government, and rightly stressing that, whatever her image-makers got her to say, the lady showed a corkscrew-like pragmatism. Thatcher simultaneously exploited and misunderstood the globalized, energy-and-information-technology-dominated capitalism whose North Sea operations briefly put the country in the black, fusing this to a Kiplingite sense of 'action' as well as conservative patriotism. The overvalued petro-pound of 1980-81, then worth five Deutschmarks, had a murderous effect on British industry, but she used the resulting unemployment to settle the 'who runs the country?' issue and decimate the bogey of the trade unions. A union establishment which had spurned the German model of 'social partnership', only to stumble into a sticky corporatism, led determinedly with its chin. The Falklands War, an affair unthinkable without oil sponsorship, gave her a second term in which to be more ideological, with many of her court-Lord Young, Sir John Hoskyns, Bernard Ingham-former Labour supporters, who wanted institutional ground-clearing and appreciated her unstoppability. What was lacking showed up, fatally, after 1987-a sense of the long-term, and an ability to persuade people not of her Erastian-Wesleyan way of thinking: the centralized ethos of British politics sustained a politics which was ultimately without altruism or vision. Kenneth Morgan's weakness-and this is a book whose basic strengths provoke carpings of this sort-is a certain indirection when he moves between the political milieu and the public mentalite. Some sort of water-diviner's instinct is necessary to survey the tortuous evolution of British capitalism, from the solid Keynesian paternalism of Sam Courtauld, R. A. Butler's father-in-law, and the first generation of the Sieffs, to the byzantine, super-affluent 'globalism' of the winners (so far) of the Thatcher years, the Murdochs and the Maxwells. 'Butskellites' could choose between the comparable rewards of a political and a business career; these days, 'spending more time with one's family' usually seems to come with a six-figure incentive. But, overall, the structure is very sound, and this lengthy book is fluently and beguilingly written. I look forward to periodic updates as the archives are opened, and hope I'm still around in 2010, when Kenneth Morgan will tell us what really happened on 22 November 1990. CHRISTOPHER HARVIE Tubingen A POCKET GUIDE. THE HISTORY OF WALES. By J. Graham Jones. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1990. Pp. vii, 177. £ 4.95. With so many monographs and general histories having appeared in recent years, the need for a short, broad coverage of Welsh history down the ages might seem