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| both free at last |
'The second negative [which helped end her prime ministership] was [Mrs. Thatcher's] intransigent attitude to further European integration; this put her in a minority in her own party. But re-reading her strident speeches today gives no sense of them being out-of-date or belonging to a by-gone era. She dismissed the idea of a United States of Europe as a fantasy. I believed in it at the time, but now I see that she was correct. She thought that the European Union should be simply a free trade area with limited co-operation between sovereign nations. That is what an increasing number of us who were once fervent Europeans would like to get back to. As she said in a famous speech in Bruges that was widely criticised: “Working closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy… We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
'... [I]n light of the perpetual crisis in which members of the Eurozone have found themselves since the onset of the financial banking crisis in 2007 as a result of misjudged integration, those negative judgments now appear wrong. In this respect at least, she was an example of the prophet without honour in her own country.'
-- Andreas Whittam Smith in The UK Independent, here
