Sir Alan Walters

The Economist has a brief obituary for Sir Alan Walters, who served as one of Margaret Thatcher's chief economic advisors. The tone of the sub-heading ("His economic advice proved politically costly") does not match the content of the article, however:

As [Thatcher's] special adviser in Downing Street, he played a vital role in two of the most important episodes of her premiership. In 1981 he was brought back from academia to stiffen her resolve in pushing though a budget that cut public spending during a recession, the decisive break with the Keynesian past.

And in 1989, even more controversially, he returned to help her in a dispute with her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who wanted sterling to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, a prelude to the euro. Sir Alan, like the prime minister, shared an instinctive distrust of such currency systems; he famously called this a "half-baked" idea. Mr Lawson resigned over what he saw as interference in economic policymaking, and Sir Alan had to go too. But in the long run Sir Alan’s view prevailed; the British still seem to prefer their pound, even in its present debauched state, to the euro.

My first trip back to Britain (I'd left as a child in 1967) was in 1979. I felt like I was visiting an Eastern Bloc nation: everything was grey, shabby, and run-down, labour unions were flexing their muscles to disrupt much of the economy, and everyone I met seemed to be feeling various levels of despair. The railway system was tottering under rotating labour actions (not real strikes, in the main, but slow-downs, walk-outs, and the like), so that even getting from London to Darlington was a weary, cold, much-delayed, and foodless (the catering union was on strike). Once we got to Middlesbrough (the very model of a Victorian industrial town at that time), the talk was all about power cuts, gas shortages, and the IRA). I'd only been back in the country for a few hours and I was already counting the days to escape back to "the west".

My next visit to the UK was several years later, and the difference was incredible: not just the physical surroundings, but in the vastly changed attitudes of the people. Where 1979 felt like entering the pages of an Orwell novel, there was little trace of that soul-numbness (though much grumbling about Margaret Thatcher . . . which was to be expected in the north of England and in Scotland).