We Fought the War and Well It Sort of Won Itself

So David Cameron's latest claim is that the Tories won the cold war. That must have been the Tory MP for Berlin East in the by election night of 9 November 1989 in that case I'm sure you'll remember the night well.

Peter Snow: Here are the new graphics for the Eastern reaches. Margaret Thatcher is looking to secure a big win here, with the help of Helmut Kohl and the late addition or Perestroika and Glasnost. Some opinion is that we shouldn't expect anything tonight. Some are saying that the Hungarian relaxation may take some time to whittle through the the rest of the seats out here so we shall wait and see.

However, if Margaret Thatcher does secure a victory expect to see me use this graphic as a surge of Blue rosettes charges through the wall and secures victory in the war that was cold.

David Dimbleby: Neil Kinnock what do you make of that?

Neil Kinnock: I think it is ludicrous David. It is obvious that if there is a result tonight it will be the people that will have spoken. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Iron Lady.

DD: But wouldn't that be bad news for Socialism and indeed your own party.

NK: The enemy of idealism is zealotry, sadly too many of my socialist friends have taken themselves too zealously and forgotten the people. Socialism will survive because it is the people that will decide.

DD: Prime Minister what do you say to that?

Margaret Thatcher: Marxists get up early to further their cause. We must get up even earlier to defend our freedom. The Labour Party believes in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners. As young man on our staff in our research department also called David said to me just the other day. If the people of East Berlin rise up to own their city twenty years from now whoever leads our great party will say "The Conservatives won the Cold War on this night.".

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families. And you know what David, I think the families of Berlin will be reunited tonight in that victory for the Conservatives.

Now I may have missed something but that wasn't how I remembered it. The people rose up in Berlin, in Moscow, in Timişoara. It wasn't so much won by anybody but lost by the behemoth of Central Planning. I remember my second term of my second year Economics degree the entire political philosophy course was meant to have focused on the socialist philosophy, systems and structures. Ten weeks of lectures became three and the third was a "What next?" hastily put together lecture.

We'd battled for years in a cold war state. In the end it turned out that maybe Sting was right in the song Russians.

Mr Reagan says we will protect you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too

I think it was indeed more hope, more luck and a love from the Eastern Europeans for their own rather than anything we did that led to the end of that particular war. There was very little being done except to hold the lines.

(On a side note as for Cameron attacking Brown for wearing a CND badge at the time, I think that speaks for the Tories Nuclear policy now. Or Brown bringing in Ashcroft to an unrelated area of questioning, truly shows up how disconnected both the main party leaders are with the mainstream opinion on how they should behave.)