She changed EVERYTHING
Ice-cream chemist who became Iron Lady; still dominates British politics years after leaving office
When Margaret Thatcher was asked what she had changed about British politics, she answered, with uncharacteristic immodesty, “Everything” - and it was true. She changed the atmosphere of the pre-emptive cringe that successive ministries of both parties and industrial management had exhibited towards the trade unions ever since the Second World War. She changed the sense of embarrassment that Britons felt towards the concepts of productivity and profit. She changed our reliance on manufacturing industry just in time, inaugurating the services and information technology revolutions. She changed the post-Suez attitude of appeasement and post-imperial guilt. She changed British politics so fundamentally that the Labour Party had to drop socialism and change its name and objectives in order to get elected.
Along with her friend and ideological soulmate Ronald Reagan, Thatcher changed the failing policy of détente with communism into the confrontational one that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989. She changed the ownership structure of vast industries, exchanging the nebulous concept of “national” ownership for the more efficient, purer (and ultimately fairer) one of shareholder ownership. She changed the way we financed the European Union budget. Meanwhile, she fundamentally changed for the worse the career paths of Jim Callaghan, General Galtieri, Michael Foot, Arthur Scargill, Neil Kinnock and the IRA activist Bobby Sands.
Those things that she did not change for the better she would have, if she hadn’t been knifed by an overambitious cabal of cowards, fools, traitors and - worst of all - Europhiles, who split the Tory party and left it feuding for half a generation, until the advent of Michael Howard in 2003. The 1992 election victory was largely down to her legacy rather than the non-leadership of her absurd successor, John Major.
By encouraging George Bush Sr not to “wobble” during the first Gulf war, she set the international scene that has allowed Tony Blair to finish off the campaign against Saddam Hussein that she started in 1990, further strengthening the “special relationship” with the United States that both she and Blair so fervently believe in.
Margaret Thatcher told it like it was, in a way that so few politicians seem able to do nowadays. When she came to power in 1979 Britain was in a terrible state, with huge areas of our nationalised industries collapsing, a government in craven retreat from the trade unions and the country teetering on the brink of relegation from the second division of world powers. She recognised that only extreme shock tactics and a searing honesty of the type seldom seen in politics could shake the British people out of their torpor.
She was always true to her word. When she said the lady wasn’t for turning, she wasn’t. When she said the Falklands must be liberated come what may, they were. When she said that people would be allowed to buy their own council houses, they were, too. When she told European politicians that she wanted a rebate on the billions Britain overpaid the Community, she held out until she got one.
There’s a downside to all this refreshing candour. The kind of permanent revolution she offered did not suit everyone, and eventually she was overthrown. But she went down fighting for her principles; no one was in any doubt about what she stood for and what she believed in. You might not have agreed with her, but you can’t deny that hers was an honesty of the kind hardly ever heard from today’s so-called leaders. That, I suspect, rather than her free-market ideology, is why New Statesman readers have finally acknowledged her heroism in this unexpected, if welcome, way.
Andrew Roberts
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