BRITAIN IN THE XX CENTURY: THATCHERISM

Margaret Thatcher (Baroness Thatcher 1979-90) was the United Kingdom’s first woman prime minister. She came to office in May 1979 and remained until her resignation in November 1990, making her the longest continually serving prime minister in 150 years.

Mrs. Thatcher is both admired and despised by many in her country: to some her radical economic policies reversed decades of decline and re-established Britain as a major economic power on the world stage; to others her harsh economic policies caused social friction and divided the nation.

Margaret Roberts was born on 13^th October 1925 in the small town of Grantham in the north of England. Margaret’s father, Alfred, was a self-educated man who had been forced to leave school at fourteen. He worked his way into the grocery business until he owned his own shop, above which the Roberts’ family lived. Margaret’s mother, Beatrice, a woman of little ambition, had been a seamstress. Alfred and Beatrice gave birth to another daughter, Muriel, in 1929. The sisters were brought up in a serious, practical and religious environment.

Margaret was educated at Kesteven & Grantham Girls’ School, before proceeding to Oxford University to read chemistry. In 1943 Margaret became the president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, the first women to hold the position.

After several unsuccessful attempts to become a member of parliament (MP), Margaret married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman of the chemicals industry, in 1951. Two years later they gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol.

In 1959, Margaret Thatcher was elected member of parliament for Finchley, near London. Unusually, parliamentarians took favour to the bill proposed in her maiden speech in the House of Commons, 1960, which duly became legislation. Within just two years she had been appointed parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Pensions. Following Edward Heath’s election as prime minister in 1970, Margaret Thatcher was promoted into the cabinet as the Secretary of State for Education. She made some highly controversial moves, which quickly earned her the title of ‘the most unpopular women in Britain’. She scrapped the entitlement of primary school children to free milk, giving way to the nickname ‘Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’.  Following Heath’s election loss in 1974 due to a bitter dispute with the trade unions, Mrs. Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975. Together with Keith Joseph and John Hoskyns, she began the task of understanding what had gone wrong with the British economy, then in a dire state. She called for a reversal of socialism – less state intervention, less taxation, less public expenditure, more individual power and responsibility, more competition, more private ownership.

On 4^th May 1979, before a dismal economic backdrop and bitter industrial relations, Margaret Thatcher won the general election and became Britain’s first women prime minister, with a Conservative majority of 44 in the House of Commons.

Mrs. Thatcher’s early years as prime minister were marked by a multitude of difficulties. The government’s harsh monetary policy of high interest rates, required to steadily bring down the rampant inflation, was highly damaging to business and exacerbated a deep recession brought about by an international oil crisis in the summer of 1979. Unemployment soon passed three million, a figure unthinkable just a few years beforehand. This economic crisis sparked deep rivalry in the cabinet and triggered a number of high profile resignations.

In April 1982, Argentina launched an unexpected invasion of the neighbouring Falkland Islands, British territory for almost 150 years. After an unsuccessful diplomatic attempt to halt the invasion, Margaret Thatcher, determined to reclaim the islands, dispatched a Royal Navy task force. With a high risk of failure, the government’s survival lay in the balance. Ten weeks later Argentina surrendered and Britain reclaimed the Falkland Islands. But the war was not without its difficulties. The sinking of the General Belgrano was perhaps the single most controversial act of the war, in which Margaret Thatcher gave the orders to sink an Argentinean submarine that was sailing away from the declared exclusion zone. 368 sailors drowned. The British press gave their overwhelming support to the ‘Iron Lady’ during the war, though some suggest that she merely had domestic political motives behind the war.

With Mrs. Thatcher’s personal ratings soaring in the opinion polls, and with a divided Labour party in disarray, the Conservatives won the largest landslide election victory since 1945, with a parliamentary majority of 144.

During the 1984 Conservative Party Conference in October, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) planted and detonated a bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, missing the prime minister only by feet. Five of Mrs. Thatcher’s colleagues were killed. The bomb had been retaliation for Mrs. Thatcher’s stance over the IRA Hunger Strikes of 1980-81. Convicted Irish terrorists being held in the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland had gone on hunger strike, refusing to end until their demands for ‘special status’ were met. Mrs. Thatcher regarded any such concession as surrender to terrorism and refused to grant the strikers their demands. After many weeks, Bobby Sands, the leader of the IRA in the prison, and nine other strikers, died.

Mrs. Thatcher entered office with one overriding objective: to reverse the socialism that she believed had done great harm to the British economy. Her monetarist program called for deregulation, tax cuts, greater use of supply side policies and a rigorous control of the money supply in order to keep inflation low. But she also entered office upon a dismal economic scene that would only get worse. Her policy of high interest rates hit business, prolonging a deep recession. Upon entering office, income tax was cut immediately and offset by a subsequent increase in VAT (Value Added Tax), representing an important shift from direct to indirect taxation. Under Mrs. Thatcher Britain was the pioneer in a global wave of privatization - that is the sale of state-owned industries. This program can claim significant economic success, removing large government subsidies that had previously kept such businesses afloat, and in some cases, but not all, improving their efficiency by the introduction of market forces.

Alongside privatization, trade union reform lay at the heart of the Thatcher economic plan. The unions were held responsible for Britain’s relative economic decline since 1945. A series of bold steps were phased in over the decade, gradually taking from the unions much of the power granted to them over the decades. Restrictions were placed on many forms of industrial action through the legalization of secondary picketing and the introduction of secret ballots.

The turning point in government-union relations came in 1984 with the beginning of the year-long miners’ strike. The strike was a response to the government’s decision to close a great number of mines across the country. The economic case for the pit closures was to make the industry more efficient and more competitive.

Determined that her third term in office should have a more purposeful drive than the second, Mrs. Thatcher pressed on with an increasingly radical agenda. The Community Charge - better known as the ‘Poll Tax’ - was an attempt to replace the old rates system. Towards the late 1980s questions arose about the future of Britain’s economic and political relationship with Europe and of the case for Economic and Monetary Union. On this topic the government became deeply divided. Mrs. Thatcher rejected any form of political or economic integration with Europe, believing that it would pose a threat to the economic success her government had achieved in the previous decade. But her famous ‘Bruges Speech’ in 1988, in which she set out her vision of a family of independent, sovereign nation states, struck the wrong note with many colleagues.

In November 1990, following a high-profile resignation from Commons Leader Geoffrey Howe, former cabinet member Michael Heseltine stood against the prime minister in the Conservative Party leadership ballot. Only just surviving the first round, and persuaded that a second attempt would result in a humiliating defeat, Margaret Thatcher resigned on 22^nd November 1990.

In 1992 Margaret Thatcher was made a Baroness and duly took her seat in the House of Lords. The following year, Lady Thatcher launched her autobiography, ‘The Downing Street Years’ (1993, Harper Collins), followed by an autobiography of her years before Prime Minister, ‘The Path to Power’ (1995). Although rumors of Margaret Thatcher’s intentions to remain a ‘back-seat driver’ in subsequent administrations have apparently not materialized, Lady Thatcher has remained a highly influential force in British politics. Her public support for William Hague (1997) and then Iain Duncan Smith (2001) in the Conservative Party leadership contests proved to be the deciding factor in the election outcomes. Her high-profile intervention in the Pinnochet extradition case (1999) attracted considerable media coverage. Following a series of minor strokes in late 2001, Lady Thatcher was advised by her doctors to retire from public life. She was, however, persuaded to take part in a television interview late in 2002 in which the frail former prime minister recalled her life with husband Denis. In June 2003 Sir Denis Thatcher died, several months after a heart transplant.

In March 2002 her eagerly awaited book, ‘Statecraft: strategies for a changing world’ was published.