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Paddy Briggs looks at the career and restoration of Thatcher’s legacy by Tory Brexiteers and asks whether she would agree with them if she was alive today.
It’s 40 years since Britain’s most divisive modern Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, came to power and her premiership and fall continues to have an effect on political life both in the UK and elsewhere.
One thing that pro-Thatcher and anti-Thatcher modern day observers can agree on is that she changed Britain dramatically, although whether that change was for good or ill is still to be debated.
The main case for her defence revolves around what Thatcher replaced – a Labour Government that had run out of steam, dominated by a Labour Party under the control of intransigent and small ‘c’ conservative trades unions. The Cabinet that Harold Wilson had handed over to James Callaghan in 1976 was talented and experienced, but even the canny Wilson and certainly not his successor could do anything about the unions – in place of strife there was more strife.
Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 to tackle the strife, and this she did. And some. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it quick and easy.
There were riots across Britain in the early years of Thatcher’s premiership and the economy was in dire straits. It is forgotten that Michael Foot actually led her in the polls for a time – it was that bad. But, the ideology of Foot’s Labour Party was to lead to the formation of the Social Democratic Party and an alliance of the new party with the Liberals. As Thatcher occupied the right and Foot the left, there was genuine optimism that the centre-ground could hold and prosper.
But, the Falklands War in 1982 changed everything. Coming at a time when the economy was showing signs of recovery, it provided impetus to the distinctive Thatcher brand – flag-waving, patriotically British and increasingly sceptical of foreigners except, that is, Ronald Reagan who had taken office as US President the previous year and with whom she built an immediate rapport.
In the 1983 general election, the left and centre-left (Labour and the alliance) actually marginally out-polled the Conservatives, but our first past the post electoral system delivered Thatcher a landslide victory, with the Tories winning 397 seats to the opposition’s 232.
This was to be the beginning of the real Thatcherite revolution.
“The Enemy Within”
The target of the long promised assault on union power was the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) under its firebrand uber-socialist leader Arthur Scargill. To Thatcher, the miners were the “enemy within”.
But, as Edward Heath had found, the miners were not easy meat – not least because there was a strong groundswell of sentimental support for them in the country at large. Despite this, Thatcher planned carefully, learning from Heath’s mistakes and, when the miners went on strike, she organised and won – taking the majority of public opinion with her. Although deep mining in Britain took a while to disappear, the main reason for its eventual privatisation and decline came after Thatcher’s victory.
Thatcher’s personal ideology was not that of a One Nation Conservative. Her privatisation programme was branded “selling off the family silver” by one of her predecessors, Harold Macmillan. Heath rarely concealed his disdain for her. In her Cabinet, the traditional Tories were condemned as “Wets”, though only occasionally did she feel the need to sack them.
Shifting the Economic Balance
Margaret Thatcher was determined to shift the balance in the mixed economy she inherited away from public ownership and regulation to a more libertarian free enterprise, with lower taxation. Privatisation was her main tool but deregulation, especially in financial services, also played a key part.
The seeds of the destruction of Britain’s much envied workplace pensions sector were sown in the late 1980s leading to the scandalous miss-selling of some ‘personal pension plans’. The ‘loadsamoney’ culture of the times was mocked by comedian Harry Enfield in a hit single and a successful live tour in which there was satirical mocking of “the hapless poor, middle-class people in suits, opera-goers, politicians and the old-style, outmoded pay packet flat cap working class”.
Margaret Thatcher was not, however, a class warrior though some of her supporters were. Of bourgeois origins, she admired those who succeeded by their own efforts, as she had, and she was suspicious of privilege.
Her three general election victories required voter support outside of the traditional Conservative-voting middle classes and she had an instinctive feel for electorally attractive populism. After the Falklands War this included overt patriotism and contempt for communism. Together with Ronald Reagan, she can be credited with a hand in the fall of the Soviet Union. However, dictators of the right such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile troubled her much less.
Europe
In 1975, Thatcher had played a key role in campaigning for a “yes” vote in the referendum on whether the UK should remain in the then European Community.
During her premiership, she fought resolutely and successfully to reduce Britain’s contributions to the EC but, by 1988, she had become much more of a sceptic and in a speech in Bruges she said: “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.”
It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of the Bruges speech, which perhaps for the first time articulated the argument of British sovereignty that has become the core of subsequent Eurosceptic campaigning.
But, despite various battles over Europe, Thatcher did pass the Single European Act, which created the single market and, in the dying days of her premiership, she agreed to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the crucial precursor of the single European currency.
Europe played a part in Margaret Thatcher’s fall as her Cabinet was distinctly more pro-Europe than