Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 4 May 1979 to 28 November 1990, the longest continuous premiership of the twentieth century and the first held by a woman in Britain. She won three general elections, broke the industrial power of the trade unions, sold state industries and council houses, restored price stability at heavy cost, and reversed her country’s assumption of managed decline.

She is also the figure through whom conservatives argue with each other. To one camp she is the standard: a leader who understood that inflation is a moral question, that state ownership corrupts both producer and consumer, and that a nation which will not defend its territory will not be believed about anything else. To another, quieter camp — Roger Scruton’s — she accelerated the dissolution of the settled communities, chapels, clubs and trades that conservatism exists to protect, and did it with the instruments of market liberalism.⁵

Key Takeaways

• Born Margaret Roberts on 13 October 1925 above a grocer’s shop in Grantham; read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford; elected MP for Finchley in 1959.
• Took the Conservative leadership in February 1975 and the premiership on 4 May 1979, winning again in 1983 and 1987.
• Her programme rested on monetary discipline, privatisation, the Right to Buy under the Housing Act 1980, and legal limits on union power.
• Victory in the Falklands in June 1982 and defeat of the miners’ strike in March 1985 were the two decisive tests of authority.
• The Community Charge and a cabinet split over Europe ended her premiership in November 1990; she died on 8 April 2013.

History And Context

Britain in the 1970s worked badly and knew it. Inflation reached 24 per cent in 1975. The miners’ overtime ban of November 1973 put industry on a three-day week from 1 January 1974, and the strike that followed in February destroyed Edward Heath’s government. In 1976 a Labour chancellor applied to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. The winter of 1978 and 1979 brought rubbish in the streets and unburied dead in Liverpool.

Thatcher’s intellectual formation ran through Keith Joseph, who founded the Centre for Policy Studies with her in 1974 and who insisted that the postwar consensus itself was the problem. Behind Joseph stood Friedrich Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom she had read as a student and whose argument that central direction of the economy erodes the rule of law she cited throughout her career.⁴ The Institute of Economic Affairs, founded in 1955, had spent two decades making the monetarist and market case respectable.

In office the sequence was harsh. The 1981 budget raised taxes into a recession, which 364 economists denounced in a letter to The Times; unemployment passed three million in January 1982. The Falklands invasion in April 1982 and the recapture of the islands by June transformed her political standing. She then took the confrontation she had prepared for: the National Union of Mineworkers struck in March 1984 without a national ballot, and after a year of coal stockpiles, police mobilisation and internal union division, the strike collapsed in March 1985.

Privatisation followed: British Telecom in 1984, British Gas in 1986, British Airways in 1987, water in 1989, electricity from 1990. The Right to Buy, legislated in 1980, transferred more than a million council houses to their tenants and created a new class of Conservative-voting owners. The Big Bang of October 1986 deregulated the City of London.

The end came from her own side. The Community Charge, a flat per-head local tax introduced in Scotland in 1989 and England and Wales in 1990, provoked mass non-payment and riots. Geoffrey Howe resigned over Europe on 1 November 1990, Michael Heseltine challenged her leadership, and after failing to win outright on the first ballot she withdrew from the contest on 22 November and left office on 28 November.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives defend the record on four grounds. First, inflation. Thatcher treated the erosion of money as a breach of faith with savers and pensioners rather than a technical problem — a position closer to Burke on the assignats than to any economics faculty. Inflation, above 18 per cent in 1980, was under 5 per cent by 1983.

Second, the constitutional point about unions. The Employment Acts of 1980, 1982 and 1988 and the Trade Union Act of 1984 required secret ballots before strikes, restricted secondary picketing and ended the closed shop. The conservative claim is not that unions are illegitimate but that no private body should hold a veto over the elected government, which is what the events of 1974 had established.

Third, property. The Right to Buy fits a long conservative tradition, from Anthony Eden’s property-owning democracy onwards, holding that ownership produces prudence, stake-holding and independence from the state. Her own account gives this equal weight with the economic reforms.²

Fourth, resolve abroad. The Falklands, the deployment of cruise missiles against sustained protest, and the working relationship with Ronald Reagan and then Mikhail Gorbachev formed part of the Western pressure under which the Soviet system failed. Charles Moore’s authorised biography documents how deliberate the Falklands decision was, taken against Foreign Office advice and with the fleet assembled in days.¹

The internal conservative criticism deserves equal standing. Scruton, writing in England: An Elegy, mourned an England of parish, regiment, chapel and market town that market forces dissolved as thoroughly as any socialist plan.⁵ John Gray made the sharper version: a party of tradition governed by economic radicalism produced a society with weaker attachments than the one it inherited. She never resolved the tension, and neither has the British right.

Differing Positions

Critics point to the industrial regions. Manufacturing employment fell by roughly a quarter between 1979 and 1983; unemployment stayed above three million until 1987; the coalfields, steel towns and shipyards of the north of England, south Wales and central Scotland lost their economic basis and in many cases have not recovered. Relative poverty rose substantially over the decade, and inequality measured by the Gini coefficient rose faster in Britain in the 1980s than in almost any comparable economy.³

The Right to Buy is criticised on the same evidence conservatives cite for it: councils were restricted from using receipts to replace the stock, and the social housing shortage that followed is a direct inheritance. Scotland’s political realignment away from the Conservatives, tested to destruction by the poll tax, has proved permanent. On Europe her legacy is contested even among admirers, since she signed the Single European Act in 1986 and then spent her later years opposing what it produced.

References

1. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not for Turning (Allen Lane, 2013).
2. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993).
3. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Jonathan Cape, 2003).
4. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge, 1944).
5. Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (Chatto & Windus, 2000).