Margaret Thatcher: We remember differently

One Chris Kitchen, a Briton, was quoted as saying:  “We’ve been waiting for a long time to hear the news of Baroness Thatcher’s demise and I can’t say I’m sorry. I’ve got no sympathy for Margaret Thatcher and I will not be shedding a tear for her. She’s done untold damage to the mining community. I don’t think Margaret Thatcher had any sympathy for the mining communities she decimated, the people she threw on the dole and the state she left the country in. I honestly can’t think of anything good I can say about Margaret Thatcher.”

To fully understand this commentator, whose feelings have apparently not been mollified by a tradition of mortuary respect and the fact that Thatcher had been out of power for over twenty years, we need to go back to the miners’ strike in the UK – the biggest confrontation between the unions and the Thatcher government.  Briefly, when in 1984 the National Coal Board (NCB) proposed to close 20 of the 174 state-owned mines and cut 20,000 jobs out of 187,000, two-thirds of the country’s miners, led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) downed tools in protest. The leader of NUM had refused to hold a ballot on the strike, having lost three previous national ballots on strikes (January 1982, October 1982, March 1983). For this, the Thatcher regime declared the strike illegal and bluntly refused to bargain with the workers. In March 1985, after being on strike for a year, the NUM leadership conceded without a deal. Despite opposition the government in the same 1985 closed 25 coal mines it said were ‘unprofitable’. The trend of closing mines continued after Thatcher’s tenure with the eventual closure of 150 coal mines, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, which devastated entire communities. So unpopular were the initial impacts of her policies, which centred on de-regulation, privatization and curtailing of public spending that the media started canvassing for a policy U-turn after the 1981 riots over the harsh impacts of her policies. Thatcher however retorted to the media campaign: “Turn, if you want to. The Lady is not for turning”.

Supporters of Thatcher say she is not given sufficient credit for her role in arresting the UK’s hitherto terminal decline as a great power. They argue that the competitive nature of the UK economy today is in large part due to Thatcher’s policies. In fact Thatcher’s supporters would argue that despite the short term adverse impacts of her policy options, by 1982, the UK had begun to experience signs of economic recovery, with inflation down to 8.6 per cent from a high of 18 per cent. By 1983 overall economic growth was stronger and inflation and mortgage rates were at their lowest levels since 1970, although manufacturing output had dropped by 30 per cent since 1978 and unemployment remained high. By 1987 however, unemployment was falling, the economy was stable and strong, and inflation was low, prompting a reversal in public opinion of her (her job approval rating was only only 23 per cent by December 1980 – lower than recorded for any previous Prime Minister). This turn-around in public opinion prompted Thatcher to call for a general election for 11 June that year, despite the deadline for an election still being 12 months away. In that election, Thatcher re-elected for a third successive term.

From domestic policy to foreign policy, deconstructing the legacy of the Iron Lady remains a difficult task: In Africa for instance Thatcher is often remembered unkindly, especially by those involved in the frontal struggle against Apartheid for her declaration that the African National Congress is a “typical terrorist organisation… Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.”  Former ANC cabinet minister Pallo Alto, on hearing about Thatcher’s death, reportedly said: “I’ve just sent a letter of congratulations…I say good riddance.”  My personal opinion is that this too is a rather simplistic appraisal. After all, the same Iron Lady that made that infamous statement and was opposed to sanctions also granted asylum to many of the ANC activists, including former president Thabo Mbeki. It should be recalled that in the mid 1980s, when the South African government was implicated in a plot that blew up the ANC offices in London and attempted to kidnap its members including Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo (remember Umaru Dikko?),  Thatcher provided armed body guard for most of the ANC’s senior officials in London at the taxpayers’ expense. Some of Thatcher’s supporters even claim that she was privately doing more to end apartheid than her official gestures suggested. For instance  in a confidential letter to P.W. Bother in 1985, Thatcher was quoted as saying:  “I continue to believe, as I have said to you before, that the release of Nelson Mandela would have more impact than almost any single action you could undertake.”

Born Margaret Hilda Roberts in Grantham, Lincolnshire on 13 October 1925, her father Alfred Roberts owned two grocery shops and was active in local politics and in the Methodist church. The young Miss Roberts won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where she was the Head Girl (Senior Prefect) in 1942-1943. She was admitted into Oxford University in 1943 for a degree in Chemistry. While there she became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946 after reportedly being influenced by Friedrich von Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom (1944), which condemned economic intervention by government as a precursor to an authoritarian state.

The road to Thatcher’s ascent to the top in British politics was not paved with gold. She paid her dues, losing local elections a consecutive number of times (1950, 1951 and 1955) before she was elected MP for Finchley in the 1959 elections.  Even when she applied for a job after graduating in Chemistry from Oxford University in 1947 at the chemical company ICI, she was also rejected after the personnel department assessed her as being “headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated.” In 1975, Thatcher became the Leader of the Opposition and the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. Between 1979 and 1990, she was Britain’s Prime Minister and the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century. She is famously known as the Iron Lady – a nickname given to her by a Russian journalist to capture her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

Largely because of her cuts in higher education spending, Thatcher was the first Oxford-educated post-war Prime Minister not to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford after a 738 to 319 vote of the governing assembly and a student petition. She left office in 1990, following a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine.

For many, the last memory of Thatcher in office was her feminization of power when she left Downing Street in tears, regarding her ouster from the leadership of the Conservative Party and consequently of the government as an act of betrayal. After retiring from the House of Commons in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the county of Lincolnshire, which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords.  She died of a stroke in London, aged 87.