Jonathan Manthorpe: Margaret Thatcher the revolutionary architect of modern Britain (with video)


The Iron Lady forced Britain to abandon a class-ridden and hierarchical society


Remembering Margaret Thatcher "The Iron Lady", tributes pour in from around the world.

VANCOUVER — Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most important political and social revolutionary since Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century.

Cromwell laid the groundwork for Britain’s emergence as a parliamentary democracy.

Thatcher forced Britain, kicking and screaming, to abandon its tired and tattered security blanket of a class-ridden and hierarchical society.

In the 1970s, Britain had descended into a grim and grey servitude under the Orwellian authority of intrusive national and local governments, moribund state-owned industries, and the often manic ideological Jacobinism of the trade unions.

In her 11 years as Britain’s first — and so far only — woman prime minister, Thatcher brought a storm of creative destruction to the country’s political, social and economic landscape.

By the time she was forced from office in 1990 by her Conservative Party colleagues — who had become convinced she had lost her political touch — Thatcher had turned Britain into the meritocracy it is today. And she had restored its position as a capital of finance and innovation it had not held since the heydays of empire in the 19th century.

Thatcher always said she learned her simple faith in the power of a free-market economy watching her father run the family store in the small Midlands town of Grantham.

And accolades for her great success in turning Britain from the basket case beholden to the International Monetary Fund when she led the Conservative Party to victory in 1979, to the muscular world-class economy she bequeathed to her successors, usually focus on her privatization of state-owned companies.

She began her economic reforms in 1979 with a shift on taxation away from incomes and toward consumption, which she considered more fair because it was based on choice.

Income tax rates were cut dramatically and replaced by a near doubling of the value-added tax, the sales tax, to 15 per cent.

She did indeed sell off companies like British Telecom, British Gas, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, British Coal, British Steel, and regional water authorities.

But what enabled Britain to become a nation of shareholders was a move by Thatcher that is often overlooked or downplayed, but which may have been the most important strand in her revolution.

That was her decision to force municipalities to sell their rental public housing to the tenants if they wanted to buy.

By the time Thatcher took office in 1979, the proportion of what is known in Britain as “council housing” had reached 50 per cent of the nation’s entire housing stock.

The sell-off not only gave the new owners a real stake in their communities and society, it fundamentally changed the relationship between citizens and their government.

It also gave them equity.

That translated into a boom in the housing market, and also a surge of investment as new homeowners turned their collateral into businesses and stock portfolios.

Those benefits were not immediately evident. In Thatcher’s first years of restructuring the economy, unemployment in Britain rose to its highest level since the recession of the 1930s.

Many of Thatcher’s Tory colleagues became wobbly, and urged her to follow the example of the former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath who had performed a U-turn and reversed market reforms in 1972 in the face of public disquiet.

But Thatcher responded at a party conference in 1980 with a phrase that came to embody her steely determination:

“You turn if you must,” she said. “The lady’s not for turning.”

Thatcher had no time for fools or the weak-willed, who by early 1982 included enough of her backbenchers to be a problem.

The invasion of the Falkland Islands by the Argentine military regime in April 1982 not only silenced her critics, it became the defining moment of her leadership.

Outraged at the incompetence of her foreign ministry and despite advice from military leaders that retaking the islands might not be feasible, Thatcher ordered the sending of an expeditionary force.

By any measure, the retaking of the Falkland Islands in a brief and utterly decisive war was an extraordinary feat of arms.

Thatcher tripled her majority in the House of Commons in the 1983 election.

With the heads of the Argentine junta in her trophy room, Thatcher turned her attention to the still very powerful British trade unions.

The confrontation came to a head with a coal miners’ strike in 1984 and 1985. Thatcher refused to budge, and in the end the miners, led by Arthur Skargill, went back to work having achieved nothing.

The unions have never regained the political power they lost in that strike.

On the world stage, Thatcher’s friendship and political partnership with U.S. President Ronald Reagan defined international affairs of the late-1980s.

It was Thatcher who first decided that new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was someone the West could “do business” with.

Reagan followed her lead and stayed engaged with Gorbachev through the orchestrated collapse of the Soviet Union.

Not surprisingly in the circumstances, it was Soviet journalists who first gave Thatcher the name by which history remembers her: “The Iron Lady.”


British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan pose for photographers on the patio outside the Oval Office on July 17, 1987. Thatcher died on Monday following a stroke.


Photograph by: MIKE SARGENT, AFP/Getty Images


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