Thatcher, Margaret Hilda, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire (née Roberts) (b. 13 Oct. 1925). British Prime Minister 1979–90 Born in Grantham (Lincolnshire), she was educated at Kesteven and Grantham Girls School, and at Oxford, where she studied chemistry. She was then a research chemist, and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as
Conservative candidate for Dartford in 1950 and 1951. She married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman, in 1951, and having studied law, was called to the Bar in 1954. In 1959, she was elected to Parliament for Finchley and, in 1961, became Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. After taking a prominent role in opposition (1964–70), she served under
Heath as Secretary of State for Education. By late 1974, when Heath had lost his third election, she was still relatively unknown. In the leadership contest of 1975 she was the only serious challenger to Heath and, after a surprising success in the first ballot, gathered so much momentum as to achieve an overall majority in the second. The manner of her election meant that she had to be careful in her first years of opposition to conciliate many leading figures in the party who had been her seniors before 1975. However, her increasing conviction that Britain needed a radical policy overhaul to establish free and private enterprise liberated from government and
trade-union interference struck a chord during the strike waves of 1978–9, which became known in popular memory as the ‘winter of discontent’.
She won the 1979 elections through her uncompromising twin message that the
Labour Party was the party of government intervention, and that it had become a hostage to
trade union power. In office, she broke with postwar Conservative policy to realize economic policies of
monetarism. The effects of the prevalent world depression caused by the 1979
oil price shock were exacerbated through drastic reductions in state spending, and a policy of high interest rates to reduce inflation, the new number one target of economic policy. The record of her economic achievements was mixed. She did drastically reduce inflation, as well as public debt. During the 1980s, economic fortunes improved, and unemployment recovered from its high levels of 1979–81. However, inflation decreased not only in Britain, but in all industrialized countries, and Britain's inflation rate remained among the highest in Western Europe. It is also unclear to what extent the economic recovery of the 1980s was the result of her policies, and to what extent it was the consequence of a decline in commodity prices which affected all other countries as well. At any rate, her claim to have improved long-term British economic prospects were belied by the recession which set in in 1989, which was even worse than that of 1979–81, and underpinned her eventual fall from power.
Apart from directing economic policy, she lost no time in pursuing her second major preoccupation, the reduction of trade-union power. She exploited the unions' inevitable weakness during the 1979–82 depression to pass legislation making trade unions more democratic in their decision-making, and more responsive to their members' wishes. Her battle against the trade unions climaxed in 1984–5, when she stood firm and eventually overcame the eleven month-long miners' strike. It was a decisive victory over the trade-union movement and its hitherto excessive power, albeit achieved at an enormous social cost. Furthermore, it is arguable that, in line with the rest of the world, trade-union power and membership declined more owing to the difficult economic circumstances of high unemployment and job insecurity during the 1980s and 1990s, than in response to any of her anti-union legislation.
The initial unpopularity of her government was reversed as the ‘iron lady’ reclaimed the Falklands Islands from Argentine occupation in the
Falklands War of 1982. In consequence, she won the 1983 elections with a record majority. In foreign policy, her close relationship with US Presidents
Reagan and
Bush gave her enormous clout, which ensured that her reputation abroad eventually exceeded her rather more controversial image in Britain. Again, her record is mixed. Her pragmatic and pioneering insight in 1984 that
Gorbachev was a man one ‘could do business with’ stood in sharp contrast to her great reluctance to accept the inevitability of German reunification after the fall of the
Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Her undoubted hostility to
European integration was also compromised by her eventual acquiescence to the signing of the
Single European Act in 1986.
Her longevity despite the ambiguous success of her policies stemmed from three basic factors. First, she created a rhetoric in which her strong leadership was portrayed as successful, while the Labour Party would continue to be wedded to
socialism and trade unionism regardless of its party reforms under
Kinnock.
Second, she was extraordinarily fortunate in the foundation of the
Social Democratic Party in 1981, which throughout the 1980s split the opposition between two almost equal camps: thus she was able to gain record parliamentary majorities despite gaining less than 45 per cent of the popular vote.
Third, she had a shrewd appreciation of the needs of the Conservative political constituency and ways to expand it. For example, the Housing Act of 1980 gave council tenants the right to buy their houses or flats, and about half a million properties were sold in 1979–83. As new homeowners, these people had effectively received a social promotion, and were now keen to underline their new status as ‘middle class’ by switching their allegiance from Labour to Conservative. Her programme of large-scale privatization had a similar effect of strengthening her middle-class constituency, through their purchase of cheap shares, which increased government revenue. But perhaps the best example in this respect is her policy of taxation. Although the total tax burden increased during her time in power, direct taxation fell, which enhanced her tax-cutting image among her middle-and upper-income constituency. The consequent increase in indirect taxation hit the poorest sections of society particularly hard, but these would have been unlikely to vote Conservative anyway.
Despite her record victories at three successive elections, by 1989 she increasingly lost her political touch, notably by failing to appreciate the unpopularity of the
poll tax. It seemed unlikely that she could win another victory against a rejuvenated Labour Party, and her obstinate opposition to the European Community was increasingly at odds with her senior Cabinet colleagues. Challenged by the charismatic Michael Heseltine, himself an earlier casualty of her iron control over the Cabinet, she narrowly failed to win a sufficient majority in the first round of the 1990 leadership elections and resigned (perhaps a little rashly), taking into account the not altogether selfless advice of her senior Cabinet colleagues such as John
Major. Adorned by the rank-and-file in the Conservative Party, her frequent political criticism of her successor and her increasingly hostile stance on the EU compounded the difficulties of the Conservatives in the 1990s to find consistent policies.
