How Margaret Thatcher made Britain great again

Feb 25, 2009

Andrew Roberts
As the BBC tells the story of Margaret Thatchers downfall in a major new
drama, historian Andrew Roberts assesses her legacy

WHEN Margaret Thatcher was asked what she had changed about British
politics, she answered: "Everything." It was uncharacteristically immodest
of her, but it was true. After she became prime minister in May 1979, she
changed the atmosphere of the pre-emptive cringe that successive
ministries of both parties and industrial management had exhibited
towards the trade unions ever since the World War Two.

She changed the sense of embarrassment that Britons felt towards the
concepts of productivity and profit. She changed British reliance on
manufacturing industry just in time, inaugurating the services and
information technology industry revolutions.

She changed the attitude of appeasement and post-imperial guilt that had
actuated foreign policy making since the Suez Crisis. She changed British
politics so fundamentally that the Labour Party had to drop socialism and
change its name and objectives in order to get elected.

No one was in any doubt about what Lady Thatcher stood for or believed
in

Along with her friend and ideological soulmate Ronald Reagan - the
greatest US president since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s - Thatcher
changed the failing policy of detente with Communism into the
confrontational one that eventually brought the Berlin Wall down at the
end of her premiership.

She changed the ownership structure of vast industries, exchanging the

nebulous concept of 'national' ownership for the more efficient, purer (and

ultimately fairer) one of shareholder ownership. She changed the way we

financed the European budget.

Meanwhile she fundamentally changed - for the worse - the career paths
of the Labour PM Jim Callaghan, the Argentinian junta leader General
Galtieri, the next Labour leader Michael Foot, the extreme left-wing
National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill, the next Labour
leader Neil Kinnock and especially the IRA terrorist and hunger-striker
Bobby Sands.

Those things that she did not change for the better she would have, if she
hadn't been knifed by an over-ambitious cabal of cowards, fools, traitors
and - worst of all - Europhiles, who split the Tory party and left it feuding
for half a generation, until the advent of David Cameron in 2005.

The election victory of 1992 was largely down to her legacy rather than
the non-leadership of her absurd successor John Major, since when the
Conservatives were thrice defeated by Tony Blair - an ideological son of
Thatcher - at three general elections.

By encouraging George Bush Sr not to 'wobble' during the First Gulf War,
she set the international scene that allowed Tony Blair to finish off the
campaign against Saddam Hussein that she started in 1990, further
strengthening the Special Relationship that the two PMs both so fervently
believed in.

The actions against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo and the liberation of Iraq
from Saddam Hussein were both supported by Thatcher after she left
office, showing that her instinct for extending democracy was undimmed.
(Fortunately this did not extend during her premiership to the corrupt,
unwieldy and extremist GLC, which she heroically abolished in 1986.)

The kind of permanent revolution she offered did not suit everyone

Margaret Thatcher stuck to the practice of saying what she meant and
meaning what she said. When she said the lady wasn't for turning, she
wasn't. When she said the Falklands must be liberated come what may,
they were. When she said that people would be allowed to buy their own
council houses, they were too. When she told European politicians that
she wanted a rebate on the billions Britain overpaid the EEC, she held out
till she got one.

There's a downside to all this refreshing candour, of course. The kind of

permanent revolution she offered did not suit everyone and eventually
she was overthrown.

But she went down fighting for her principles; no one was in any doubt
about what she stood for or what she believed in. You might not have
agreed with her, but few deny that hers was a towering political honesty
of the kind hardly ever heard from today's so-called leaders.

British politics throws up very few giants, but in her record-breaking 11and-a-half years in the premiership - the longest continuous period of
anyone since 1827 - Margaret Thatcher showed herself to be one such.