Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Main
prime minister of United Kingdom
in full Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, née
Margaret Hilda Roberts
born October 13, 1925, Grantham, Lincolnshire, England
British Conservative Party politician and prime minister (1979–90),
Europe’s first woman prime minister. The only British prime minister in
the 20th century to win three consecutive terms and, at the time of her
resignation, Britain’s longest continuously serving prime minister since
1827, she accelerated the evolution of the British economy from statism
to liberalism and became, by personality as much as achievement, the
most renowned British political leader since Winston Churchill.
Early years
The daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and local alderman (and later
mayor of Grantham), and Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, Thatcher formed an
early desire to be a politician. Her intellectual ability led her to the
University of Oxford, where she studied chemistry and was immediately
active in politics, becoming one of the first woman presidents of the
Oxford University Conservative Association. After graduating in 1946 she
worked for four years as a research chemist, reading for the bar in her
spare time. From 1954 she practiced as a barrister, specializing in tax
law. In 1951 she married a wealthy industrialist, Denis Thatcher (b.
1915—d. 2003), who supported her political ambition. The couple had
twins, a son and a daughter, in 1953.
Thatcher first ran for Parliament in 1950 but was unsuccessful,
despite increasing the local Conservative vote by 50 percent. In 1959
she entered the House of Commons, winning the “safe” Conservative seat
of Finchley in northern London. She rose steadily within the party,
serving as a parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Pensions and
National Insurance (1961–64), as chief opposition spokesman on education
(1969–70), and as secretary of state for education and science (1970–74)
in the Conservative government of Edward Heath. While a member of the
Heath cabinet (Thatcher was only the second woman to hold a cabinet
portfolio in a Conservative government), she eliminated a program that
provided free milk to schoolchildren, provoking a storm of controversy
and prompting opponents in the Labour Party to taunt her with cries of
“Thatcher the milk snatcher.” She also created more comprehensive
schools—introduced by the Labour Party in the 1960s to make rigorous
academic education available to working-class children—than any other
education minister in history, though they were undermined during her
tenure as prime minister. After Heath lost two successive elections in
1974, Thatcher, though low in the party hierarchy, was the only minister
prepared to challenge him for the party leadership. With the backing of
the Conservative right wing, she was elected leader in February 1975 and
thus began a 15-year ascendancy that would change the face of Britain.
Margaret Thatcher
Prime minister
Thatcher led the Conservatives to a decisive electoral victory in 1979
following a series of major strikes during the previous winter (the
so-called “Winter of Discontent”) under the Labour Party government of
James Callaghan. As a prime minister representing the newly energetic
right wing of the Conservative Party (the “Dries,” as they later called
themselves, as opposed to the old-style moderate Tories, or “Wets”),
Thatcher advocated greater independence of the individual from the
state; an end to allegedly excessive government interference in the
economy, including privatization of state-owned enterprises and the sale
of public housing to tenants; reductions in expenditures on social
services such as health care, education, and housing; limitations on the
printing of money in accord with the economic doctrine of monetarism;
and legal restrictions on trade unions. The term Thatcherism came to
refer not just to these policies but also to certain aspects of her
ethical outlook and personal style, including moral absolutism, fierce
nationalism, a zealous regard for the interests of the individual, and a
combative, uncompromising approach to achieving political goals.
The main impact of her first term was economic. Inheriting a weak
economy, she reduced or eliminated some governmental regulations and
subsidies to businesses, thereby purging the manufacturing industry of
many inefficient—but also some blameless—firms. The result was a
dramatic increase in unemployment, from 1.3 million in 1979 to more than
double that figure two years later. At the same time, inflation doubled
in just 14 months, to more than 20 percent, and manufacturing output
fell sharply. Although inflation decreased and output rose before the
end of her first term, unemployment continued to increase, reaching more
than three million in 1986.
Thatcher embarked on an ambitious program of privatization of
state-owned industries and public services, including aerospace,
television and radio, gas and electricity, water, the state airline, and
British Steel. By the end of the 1980s, the number of individual
stockholders had tripled, and the government had sold 1.5 million
publicly owned housing units to their tenants.
Nonetheless, rising unemployment and social tensions during her first
term made her deeply unpopular. Her unpopularity would have ensured her
defeat in the general election of 1983 were it not for two factors: the
Falkland Islands War (1982) between Britain and Argentina, over
possession of a remote British dependency in the South Atlantic, and the
deep divisions within the Labour Party, which contested the election on
a radical manifesto that critics dubbed the “longest suicide note in
history.” Thatcher won election to a second term in a landslide—the
biggest victory since Labour’s great success in 1945—gaining a
parliamentary majority of 144 with just over 42 percent of the vote.
Thatcher entered office promising to curb the power of the unions,
which had shown their ability to bring the country to a standstill
during six weeks of strikes in the winter of 1978–79. Her government
enacted a series of measures designed to undermine the unions’ ability
to organize and stage strikes, including laws that banned the closed
shop, required unions to poll their members before ordering a strike,
forbade sympathy strikes, and rendered unions responsible for damages
caused by their members. In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers began
a nationwide strike to prevent the closing of 20 coal mines that the
government claimed were unproductive. The walkout, which lasted nearly a
year, soon became emblematic of the struggle for power between the
Conservative government and the trade union movement. Thatcher
steadfastly refused to meet the union’s demands, and in the end she won;
the miners returned to work without winning a single concession.
A terrorist bombing at a Conservative Party conference in Brighton in
1984, the work of the Irish Republican Army, nearly killed Thatcher and
several senior members of her government. After battling Ken
Livingstone’s Labour-led London government, Thatcher abolished the
Greater London Council in 1986. By the end of Thatcher’s second term,
few aspects of British life had escaped the most sweeping transformation
of Britain since the postwar reforms of the Labour Party.
In foreign affairs, the Falklands War illuminated her most
significant international relationship, with Ronald Reagan, president of
the United States (1981–89). Thatcher and Reagan, who together made the
1980s the decade of conservatism, shared a vision of the world in which
the Soviet Union was an evil enemy deserving of no compromise, and their
partnership ensured that the Cold War continued in all its frigidity
until the rise to power of the reform-minded Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1985. In keeping with her strong anticommunism—a 1976
speech condemning communism earned her the nickname “Iron Lady” in the
Soviet press—Thatcher strongly supported the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) and Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, a
stance that proved popular with the electorate, given the Labour Party’s
repudiation of Britain’s traditional nuclear and defense policies. In
Africa, Thatcher presided over the orderly establishment of an
independent Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) in 1980 after 15 years of
illegal separation from British colonial rule under a white minority.
However, she encountered considerable criticism both at home and abroad
for her opposition to international sanctions against the apartheid
regime of South Africa.
The second half of Thatcher’s tenure was marked by an
inextinguishable controversy over Britain’s relationship with the
European Community (EC). In 1984 she succeeded, amid fierce opposition,
in drastically reducing Britain’s contribution to the EC budget. After
her third electoral victory in 1987, she adopted a steadily more hostile
attitude toward European integration. She resisted “federalist”
continental trends toward both a single currency and a deeper political
union. Her traditionally pro-European party became divided, and a string
of senior ministers left the Cabinet over the issue.
The implementation of a poll tax in 1989 produced outbreaks of street
violence and alarmed the Conservative rank-and-file, who feared that
Thatcher could not lead the party to a fourth consecutive term. Spurred
by public disapproval of the poll tax and Thatcher’s increasingly
strident tone, Conservative members of Parliament moved against her in
November 1990. Although she defeated her most senior opponent, former
defense minister Michael Heseltine, by 204 votes to Heseltine’s 152, her
total fell four votes short of the necessary majority plus 15 percent,
and she decided not to contest the election in a second ballot. On
November 22 she announced her resignation as Conservative Party leader
and prime minister, paving the way for her replacement by John Major six
days later.
Later years
In retirement, Margaret Thatcher remained a political force. She
continued to influence internal Conservative Party politics (often to
the dismay of Major), and Thatcherism shaped the priorities of the
Labour Party, which she had kept out of office for more than a decade.
She remained a member of Parliament until the 1992 election and was
subsequently elevated, as a peeress for life, to the House of Lords. She
continued to speak and lecture, notably in the United States and Asia,
and established the Thatcher Foundation to support free enterprise and
democracy, particularly in the newly liberated countries of central and
eastern Europe. In 1995 she became a member of the Order of the Garter.
Following a series of minor strokes, Thatcher retired from public
speaking in 2002.
Hugo Young
Encyclopaedia Britannica
