Margaret Thatcher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Term of office: May 4, 1979 -
November 28, 1990
Preceded by: James Callaghan
Succeeded by: John Major
Date of birth: 13 October 1925
Place of birth: Grantham, England
Spouse: Denis Thatcher
Political party: Conservative
The Right Honourable Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (born 13 October 1925), is a British stateswoman and was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, also Leader of the Opposition from 1975, and the only woman to date to hold the former position. She is also the only woman to be in the latter position officially, though Margaret Beckett has been the Acting Leader. She won three successive general elections and was the last person to do this until Tony Blair in 2005. However, although she had strong support from the largest minority of voters for most of her tenure she was eventually elected out of leadership by her own party and replaced by John Major in 1990, whose government went on to be re-elected in 1992. She is an elder stateswoman of the Conservative Party and the figurehead of a political philosophy that became known as Thatcherism, which involves reduced public spending, lower direct taxation, de-regulation, a monetarist policy, and a programme of privatisation of government-owned industries. Even before coming to power she was nicknamed the Iron Lady in Soviet media (because of her vocal opposition to communism), an appellation that stuck.
Thatcher served as Secretary of State for Education and Science in the government of Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974, and successfully challenged Heath for the Conservative leadership in 1975. She was undefeated at the polls, winning the 1979, 1983 and 1987 general elections, and became the longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century. In foreign relations, she maintained the "special relationship" with the United States, and formed a close bond with Ronald Reagan. In 1982 her government dispatched a Royal Navy task force to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina in the Falklands War.
The profound changes Thatcher set in motion as Prime Minister altered much of the economic and cultural landscape of the UK. She curtailed the power of the trade unions, cut back the role of the state in business, dramatically expanded home ownership, and in so doing created a more entrepreneurial culture. She also aimed to cut back the welfare state and foster a more flexible labour market that would create jobs and could adapt to market conditions. Exacerbated by the global recession of the early 1980s, her policies initially caused large-scale unemployment, especially in the industrial heartlands of northern England and the coalfields of South Wales, and increased wealth inequalities. However from the mid 1980s a period of sustained economic growth occurred that led to an improvement in the UK's economic performance. Supporters of Margaret Thatcher assert that Thatcherite policies were responsible for this.
Her popularity finally declined when she replaced the unpopular local government rates tax with the even less popular Community Charge, which was more commonly known as the poll tax. At the same time the Conservative Party began to split over her sceptical approach to European Economic and Monetary Union. Her leadership was challenged from within and she was forced to resign in 1990, her defeat being due at least partly to inadequate advice and campaigning. In 1992 she was created Baroness Thatcher, and since then her direct political work has been as head of the Thatcher Foundation.
Early life and education
Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire in eastern England. Her father was Alfred Roberts, who ran a grocer's shop in the town and was active in local politics, serving as an Alderman. While officially described as 'Liberal Independent', in practice he supported the local Conservatives. He lost his post as Alderman after the Labour Party won control of Grantham Council in 1946. Her mother was Beatrice Roberts, and she has a sister, Muriel.
She did well at school, going to a girls' grammar school and then to Somerville College, Oxford from 1944, where she studied chemistry. She became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, the third woman to hold the post. She graduated with a 2:2 degree classification, and worked as a research chemist for British Xylonite and then J. Lyons and Co., where she helped develop methods for preserving ice cream. She was a member of the team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream.
Political career between 1950 and 1970
In the 1950 election she was the youngest woman Conservative candidate, and fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford. She fought the seat again in the 1951 election. Her activity in the Conservative Party in Kent brought her into contact with Denis Thatcher; they fell in love and were married later in 1951. Denis was a wealthy businessman, and he funded his wife to read for the Bar. She qualified as a Barrister in 1953, the same year that her twin children, Carol and Mark, were born. On returning to work, she specialised in tax issues.
Thatcher had begun to look for a safe Conservative seat, and was narrowly rejected as candidate for Orpington in 1954. She had several other rejections before being selected for Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat easily in the 1959 election and took her seat in the House of Commons. Unusually, her maiden speech was in support of her Private Member's Bill to force local councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful. In the same year, the only occasion she was to ever to resist her party's line was to vote for the restoration of birching.
She was given early promotion to the front bench as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in September 1961, keeping the post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 election. When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down, Thatcher voted for Edward Heath in the leadership election over Reginald Maudling, and was rewarded with the job of Conservative spokesman on Housing and Land. She moved to the Shadow Treasury Team after 1966.
Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support the Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality, and she voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion. However she was opposed to the abolition of capital punishment. She made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966 with a strong attack on the taxation policy of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism". She won promotion to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel Spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted to shadow Transport and finally Education before the 1970 election.
In Heath's Cabinet
When the Conservatives won the 1970 general election, Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science. In her first months in office, forced to administer a cut in the Education budget; she decided that abolishing free milk in schools would be less harmful than other measures.
Nevertheless, this provoked a storm of public protest, earning her the nickname "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher", coined by The Sun. Her term was marked by many proposals for more local education authorities to abolish grammar schools and adopt comprehensive secondary education, of which she approved, even though this was widely perceived as a left-wing policy. Thatcher also defended the budget of the Open University from attempts to cut it.
After the Conservative defeat in February 1974, she was promoted again, to Shadow Environment Secretary. In this job she promoted a policy of abolishing the rating system that paid for local government services, which proved a popular policy within the Conservative Party.
However, she agreed with Sir Keith Joseph that the Heath Government had lost control of monetary policy. After Heath lost the second election that year, Joseph and other right-wingers declined to challenge his leadership, but Thatcher decided that she would. Unexpectedly she outpolled Heath on the first ballot and won the job on the second, in February 1975. She appointed Heath's preferred successor William Whitelaw as her deputy.
As Leader of the Opposition
On January 19, 1976 she made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union. The most famous part of her speech ran:
"The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns."
In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Red Star gave her the nickname "The Iron Lady", which was soon publicised by Radio Moscow world service. She took delight in the name and it soon became associated with her image as an unwavering and steadfast character. (Although it has been claimed that this was not a very accurate translation of what the Russians called her, a more accurate translation would be "the frigid bitch".) She acquired many other nicknames such as "The Great She-Elephant", "Attila the Hen" and "The Grocer's Daughter". The last nickname was due to her father's profession, but coined at a time when she was considered as Edward Heath's ally; he had been nicknamed "The Grocer" by Private Eye.
At first she appointed many Heath supporters in the Shadow Cabinet and throughout her administrations sought to have a cabinet that reflected the broad range of opinions in the Conservative Party. Thatcher had to act cautiously in converting the Conservative Party to her monetarist beliefs. She reversed Heath's support for devolution to Scotland. In an interview she gave to Granada Television's World in Action programme in 1978, she spoke of her concerns about immigrants "swamping" the UK, arousing particular controversy at the time, and it has been viewed as having drawn supporters of the National Front back to the Conservative fold.
Most opinion polls showed that voters preferred James Callaghan as Prime Minister even as the Conservative Party maintained a lead, but the Labour Government ran into difficulties with some industrial disputes during the winter of 1978-9, dubbed the 'Winter of Discontent'. The Conservatives used catchy campaign posters which proclaimed that "Labour Isn't Working" to attack the governments record over unemployment. The Callaghan government fell after a successful Motion of no confidence, and following the general election, the Conservatives won a working majority in the House of Commons and Thatcher became the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
As Prime Minister
1979-1983
She formed a government on May 4, 1979, with a mandate to reverse the UK's economic decline and to reduce the role of the state in the economy. Thatcher was incensed by one contemporary view within the Civil Service that its job was to manage the UK's decline from the days of Empire, and wanted the country to punch above its weight in international affairs. She was a philosophic soulmate with Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 in the United States, and to a lesser extent Brian Mulroney, who was elected a little later in Canada. It seemed for a time that conservatism might be the dominant political philosophy in the major English-speaking nations for the era.
In May 1980, one day before she was due to meet the Irish Taoiseach, Charles Haughey to discuss Northern Ireland, she announced in the House of Commons that "The future of the constitutional affairs of Northern Ireland is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland, this government, this parliament and no-one else."
In 1981 a number of Provisional IRA and INLA prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze prison (known in Ireland as 'Long Kesh', its previous name) went on hunger strike to regain the status of political prisoners, which had been revoked five years earlier. Bobby Sands, the first of the strikers, was elected as an MP for the constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone a few weeks before he died. Thatcher refused at first to countenance a return to political status for republican prisoners, famously declaring "Crime is crime is crime; it is not political." However, after 9 more men had starved themselves to death and the strike had ended, and in the face of growing anger on both sides of the Irish border and widespread civil unrest, political status was restored to all paramilitary prisoners. This was a major propaganda coup for the IRA and is seen as the beginning of Sinn Féin's electoral rise, as they capitalised on the gains made during the hunger strikes.
Thatcher also continued the policy of "Ulsterisation" of the previous Labour government and its Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Roy Mason, believing that the unionists of Ulster should be at the forefront in combatting Irish republicanism. This meant relieving the burden on the mainstream British army and elevating the role of the Ulster Defence Regiment and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Another noticeable foible of Thatcher's was her refusal to call Cardinal Tomas O'Fiach, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, by his chosen name, insisting on calling him "Cardinal Fee".
In economic policy, Thatcher started out by increasing interest rates to drive down the money supply. She had a preference for indirect taxation over taxes on income, and value added tax (VAT) rose sharply to 15% with the result that inflation also rose. These moves hit businesses, especially in the manufacturing sector, and unemployment quickly passed two million. Interestingly, her early tax policy reforms were based on the monetarist theories of Friedman rather than the supply-side economics of Arthur Laffer and Jude Wanniski, which the government of Ronald Reagan espoused. There was a severe recession in the early 1980s, and the Government's economic policy was widely blamed. Political commentators harkened back to the Heath Government's "U-turn" and speculated that Mrs Thatcher would follow suit, but she repudiated this approach at the 1980 Conservative Party conference, telling the party: "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catch-phrase - the U-turn - I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning". That she meant what she said was confirmed in the 1981 budget, when despite concerns expressed in an open letter from 364 economists, taxes were increased in the middle of a recession. In January 1982, the inflation rate dropped to single figures and interest rates were then allowed to fall. Unemployment continued to rise, reaching an official figure of 3.6 million (the criteria for defining who was unemployed was amended, and others estimate that unemployment hit 5 million), and it remained over 3 million for several years. By the time of the 1983 election the economy was in a mess. British defence budget cuts, applying in the South Atlantic, coupled with Thatcher's disregard of the Falkland Islands and the removal of the ice patrol ship Endeavour and immigration reform detrimental to the British citizenship rights of citizens of the British Empire's few remnants - which was motivated mainly against Hong Kong - provoked the arguably most difficult foreign policy decision of Thatcher's era. In Argentina an unstable military junta was in power and keen on reversing its huge economic unpopularity. On 2 April 1982, it invaded the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas to Argentines), the only invasion of a British territory since World War II. Argentina has claimed the islands since an 1830s dispute on their settlement. Within days, Thatcher sent a naval task force to recapture the Islands. The ensuing military campaign was successful, resulting in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm for her personally, at a time when her popularity had been at an all-time low for a serving Prime Minister.
This Falklands Factor, as it came to be known, is regarded as crucial to the scale of the Conservative majority in the June 1983 general election. However, the economy was still in a deep recession associated with encouraging traditional heavy industries to come to an end. Continuing mass unemployment was explained as a consequence of this transition, implying it to be transitory, and alongside it new laws had given trade union members democratic powers to restrain militant union leaderships. Additionally, Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' policy, whereby council housing residents were permitted to buy their homes at a discount did much to increase her government's popularity in working-class areas.
The 1983 election was also influenced by events in the opposition parties. Labour was increasingly dominated by its "hard left" that had emerged from the 1970s union militancy, and in opposition its policies had swung very sharply to the left. This drove a significant number of right wing Labour members and MPs to form a breakaway party in 1981, the Social Democratic Party. Labour fought the election on unilateral nuclear disarmament, which proposed to abandon the British nuclear deterrent despite the threat from a nuclear armed Soviet Union, withdrawal from the European Community, and total reversal of Thatcher's economic and trade union changes. Indeed, one Labour MP, Gerald Kaufman, has called the party's 1983 manifesto "the longest suicide note in history". Consequently upon the Labour split, there was a new centrist challenge, the Alliance, from the Social Democrats in electoral pact with the Liberal Party, to break the major parties' dominance and win proportional representation. They were a grouping of uncertain cohesion and it is apparent from the result that they drew votes mainly away from Labour. This unbalanced splitting of the left of centre vote without a corresponding effect to the right, in combination with Britain's first past the post electoral system, where marginal changes in vote numbers and distribution have disproportionate effects on the number of seats won, also contributed to the Conservative landslide.
1983-1987
Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trade unions but, unlike the Heath government, adopted a strategy of incremental change rather than a single Act. Several unions launched strikes that were wholly or partly aimed at damaging her politically. The most significant of these was carried out by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). However, Thatcher had made preparations long in advance for an NUM strike by building up coal stocks, and there were no cuts in electric power, unlike 1972. Police tactics during the strike concerned civil libertarians: stopping suspected strike sympathisers travelling towards coalfields when they were still long distances from them, phone tapping as evidenced by Labour's Tony Benn, and a violent battle with mass pickets at Orgreave, Yorkshire. But images of massed militant miners using violence to prevent other miners from working, along with the fact that (illegally under a recent Act) the NUM had not held a ballot to approve strike action, swung public opinion against the strike--especially in the south and the moderate Nottinghamshire coalfield. The Miners' Strike lasted a full year, 1984-85, before the drift of half the miners back to work forced the NUM leadership to give in without a deal. This aborted political strike marked a turning point in UK politics: no longer could militant unions remove a democratically elected government.
On the early morning of October 12, 1984, Thatcher escaped death (on the day before her 59th birthday) from the bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Brighton's Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party conference. Five people died in the attack, including Roberta Wakeham (the first wife of the government's Chief Whip John Wakeham) and the Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry. A prominent member of the Cabinet, Norman Tebbit, was injured, along with his wife Margaret, who was left paralysed. Thatcher insisted that the conference open on time the next day and made her speech as planned.
On November 15, 1985, Thatcher signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first acknowledgement by a British government that the Republic of Ireland had an important role to play in Northern Ireland. The agreement was greeted with fury by Irish unionists. The Ulster Unionists and Democratic Unionists made an electoral pact and on January 23, 1986, staged an ad-hoc referendum by re-fighting their seats in by-elections, and won with 1 seat lost to the nationalist SDLP party. Then, unlike the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974, they found they could not bring the agreement down by a general strike. This was another effect of the changed balance of power in industrial relations. The agreement stood, and Thatcher "punished" the unionists for their non-cooperation by abolishing a devolved assembly she had created only four years before, although unionists have traditionally been of two minds about political devolution (witness the "Home Rule" crisis that led to the Anglo-Irish War), and the politicians most affected by the abolishment of the assembly were the constitutional nationalists, i.e. the SDLP, not it must be noted, Sinn Féin, which was not interested in a devolved assembly at that time, nor would it be for many years to come. The Anglo-Irish Agreement therefore, enraged the Unionists and alienated moderate nationalists, while doing little to reduce IRA violence. The British Government's intention may have been to solidify support from Dublin. However, the Irish Government had proved an unreliable ally since Eamon De Valera's time, adopting the strategy of making conciliatory gestures or minor concessions with one hand and undermining Britain with other action(s) by the other hand.
Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasised free markets and entrepreneurialism. Since gaining power, she had experimented in selling off a small nationalised company, the National Freight Company, to its workers, with a surprisingly large response. After the 1983 election, the Government became bolder and sold off most of the large utilities which had been in public ownership since the late 1940s. Many in the public took advantage of share offers, although many sold their shares immediately for a quick profit. The policy of privatisation, while anathema to many on the left, has become synonymous with Thatcherism. Privatisation has since been exported across the globe; a testament to its success in rejuvenating moribund government controlled industries while substantially improving the government's balance sheet.
In the Cold War Mrs Thatcher supported Ronald Reagan's policies of deterrence against the Soviets. This contrasted with the policy of détente which the West had pursued during the 1970s, and caused friction with allies still wedded to the idea of détente. US forces were permitted by Mrs. Thatcher to station nuclear cruise missiles at British bases, arousing mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. However, she later was the first Western leader to respond warmly to the rise of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring she liked him and "We can do business together" after a meeting 3 months before he came to power in 1985. This was a start in swinging the West back to a new détente with the Soviet Union in his era, as it proved to be an indication that the Soviet regime's power was decaying. Thatcher outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1989, and voices who share her views on it credit her with a part in the West's victory, by both the deterrence and détente postures.
She supported the US bombing raid on Libya from bases in the UK in 1986 when other NATO allies would not. Her liking for defence ties with the United States was demonstrated in the Westland affair when she acted with colleagues to prevent the helicopter manufacturer Westland, a vital defence contractor, from linking with the Italian firm Agusta in favour of a link with Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation of the United States. Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had pushed the Agusta deal, resigned in protest at her style of leadership, and thereafter became a potential leadership challenger.
In 1985, the University of Oxford, as a deliberate snub, voted to refuse her an honorary degree in protest against her cuts in funding for education. [1] This award had always previously been given to Prime Ministers that had been educated at Oxford.
In 1986 her government controversially abolished the Greater London Council (GLC), then led by left-winger Ken Livingstone, and six Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs). The government claimed this was an efficiency measure. However, it is widely believed to have been politically motivated, as all of the abolished councils were controlled by Labour, and had become powerful centres of opposition to her government, and were in favour of higher public spending by local government.
Thatcher had two noted foreign policy successes in her second term. In 1984, she visited China and signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration with Deng Xiaoping on 19 December, stating the basic policies of the People's Republic of China regarding Hong Kong, to remain a "Special Autonomous Region" of China without economic change after the handover in 1997. At the Fontainebleau summit of 1984, Thatcher argued that the United Kingdom paid far more to the European Economic Community than it received in spending and negotiated a budget rebate. She was widely misquoted as saying, "I want my money", although her actual statement was: "We are not asking the Community or anyone else for money. We are simply asking to have our own money back".
1987-1990
By winning the 1987 general election, on the economic boom and against a stubbornly anti-nuclear Labour opposition, she became the longest serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since Lord Liverpool, 1812 to 1827,and first to win 3 successive elections since Lord Palmerston in 1865. Most United Kingdom newspapers supported her?-with the exception of The Daily Mirror and The Guardian?-and were rewarded with regular press briefings by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. She was known as "Maggie" in the tabloids, which inspired the well-known "Maggie Out!" protest song, sung throughout that period by some of her opponents. Her unpopularity on the left is evident from the lyrics of several contemporary popular songs: "Stand Down Margaret" (The Beat), "Tramp the Dirt Down" (Elvis Costello), and "Mother Knows Best" (Richard Thompson).
Many opponents believed she and her policies created a significant North-South divide from the Bristol Channel to The Wash, between the "haves" in the economically dynamic south and the "have nots" in the northern rust belt. Hard welfare reforms in her third term created an adult Employment Training system that included full-time work done for the dole plus a £10 top-up, on the workfare model from the US. The "Social Fund" system that placed one-off welfare payments for emergency needs under a local budgetary limit, and where possible changed them into loans, and rules for assessing jobseeking effort by the week, were breaches of social consensus unprecedented since the 1920s.
In the late 1980s, Thatcher, a former chemist, became concerned with environmental issues, which she had previously dismissed. In 1988, she made a major speech accepting the problems of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain. In 1990, she opened the Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research. [2].
At Bruges, Belgium in 1988, Thatcher made a speech in which she outlined her opposition to proposals from the European Community for a federal structure and increasing centralisation of decision-making. Although she had supported British membership, Thatcher believed that the role of the EC should be limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that new EC regulations would reverse the changes she was making in the UK. "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a new super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels". She was specifically against Economic and Monetary Union, through which a single currency would replace national currencies, and for which the EC was making preparations. The speech caused an outcry from other European leaders, and exposed for the first time the deep split that was emerging over European policy inside her Conservative Party.
Thatcher's popularity once again declined in 1989 as the economy suffered from high interest rates imposed to stop an unsustainable boom. She blamed her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who had been following an economic policy which was a preparation for monetary union; Thatcher claimed not to have been told of this and did not approve. At the Madrid European summit, Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe forced Thatcher to agree the circumstances under which she would join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a preparation for monetary union. Thatcher took revenge on both by demoting Howe, and by listening more to her adviser Sir Alan Walters on economic matters. Lawson resigned that October, feeling that Thatcher had undermined him.
That November, Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer. As Meyer was a virtually unknown backbench MP, he was viewed as a stalking horse candidate for more prominent members of the party. Thatcher easily defeated Meyer's challenge, but there were 60 ballot papers either cast for Meyer or abstaining, a surprisingly large number for a sitting Prime Minister.
Thatcher's new system to replace local government rates was introduced in Scotland in 1989 and in England and Wales in 1990. Rates were replaced by the "Community Charge" (more widely known as the Poll Tax), which applied the same amount to every individual resident, with only limited discounts for low earners. This was to be the most universally unpopular policy of her premiership. The Charge was introduced early in Scotland as the rateable values would in any case have been reassessed in 1989. However, it led to accusations that Scotland was a 'testing ground' for the tax. Thatcher apparently believed that the new tax would be popular, and had been persuaded by Scottish Conservatives to bring it in early and in one go. Despite her hopes, the early introduction led to a sharp decline in the already low support for the Conservative party in Scotland.
Additional problems emerged when many of the tax rates set by local councils proved to be much higher than earlier predictions. Some have argued that local councils saw the introduction of the new system of taxation as the opportunity to make significant increases in the amount taken, assuming (correctly) that it would be the originators of the new tax system and not its local operators who would be blamed.
A large London demonstration against the poll tax on March 31, 1990 -- the day before it was introduced in England and Wales--turned into a riot. Millions of people resisted paying the tax. Opponents of the tax banded together to resist bailiffs and disrupt court hearings of poll tax debtors. Mrs Thatcher refused to compromise, or change the tax, and its unpopularity was a major factor in Thatcher's downfall.
One of her final acts in office was to pressure US President George H. W. Bush to deploy troops to the Middle East to drive Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait. Bush was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, but Thatcher famously told him that this was "no time to go wobbly!"
On the Friday before the Conservative Party conference in October 1990, Thatcher persuaded her new Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major to reduce interest rates by 1%. Major persuaded her that the only way to maintain monetary stability was to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism at the same time, despite not meeting the 'Madrid conditions'. The conference that year saw a degree of unity break out within the Conservative Party. Few who attended could have realised that Mrs Thatcher had only a matter of weeks left in office.
Fall from power
By 1990, opposition to Thatcher's policies on local government taxation, her Government's perceived mishandling of the economy (especially high interest rates of 15%, which were undermining her core voting base within the home-owning, entrepreneurial and business sectors), and the divisions opening within her party over the appropriate handling of European integration made her and her party seem increasingly politically vulnerable.
A challenge was precipitated by the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, with whom Thatcher had for a long time had very bad personal relations, on November 1, 1990. The immediate pretext was a particularly combative answer she had given to a parliamentary question in the Commons on the October 30, 1990, in which she denounced the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors.
"Yes, the Commission wants to increase its powers. Yes, it is a non-elected body and I do not want the Commission to increase its powers at the expense of the House, so of course we differ. The President of the Commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No! No! No!"
In his resignation speech Howe condemned Thatcher's policy on the European Community as being devastating to British interests, and openly invited "others to consider their own response", which led Michael Heseltine to announce his challenge for party leadership (and hence Prime Minister). In the first ballot, Thatcher was two votes short of winning automatic re-election, a small but critical margin. (The margin was 14.6%; and the necessary margin required to avoid a second ballot was 15%.)
The results were:
Margaret Thatcher: 204, Michael Heseltine: 152, Void/Spoiled: 16
This was probably at least in part due to mismanagement; she had fatally decided to be out of the country for the CSCE summit (Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe) in Paris, and her advisors appear to have underestimated the seriousness of the matter and the need to campaign, and the need to cajole potentially wavering supporters and reassure them in order to achieve the necessary first round win and put paid to talk of doubts.
Upon returning to London, Thatcher consulted her cabinet colleagues. A large majority believed that, the first round not being a clear win, she would lose the second run-off ballot.
On November 22, at just after 9.30 am, Mrs. Thatcher announced to her cabinet that she would not be a candidate in the second ballot, thereby bringing her term of office to an end.
"Having consulted widely among colleagues, I have concluded that the unity of the Party and the prospects of victory in a General Election would be better served if I stood down to enable Cabinet colleagues to enter the ballot for the leadership. I should like to thank all those in Cabinet and outside who have given me such dedicated support."
In defeat, Margaret Thatcher seized the opportunity of the debate on confidence in her government to deliver one of her most memorable performances:
"... a single currency is about the politics of Europe, it is about a federal Europe by the back door. So I shall consider the proposal of the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner ). Now where were we? I am enjoying this."
She supported John Major as her successor and retired from Parliament at the 1992 election.
Post-political career
In 1992, she was given the title Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven (in the County of Lincolnshire), and she entered the House of Lords, although she did not become an active member of the House. She had already been honoured by the Queen in 1990, shortly after her resignation as Prime Minister, when she was awarded the Order of Merit, one of the UK's highest distinctions. In addition, her husband, Denis Thatcher, had been given a baronetcy in 1991 (ensuring that their son Mark would inherit a title). This was the first creation of a baronetcy since 1965. In 1995 Thatcher would also join the majority of former Prime Ministers as a member of the Order of the Garter, the United Kingdom's highest order of chivalry.
In July 1992, she was hired by tobacco giant Philip Morris Companies, now the Altria Group, as a "geopolitical consultant" for US$250,000 per year and an annual contribution of US$250,000 to her Foundation. In practice, she helped them break into markets in central Europe, the former Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam, as well as fight against a proposed EC ban on tobacco advertising.
From approximately 1994 to 2000, she served as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary, one of the oldest universities in North America which was established by royal charter in 1693.
She wrote her memoirs in two volumes. Although she remained supportive in public, in private she made her displeasure with many of John Major's policies plain, and her views were conveyed to the press and widely reported. Major later said he found her behaviour in retrospect to have been intolerable. She publicly endorsed William Hague for the Conservative leadership in 1997.
In 1998, she made a highly publicised and controversial visit to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during the time he was under house arrest in Surrey facing charges of torture, conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to murder. She expressed her support and friendship for him.[3]. (Pinochet had been a key ally in the Falklands war.)
Lady Thatcher visits Pinochet during house arrest in London, in 1998.
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Lady Thatcher visits Pinochet during house arrest in London, in 1998.
During the same year, she made a £2 million donation to Cambridge University for the endowment of a Margaret Thatcher Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies. She also donated the archive of her personal papers to Churchill College, Cambridge.
She made many speaking engagements around the world, and she actively supported the Conservative election campaign in 2001. However, on March 22, 2002, she was told by her doctors to make no more public speeches on health grounds, having suffered several small strokes, which left her in a very frail state. In 2003 she visited Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City and compared his offices to those of Sir Winston Churchill's War Room. Although she was able to attend the funeral of former US President Ronald Reagan in June 2004, her eulogy for him was pre-taped to prevent undue stress.
She remains involved with various Thatcherite groups, including being president of the Conservative Way Forward group, which held a dinner at the Savoy Hotel in honour of the 25th Anniversary of her election. She is honorary president of the Bruges Group, which takes its name from her 1988 speech at Bruges, where she was first openly hostile to developments in the European Union. She is also patron of the Eurosceptic European Foundation founded by the Conservative MP Bill Cash. She was widowed on June 26, 2003.
She celebrated her 80th birthday on October 13, 2005.
Legacy
Many British citizens remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Margaret Thatcher had resigned and what their reaction was. She was a polarising figure, who brought out strong reactions from people. Likewise, her legacy is highly disputed.
Some people credit her microeconomic reforms with rescuing the British economy from the stagnation of the 1970s and admire her committed radicalism on social issues. Others see her as authoritarian and egotistical. She is accused of dismantling the Welfare State and of destroying much of the UK's manufacturing base.
The first charge reflects her government's rhetoric more than its actions, as it actually did little to reduce welfare expenditure, despite its desire to do so. The second charge may be credible in that there was a major fall in manufacturing employment, and some industries almost disappeared, though manufacturing does take a smaller share of employment and GDP as an economy modernises and the service sector expands. The UK was widely seen as the "sick man of Europe" in the 1970s, and some argued that it would be the first developed nation to return to the status of a developing country. Instead, the UK emerged as one of the most successful economies in modern Europe. Her supporters claim that this was due to Margaret Thatcher's policies.
Critics of this view believe that the economic problems of the 1970s were exaggerated, and were caused largely by factors outside any UK government's control, such as high oil prices caused by the oil crisis which led to high inflation which damaged the economies of nearly all major industrial countries. Accordingly, they also argue that the economic downturn was not the result of socialism and trade unions, as Thatcherite supporters claim. Critics also argue that the Thatcher period in government coincided with a general improvement in the world economy, and the buoyant tax revenues from North Sea oil (although this is sometimes a double-edged sword; see Dutch disease), and that these were the real cause of the improved economic environment of the 1980s rather than Margaret Thatcher's policies.
Perceptions of Margaret Thatcher are mixed in the view of the British public. A clear illustration of the divisions of opinion over Thatcher's leadership can be found in recent television polls: Thatcher appears at number 16 in the 2002 List of "100 Greatest Britons", which was the highest placing for a living person. She also appears at number 3 in the 2003 List of "100 Worst Britons", which was confined to those living, narrowly missing out on the top spot, which went to Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the end, however, few could argue that there was any woman who played a more important role on the world stage in the 20th century. In perhaps the sincerest form of flattery, Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, himself a thrice-elected Prime Minister, has implicitly and explicitly acknowledged her importance, by continuing many of her economic policies.
Another view divides her economic legacy into two parts: market efficiency and long-term growth. The first part, due to her reforms, is quite controversial. While the unemployment rate did eventually come down, it came after initial job losses and radical labour market reforms. These included laws that weakened trade unions and the deregulation of financial markets, which certainly succeeded in returning the City to a leadership position as a European financial centre, and her push for increased competition in telecommunications and other public utilities. Long-term growth, according to available data, is considered low, due to lack of civil research and development spending, lowered education standards and ineffective job-training policies.
Many of her policies have proved to be divisive. In parts of Scotland, Wales and the urban and former mining areas of northern England she is still reviled. Many people remember the hardships of the miners' strike, which destroyed many mining communities, and the decline of industry as service industries boomed. This was reflected in the 1987 election, which she won by a landslide through winning large numbers of seats in southern England and the rural farming areas of northern England while winning few seats in the rest of the country. The fact that she continued to subsidise British agriculture heavily, whilst refusing subsidies to other troubled parts of the economy, has been bitterly criticised as evidence of partiality on her part.
Perceptions abroad broadly follow the same political divisions. On the left, Margaret Thatcher is generally regarded as somebody who used force to quash social movements, who imposed social reforms that disregarded the interests of the working class and instead favoured the wealthier elements of the middle class and business. Satirists have often caricatured her. For instance, French singer Renaud wrote a song, Miss Maggie, which lauded women as refraining from many of the silly behaviours of males?-and every time making an exception for "Mrs Thatcher". She may be remembered most of all for revealing a disturbing yet significant tenet of Thatcherism in the declaration: "There is no such thing as society" [4] to reporter Douglas Keay, for 'Womans Own' magazine, 23 September 1987 [5]. This quote is often taken out of context and truncated. The original quote goes on to emphasise the importance of families and individuals in the fabric of British life. On the economical and political 'liberal' right, Thatcher is often remembered with some fondness as a conservative who dared to confront powerful unions and removed harmful constraints on the economy, though many do not openly claim to be following her example given the strong feelings that highly ideological Lady Thatcher and Thatcherism elicits in many.
In the Republic of Ireland, she is generally remembered as an intransigent figure who eschewed negotiations with the IRA and contributed to the length and ferocity of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, despite the efforts her government made to increase Irish involvement in the North through the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
Her son Mark has been dogged by a series of controversies. In 1982 he went missing in the Sahara Desert when taking part in Algerian motor racing. In January 2005 he was fined three million rand (approximately $500,000) and received a four-year suspended jail sentence in South Africa after several months of house arrest, for abetting a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher
