Last year my wife and I watched The Iron Lady, the 2011 film starring Meryl Streep as Margret Thatcher in her declining years. Her husband, Denis, had died and she periodically converses with his ghost as she suffers the effects of several strokes and dementia. Flashbacks tell the story of her life with Denis and her political career, especially her challenges in overcoming the “boys club” which was also known as the British Parliament.
She won the leadership of her party and, consequently, became Prime Minister when the Conservatives won the majority over Labor in 1979, being the first and only woman to hold that office. Her tenure ran 11 ½ years, paralleling but extending beyond the Reagan years. While she adored the American president she lacked his charm. When it came to pushing her political party, however, her elbows were sharper. Her lack of charm and sharp elbows gave her a popularity rating throughout her Ministerial tenure in the 40s, lower than that of her party.
Thatcher thus came rightly to the name Iron Lady – an appellation accorded her by the Russians but also embraced by her. She made a rare public appearance in 2007 to unveil a bronze statue of herself in the House of Commons. "I might have preferred iron," she said, "but bronze will do."
She was born Margret Roberts to working class parents in Lincolnshire, about 2 ½ hours north of London near the east coast. Her family operated two grocery stores and she and her older sister Muriel lived in a flat over the largest of the stores. Initially rejected by Oxford College, she was later accepted when a student dropped out. She studied chemistry and worked at it a bit after graduation. But politics, not chemistry, was her passion. She ran for local office, suffered some early defeats, and honed her political skills. She also met Denis Thatcher at a conservative political function. They married and had fraternal twins, Mark and Carol.
While in college, Margret had fallen under the sway of Friedrich von Hayek whose most famous tome, The Road to Serfdom, was becoming the conservatives’ bible. It was published as World War II was entering its final chapter and on the eve of the British government’s decision to fast track the country into a postwar socialist welfare state. To say that Hayek condemned government intervention in the economy would be putting it mildly. He warned that government expansion into traditional private enterprise was the precursor to an authoritarian state. Thatcher got it. She stepped into the breach in 1959 when she was elected to Parliament.
Great Britain in the 1970s was busy proving that government management could create traffic gridlock with one car. Everything in GB that could be nationalized had been, and under public ownership and government management, British Airways, British Railways, British Steel, and British Coal were poster children proving that, no matter how incompetently managed any private company or industry is, government management can make it worse. Getting a new heating system required a trip to the Gas Board “showroom” and its laughably limited selection of products. A new telephone could take weeks to install. The country that had produced the Rolls Royce, Jaguar, and the hot cars that personified James Bond was an automotive embarrassment. Few products worked well and repairs didn’t work for long. The Bulgarians produced better products.
The paralytic effect of British labor unions contributed their share to the economic pathology. Productivity was not a word in the vocabulary of a union leader and the country was often idled by national strikes. Any threat to the sanctity of a British work week or working conditions – which rivaled the work ethic of an Ottoman Pasha – provoked a strike.
British-born journalist John Derbyshire recalled an assignment which took him from London to Hong Kong one January. Boarding his plane in freezing cold rain, airport employees were engaged in a strike that prevented runways from being de-iced so planes could take off. The passengers sat in the plane grumbling for an hour or two while officials tried to negotiate a resolution with the union. Finally the plane took off and all the passengers applauded and cheered – not so much because they were on their way – but because they had escaped from a dysfunctional nation that was declining into a dystopic abyss.
In the 1970s income tax on the wealthiest was 83% and the tax on investment income was 98%. Understandably, the British were disinclined to work hard because they were able to keep so little if they became successful. Those who were able escaped and became ex-pats. Society became hollowed out leaving much of it to live their lives in government housing, travel on government transportation or drive government-made cars. Hardly any aspect of life was not touched by the British nanny-state government. The working age population essentially said, “What the heck” and kicked back to be cared for. This is what Obama wants America to be.
When George Bush the elder was ambassador to China, his tennis partner, a British reporter recalled …
… two years running, we lost the Peking Diplomatic tennis championship to a very wily couple of Italians. And George Bush is a very generous man, and he took it in good faith. He was a very good tennis player, very good tennis player. And he turned to me after our second defeat, and he said you know what it is about you Brits? He said you don’t care to win.
He was right. The British had given up in the 1970s trying to win. Harold Wilson’s blundering Labor government took the country to the edge of bankruptcy in 1976 when the pound collapsed in foreign exchange trading, forcing GB to request a humiliating credit line from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF imposed such tight controls on government spending that the currency began to recover. Then once again the unions made impossible wage demands and set off a series of strikes. It became apparent that the government held little influence with the unions, and public opinion turned against the Labor party. Strikes continued through the winter of 1978-1979 – the so-called “Winter of Discontent” – and when the 1979 election was held, the Conservatives won a 43 seat majority. As the leader of her party, Margret Thatcher became Prime Minister.
Over across the big pond, Ronald Wilson Reagan became President the next year in 1980, inheriting a dysfunctional government from an incompetent predecessor, Jimmy Carter, as Thatcher had. Thatcher and Reagan were instinctive conservatives. Each had read about the other’s values so it was inevitable that they would become soul mates in reestablishing free market capitalism in their countries and freedom in the Cold War world. But first each had to tame their respective country’s inflation dragons, which required a bitter rain to fall on the just and unjust – for which both leaders were hated to the end of their days by those who suffered through the economic correction.
The strikes which greeted Thatcher upon her move into 10 Downing Street had brought the country and economy to a standstill. Striking garbage workers had caused weeks of putrid garbage to pile up on the streets of the cities. Striking gravediggers had left weeks of unburied dead in cold lockers. Financial markets tittered on the brink, taxes stifled incentive, regulations strangled the economy, and government deficits had no end in sight.
The grocer’s daughter went to work to stop spending other people’s money and to unshackle the bonds by which government prevented people from making more money. She privatized government-owned enterprises, which represented 10% of GDP in 1979. They fell to 2% for a long time after she had left office. Those companies for which there was no private buyer and which were unproductive – in fact were little more than government dole – were shut down to stop the bleeding. Her policies put many out of work. She was hated for it. “I’m not here to be liked,” she often said to her critics, but addiction to government welfare prevented many unemployed from bootstrapping themselves through relocation and retraining. The ones who hated her most chose to remain unemployed for the rest of their lives.
Nonsensical regulation of the financial sector was eliminated, ultimately making London a rival to Wall Street. Capital controls were lifted. She fought price, dividend, currency, and wage controls – regulations of every type – often in defiance of the received economic wisdom of her own party. She took on the stranglehold the unions had around the economy’s neck and won. Union membership fell from 13 million members to 8 million while she was in office despite population growth. Government employment was drastically cut. Public expenditures accounted for 44% of GDP when Thatcher took office. It was 36% when she left. The top tax rate was 98% when she took office and 40% when she left. Inflation was 9% when Thatcher took office. Her policies, like Reagan’s, caused inflation to spike to 22% until the country was detoxified from socialism and it was 2% when she left office.
Thatcher’s reforms were considered radical even within her own party. But her ideas were shaped by the principles of running a grocery business and the concepts of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Her north star was minimal government and letting the economy be shaped by private enterprise. "Without economic liberty, there could be no true political liberty," she told European leaders the year she launched her reforms.
Thatcher recognized the error of socialism. The trouble with it, she famously said, is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. She defeated the error of socialism three times at the polls – four if you count her replacement, John Major. But even when the Labor party regained power, putting Tony Blair in as Prime Minister, Thatcher was vindicated because Blair’s government was disinclined to return to nationalization, recognizing that people do best and live best under capitalism.
As I’ve said, Reagan and Thatcher held each other in great esteem and affection. Their partnership was unparalleled among world leaders, she the daughter of a grocer and he the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman. Both grew up in flats – his across from a bakery, hers above a store with no hot running water and with an outside toilet. Together they worked for freedom and free markets. They were partners in bringing down the Soviet communist system and ending the Cold War without a shot fired.
How they did it is a tale in itself, but Thatcher saw something in Mikhail Gorbachev that compelled her to tell Reagan, “We can do business with him.” Reagan followed her instincts but refused to abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative and the American defense buildup. As Reagan’s policies took hold and the American economy roared back, Gorbachev threw it his chips. He had been outspent and couldn’t stay in the arms race. The Soviet economy began to unravel when it became obvious to its satellites that they could secede without consequence.
In the end, Thatcher, Reagan, and Gorbachev had a close relationship. It was based on a candid understanding of each person’s principles. But Thatcher’s support of Reagan’s unyielding position toward the Soviet Union was an important contribution in ending the Cold War. In her first meeting with Gorbachev, she leaned over the table at lunch to say to the Soviet leader, "Welcome to the United Kingdom. I want our relationship to get off to a good start, and to make sure there is no misunderstanding between us – I hate Communism."
"Thatcher was a politician whose words carried big weight," Gorbachev recently observed. "In the end we managed to achieve mutual understanding and this was a contribution to the changing atmosphere between our country and the West, and to the end of the Cold War."
As a practical matter, the Soviet Union was doomed before the Reagan-Thatcher tag team accelerated its collapse. But they helped Gorbachev turn out the lights without provoking violence at home or suffering aggression from a neighboring state. That was a stunning accomplishment by the three of them. Look, for example, at the aftermath of Saddam’s collapse.
Thatcher’s misfortune was to follow a line of weak-kneed British Prime Ministers who held the office after Churchill was sent packing by the British people. Previous PMs caved, wobbled, and compromised so much that it was inevitable that Thatcher would be tested. That testing came from the unions just after she took office. Britain had lost 29 million working days the year she assumed office. But she was skillful in managing her response. She appeared to back down from her initial confrontation with the unions when in fact she was building a stockpile in preparation for the later confrontation in which she broke the back of union power. Two million working days were lost to strikes when she left office in 1990 and only 300,000 were lost last year.
In other tests, a faction of the Irish Republican Army murdered her campaign manager in 1979 and 11 years later it murdered her former private secretary. In 1984 the IRA tried and failed to assassinate her. She remained resolute.
When Argentina seized the Falkland Islands and its 1,800 residents, who were loyal subjects of the Crown, she played both hands at the same time – diplomacy with one and dispatched a naval battle group with the other to regain a pile of rocks 8,000 miles away. Her predecessors would have dawdled the incident away with an “Aw shucks, let them have it,” but Thatcher had the Falklands back under British control in a month and cowed the Argentinian thugs who had underestimated her resolve. She lost six ships and suffered hundreds of casualties, but she declared "We have ceased to be a nation in retreat." British pride soared.
Thatcher was unbending toward international bullies and favored head-on confrontation rather than endless rounds of diplomacy and negotiation. On the eve of the Gulf War, her tough and uncompromising advice to President George H.W. Bush in 1990 was – “This is no time to go wobbly, George."
Her career-long support for Israel was steadfast and she never understood anti-Semitism. Told that members of her party excluded Jews from their golf clubs, she said, “I simply do not understand it.” Her greatest achievement in life, she once said, was raising money in the 1930s to help save a 17-year old Austrian Jewish girl from the Nazis by bringing her to England. Thatcher was 12 at the time.
An important thing to remember about Margret Thatcher is that throughout her 11 years as Prime Minister, if not all of her years in political life, she was as much at war with most of her Conservative party as she was with the Labor party. The Conservative party aspired to little more than claim it could manage the big government socialist state a tad more efficiently than the Labor party. Change the names to Republicans and Democrats and you’ll see what is wrong with the political choices in America.
The Conservative party referred to her as “that woman” and she reserved her pithiest comments for them, calling them the “wets” – a British school slang term for weakness. She did not shrink from taking on her party’s Old Guard, saying many of them lived such privileged lives they didn’t know what life was like as a grocer’s daughter knew life. Perhaps, she opined, it took “that woman” to get things done because most of her party couldn’t. To break the back of inflation, a sinking economy, and the power of the unions would require strong medicine, and when unemployment passed two million before peaking at three million in 1983 – the highest since the great depression – her party was calling for her to back off. “U-turn if you want to,” she told her party. “The lady’s not for turning.”
Thatcher was reelected for a third term in 1987. Deeply suspicious of the European Union as a viable political union, she resisted those in her party who in 1990 began pushing for UK economic integration with Europe, including replacing the pound with the euro. In October she delivered her famous “No, no, no” speech to Parliament:
Yes, the commission does want to increase its powers. Yes, it is a non-elected body, and I do not want the commission to increase its powers against this House. So of course, we are differing. Of course, the chairman, or the president of the commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day, that he wanted a 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 her last years as Prime Minister, the woman who famously said "the lady's not for turning" was criticized for her inflexibility on many issues, most particularly engagement with the developing European Union. In November 1990, her longest-serving cabinet member, Geoffrey Howe, resigned over her EU position. This triggered a challenge to her leadership, which Thatcher won in the first round balloting but not by enough of a margin to avoid a second ballot. She was determined to see the election through until close associates persuaded her to resign, which she did.
Thatcher continued to sit in Parliament until 2002 when she resigned from that body so that she could give speeches, write her memoirs, and voice her opinion unfettered by party politics.
Margret Thatcher pulled her country back from the brink. Today’s headlines concerning Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy today should cause the British to applaud her prescience, yet that was the cause for her defenestration by a cabal within her party.
Her husband, Denis, died in 2003.
Margret Thatcher died on April 8 at the age of 87.
She won the leadership of her party and, consequently, became Prime Minister when the Conservatives won the majority over Labor in 1979, being the first and only woman to hold that office. Her tenure ran 11 ½ years, paralleling but extending beyond the Reagan years. While she adored the American president she lacked his charm. When it came to pushing her political party, however, her elbows were sharper. Her lack of charm and sharp elbows gave her a popularity rating throughout her Ministerial tenure in the 40s, lower than that of her party.
Thatcher thus came rightly to the name Iron Lady – an appellation accorded her by the Russians but also embraced by her. She made a rare public appearance in 2007 to unveil a bronze statue of herself in the House of Commons. "I might have preferred iron," she said, "but bronze will do."
She was born Margret Roberts to working class parents in Lincolnshire, about 2 ½ hours north of London near the east coast. Her family operated two grocery stores and she and her older sister Muriel lived in a flat over the largest of the stores. Initially rejected by Oxford College, she was later accepted when a student dropped out. She studied chemistry and worked at it a bit after graduation. But politics, not chemistry, was her passion. She ran for local office, suffered some early defeats, and honed her political skills. She also met Denis Thatcher at a conservative political function. They married and had fraternal twins, Mark and Carol.
While in college, Margret had fallen under the sway of Friedrich von Hayek whose most famous tome, The Road to Serfdom, was becoming the conservatives’ bible. It was published as World War II was entering its final chapter and on the eve of the British government’s decision to fast track the country into a postwar socialist welfare state. To say that Hayek condemned government intervention in the economy would be putting it mildly. He warned that government expansion into traditional private enterprise was the precursor to an authoritarian state. Thatcher got it. She stepped into the breach in 1959 when she was elected to Parliament.
Great Britain in the 1970s was busy proving that government management could create traffic gridlock with one car. Everything in GB that could be nationalized had been, and under public ownership and government management, British Airways, British Railways, British Steel, and British Coal were poster children proving that, no matter how incompetently managed any private company or industry is, government management can make it worse. Getting a new heating system required a trip to the Gas Board “showroom” and its laughably limited selection of products. A new telephone could take weeks to install. The country that had produced the Rolls Royce, Jaguar, and the hot cars that personified James Bond was an automotive embarrassment. Few products worked well and repairs didn’t work for long. The Bulgarians produced better products.
The paralytic effect of British labor unions contributed their share to the economic pathology. Productivity was not a word in the vocabulary of a union leader and the country was often idled by national strikes. Any threat to the sanctity of a British work week or working conditions – which rivaled the work ethic of an Ottoman Pasha – provoked a strike.
British-born journalist John Derbyshire recalled an assignment which took him from London to Hong Kong one January. Boarding his plane in freezing cold rain, airport employees were engaged in a strike that prevented runways from being de-iced so planes could take off. The passengers sat in the plane grumbling for an hour or two while officials tried to negotiate a resolution with the union. Finally the plane took off and all the passengers applauded and cheered – not so much because they were on their way – but because they had escaped from a dysfunctional nation that was declining into a dystopic abyss.
In the 1970s income tax on the wealthiest was 83% and the tax on investment income was 98%. Understandably, the British were disinclined to work hard because they were able to keep so little if they became successful. Those who were able escaped and became ex-pats. Society became hollowed out leaving much of it to live their lives in government housing, travel on government transportation or drive government-made cars. Hardly any aspect of life was not touched by the British nanny-state government. The working age population essentially said, “What the heck” and kicked back to be cared for. This is what Obama wants America to be.
When George Bush the elder was ambassador to China, his tennis partner, a British reporter recalled …
… two years running, we lost the Peking Diplomatic tennis championship to a very wily couple of Italians. And George Bush is a very generous man, and he took it in good faith. He was a very good tennis player, very good tennis player. And he turned to me after our second defeat, and he said you know what it is about you Brits? He said you don’t care to win.
He was right. The British had given up in the 1970s trying to win. Harold Wilson’s blundering Labor government took the country to the edge of bankruptcy in 1976 when the pound collapsed in foreign exchange trading, forcing GB to request a humiliating credit line from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF imposed such tight controls on government spending that the currency began to recover. Then once again the unions made impossible wage demands and set off a series of strikes. It became apparent that the government held little influence with the unions, and public opinion turned against the Labor party. Strikes continued through the winter of 1978-1979 – the so-called “Winter of Discontent” – and when the 1979 election was held, the Conservatives won a 43 seat majority. As the leader of her party, Margret Thatcher became Prime Minister.
Over across the big pond, Ronald Wilson Reagan became President the next year in 1980, inheriting a dysfunctional government from an incompetent predecessor, Jimmy Carter, as Thatcher had. Thatcher and Reagan were instinctive conservatives. Each had read about the other’s values so it was inevitable that they would become soul mates in reestablishing free market capitalism in their countries and freedom in the Cold War world. But first each had to tame their respective country’s inflation dragons, which required a bitter rain to fall on the just and unjust – for which both leaders were hated to the end of their days by those who suffered through the economic correction.
The strikes which greeted Thatcher upon her move into 10 Downing Street had brought the country and economy to a standstill. Striking garbage workers had caused weeks of putrid garbage to pile up on the streets of the cities. Striking gravediggers had left weeks of unburied dead in cold lockers. Financial markets tittered on the brink, taxes stifled incentive, regulations strangled the economy, and government deficits had no end in sight.
The grocer’s daughter went to work to stop spending other people’s money and to unshackle the bonds by which government prevented people from making more money. She privatized government-owned enterprises, which represented 10% of GDP in 1979. They fell to 2% for a long time after she had left office. Those companies for which there was no private buyer and which were unproductive – in fact were little more than government dole – were shut down to stop the bleeding. Her policies put many out of work. She was hated for it. “I’m not here to be liked,” she often said to her critics, but addiction to government welfare prevented many unemployed from bootstrapping themselves through relocation and retraining. The ones who hated her most chose to remain unemployed for the rest of their lives.
Nonsensical regulation of the financial sector was eliminated, ultimately making London a rival to Wall Street. Capital controls were lifted. She fought price, dividend, currency, and wage controls – regulations of every type – often in defiance of the received economic wisdom of her own party. She took on the stranglehold the unions had around the economy’s neck and won. Union membership fell from 13 million members to 8 million while she was in office despite population growth. Government employment was drastically cut. Public expenditures accounted for 44% of GDP when Thatcher took office. It was 36% when she left. The top tax rate was 98% when she took office and 40% when she left. Inflation was 9% when Thatcher took office. Her policies, like Reagan’s, caused inflation to spike to 22% until the country was detoxified from socialism and it was 2% when she left office.
Thatcher’s reforms were considered radical even within her own party. But her ideas were shaped by the principles of running a grocery business and the concepts of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Her north star was minimal government and letting the economy be shaped by private enterprise. "Without economic liberty, there could be no true political liberty," she told European leaders the year she launched her reforms.
Thatcher recognized the error of socialism. The trouble with it, she famously said, is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. She defeated the error of socialism three times at the polls – four if you count her replacement, John Major. But even when the Labor party regained power, putting Tony Blair in as Prime Minister, Thatcher was vindicated because Blair’s government was disinclined to return to nationalization, recognizing that people do best and live best under capitalism.
As I’ve said, Reagan and Thatcher held each other in great esteem and affection. Their partnership was unparalleled among world leaders, she the daughter of a grocer and he the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman. Both grew up in flats – his across from a bakery, hers above a store with no hot running water and with an outside toilet. Together they worked for freedom and free markets. They were partners in bringing down the Soviet communist system and ending the Cold War without a shot fired.
How they did it is a tale in itself, but Thatcher saw something in Mikhail Gorbachev that compelled her to tell Reagan, “We can do business with him.” Reagan followed her instincts but refused to abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative and the American defense buildup. As Reagan’s policies took hold and the American economy roared back, Gorbachev threw it his chips. He had been outspent and couldn’t stay in the arms race. The Soviet economy began to unravel when it became obvious to its satellites that they could secede without consequence.
In the end, Thatcher, Reagan, and Gorbachev had a close relationship. It was based on a candid understanding of each person’s principles. But Thatcher’s support of Reagan’s unyielding position toward the Soviet Union was an important contribution in ending the Cold War. In her first meeting with Gorbachev, she leaned over the table at lunch to say to the Soviet leader, "Welcome to the United Kingdom. I want our relationship to get off to a good start, and to make sure there is no misunderstanding between us – I hate Communism."
"Thatcher was a politician whose words carried big weight," Gorbachev recently observed. "In the end we managed to achieve mutual understanding and this was a contribution to the changing atmosphere between our country and the West, and to the end of the Cold War."
As a practical matter, the Soviet Union was doomed before the Reagan-Thatcher tag team accelerated its collapse. But they helped Gorbachev turn out the lights without provoking violence at home or suffering aggression from a neighboring state. That was a stunning accomplishment by the three of them. Look, for example, at the aftermath of Saddam’s collapse.
Thatcher’s misfortune was to follow a line of weak-kneed British Prime Ministers who held the office after Churchill was sent packing by the British people. Previous PMs caved, wobbled, and compromised so much that it was inevitable that Thatcher would be tested. That testing came from the unions just after she took office. Britain had lost 29 million working days the year she assumed office. But she was skillful in managing her response. She appeared to back down from her initial confrontation with the unions when in fact she was building a stockpile in preparation for the later confrontation in which she broke the back of union power. Two million working days were lost to strikes when she left office in 1990 and only 300,000 were lost last year.
In other tests, a faction of the Irish Republican Army murdered her campaign manager in 1979 and 11 years later it murdered her former private secretary. In 1984 the IRA tried and failed to assassinate her. She remained resolute.
When Argentina seized the Falkland Islands and its 1,800 residents, who were loyal subjects of the Crown, she played both hands at the same time – diplomacy with one and dispatched a naval battle group with the other to regain a pile of rocks 8,000 miles away. Her predecessors would have dawdled the incident away with an “Aw shucks, let them have it,” but Thatcher had the Falklands back under British control in a month and cowed the Argentinian thugs who had underestimated her resolve. She lost six ships and suffered hundreds of casualties, but she declared "We have ceased to be a nation in retreat." British pride soared.
Thatcher was unbending toward international bullies and favored head-on confrontation rather than endless rounds of diplomacy and negotiation. On the eve of the Gulf War, her tough and uncompromising advice to President George H.W. Bush in 1990 was – “This is no time to go wobbly, George."
Her career-long support for Israel was steadfast and she never understood anti-Semitism. Told that members of her party excluded Jews from their golf clubs, she said, “I simply do not understand it.” Her greatest achievement in life, she once said, was raising money in the 1930s to help save a 17-year old Austrian Jewish girl from the Nazis by bringing her to England. Thatcher was 12 at the time.
An important thing to remember about Margret Thatcher is that throughout her 11 years as Prime Minister, if not all of her years in political life, she was as much at war with most of her Conservative party as she was with the Labor party. The Conservative party aspired to little more than claim it could manage the big government socialist state a tad more efficiently than the Labor party. Change the names to Republicans and Democrats and you’ll see what is wrong with the political choices in America.
The Conservative party referred to her as “that woman” and she reserved her pithiest comments for them, calling them the “wets” – a British school slang term for weakness. She did not shrink from taking on her party’s Old Guard, saying many of them lived such privileged lives they didn’t know what life was like as a grocer’s daughter knew life. Perhaps, she opined, it took “that woman” to get things done because most of her party couldn’t. To break the back of inflation, a sinking economy, and the power of the unions would require strong medicine, and when unemployment passed two million before peaking at three million in 1983 – the highest since the great depression – her party was calling for her to back off. “U-turn if you want to,” she told her party. “The lady’s not for turning.”
Thatcher was reelected for a third term in 1987. Deeply suspicious of the European Union as a viable political union, she resisted those in her party who in 1990 began pushing for UK economic integration with Europe, including replacing the pound with the euro. In October she delivered her famous “No, no, no” speech to Parliament:
Yes, the commission does want to increase its powers. Yes, it is a non-elected body, and I do not want the commission to increase its powers against this House. So of course, we are differing. Of course, the chairman, or the president of the commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day, that he wanted a 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 her last years as Prime Minister, the woman who famously said "the lady's not for turning" was criticized for her inflexibility on many issues, most particularly engagement with the developing European Union. In November 1990, her longest-serving cabinet member, Geoffrey Howe, resigned over her EU position. This triggered a challenge to her leadership, which Thatcher won in the first round balloting but not by enough of a margin to avoid a second ballot. She was determined to see the election through until close associates persuaded her to resign, which she did.
Thatcher continued to sit in Parliament until 2002 when she resigned from that body so that she could give speeches, write her memoirs, and voice her opinion unfettered by party politics.
Margret Thatcher pulled her country back from the brink. Today’s headlines concerning Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy today should cause the British to applaud her prescience, yet that was the cause for her defenestration by a cabal within her party.
Her husband, Denis, died in 2003.
Margret Thatcher died on April 8 at the age of 87.
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