How, and to What Extent, Was Margaret Thatcher Successful - Essay Example

How, and to what extent, was Margaret Thatcher successful? There have been numerous prime ministers occupying the 10 Downing Street, some for duration equal to that of Margaret Thatcher while others longer than her, but not many have been able to build a political brand like Margaret Thatcher. While critics argue that “Thatcherism was arguably no more than a mixture of economic liberalism, very mild populism, and pragmatism” (Fry, 2010), this fact cannot be ignored that nobody before Margaret Thatcher ever became an “-ism” in her life as the woman prime minister of Britain (Cowley and Bailey, 2000, p. 599). In spite of the criticism, the ability of Thatcherism to stand firm against the frailties speaks of its ideological strength in methods as well as objectives (Clarke, 1999). The Thatcher revolution was consistent with the interests and values of the Conservative Party. The socioeconomic base of the party underpinned the threat of socialism. Thatcher wanted to delegitimize the moral position of socialism because in her opinion, socialism deprived people of their personal responsibilities (Jackson and Saunders, 2012, p. 32). The middle class’s economic status, threatened by pay controls, inflation, organized trade unions, and taxation led to a greater emphasis upon the individual freedom. The Thatcherite alternative comprised the free market, choice, and property, with a robust methodological individualism norm. This provided those with qualifications and skills with strength and at the same time, ruined the collective structures of the unskilled and unqualified. Overall, Thatcherism can be considered as not a mere establishment of metropolitan politicians and intellectuals, but a real political movement. The beliefs of Margaret Thatcher were fine-tuned in the struggles of politics that happened from 1970s to 1980s. However, those struggles were not very different from what she had witnessed at her own home in Grantham. An in-depth analysis of her life reveals the influence of Alfred Roberts, her father who owned a grocer’s shop. Alfred Roberts belonged to a respectable middle class and was a devout Methodist. Young Margaret Thatcher learnt the values of hard work, self-help, and thrift from her father. Margaret set her foot in politics while pursuing the degree of chemistry at Oxford when she actively participated in the Conservative politics. For the most part, Denis Thatcher, her husband, financed the political career of Margaret Thatcher. Entering the Parliament in the year 1959, it did not take Margaret Thatcher longer than 1961 to become the junior minister. The new post-war Britain was in a state of transition from his conventional politics and values when she left Grantham behind. Britain significantly transited during the World War II, thus making the circumstances favorable for the victory of the Labour Party of Clement Attlee in the year 1945. The year 1945 assumes immense significance as a point of transition in the political thinking history, with many changes happening on and after the culmination of the World War II being intensifications of the prevailing aspirations and conceptions instead of being new departures (Barker, 1996). The Attlee government built on the collectivism of the years of war and dwelled on the industrial nationalization, thus paving the way for the introduction of the welfare state. Complete employment became the political life’s overriding object to the politicians’ generation that had witnessed the 1930s’ mass unemployment. Margaret Thatcher proceeded with this like most of the ambitious politicians before her. However, to maintain a full employment, it was essential for the Labour and Conservative successive governments to interfere more minutely into the economy in a variety of ways including the establishment of wages and dictation of prices. In this process, the economic freedoms and the private enterprise which had to be supported by the Conservatives were crowded out. It was essentially “the road to serfdom” (Cowdrill, 2010, p. 88) as had been warned by Friedrich Hayek, the favorite intellectual guru of Margaret Thatcher in the year 1944. Some politicians and intellectuals including Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell rallied to the cause of Friedrich Hayek, but they were ridiculed as nonconformists whereas on her part, Margaret Thatcher resolved to climb the greasy pole. When she took the role of education secretary in the government of Edward Heath between 1970 and 1974, Heath firstly tried to adopt the approach of free-market into the economic management, but with the rise in the rate of unemployment beyond the 1m mark, he was pushed to take a U-turn. Then the government displayed spending binge of such a magnitude to decrease the rate of unemployment that by the year 1975, inflation went over 24 per cent (Cowdrill, 2010, p. 47) and a lot of people started hoarding food. That was the time when Margaret Thatcher became a Thatcherite. Joseph convinced her that the country would be saved by a free-market approach. These very daring policies in the year 1975 served as the agenda of Margaret Thatcher for the next decade and a half. The precipitate decline of Britain since the year 1945 hurt and bewildered the great patriot Margaret Thatcher. Britain not only had lost an empire, but had also lost the status of the leading power in Europe by the mid-1970s. The critique made by Joseph served as a measure that not only halted but also reversed that decline. At that point, Britain required a quick return to the values of self-help and enterprise. Margaret Thatcher reinvented herself as a Gratham housewife. The grating voice, pearls and hats of the Tory grande dame was replaced with the kitchen photo opportunities, softer voice, and homilies about balancing the books and values of the corner-shop. Margaret Thatcher read her Hayek, but it was primarily her new populist style which crowned her the winner. Margaret Thatcher was the winner of the leadership election of the Conservative Party in the year 1975 in competition with Heath (Cowdrill, 2010, p. 6). Before then, no woman ever had one of the highest positions in the politics of Britain. Along with efficiently raising a son and a daughter, she did her job with immense enthusiasm and energy. All of this made her seem like the realization of Shirley Conran’s Superwoman which was that year’s bestseller. She backfired the mockery offered to her by the Russians as “the Iron Lady” (Campbell, 2003) by adoring the title and using it for her own benefit. Margaret Thatcher was aware of the fact that many members of her party as well as many nationals were not in favor of her new policies. Understanding this, she slowly advanced, giving some key posts to her supporters, but other than that not doing much to bring about a fundamental break with the past. She used the increasing unpopularity of the Labour Party, that to win the 1979 elections was not able to control the trade unions in the 1978 to 1979 winter of discontent. With the evolution of a new politics in response to the recession of the world in the 1970s, the Fordism’s exhaustion, and the distortion of the American hegemony, Thatcherism gained its distinctive characteristics as an expression of the new politics through the traditional crisis of the authority of the state which formed in Britain around the mid-1970s (Gamble, 1988). Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party retreated from making efforts to formulate comprehensive and paternalistic state-led schemes to deal with the challenge of poverty from 1975 to 1979 (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 2012). Instead, Margaret Thatcher and her followers focused upon developing such a rational system of tax/benefit that would provide the poor with the safety net along with encouraging thrift and effort. Thatcherites attempted to reincarnate the bourgeois virtues of the Victorian Britain to marginalize the significance of welfare of the state for the middle classes. Thatcherite policies were based on family-focused and moralistic individualism which was not very much congruent with the individualism displayed by the neo-liberal theorists. The roots of the individualism of Thatcherites existed in the personal sources in general and in Methodism in particular along with the Hayekian fear of state and home-grown poverty discourses. Although the ideas of Thatcherites originated in diverse sources, yet there was a single purpose that guided their political project which was Britain’s moral as well as economic revitalization of Britain. In this sense, Thatcherism was a whole ideology. Margaret Thatcher showed her true strength after coming in power. “On assuming office in 1979, the Thatcher government made it clear that it would be adopting a much more skeptical, even aggressive, stance towards the Soviets, stepping up both the Cold War rhetoric and Britain’s military capability” (Bale, 2012, p. 272). Spending of the government was restricted in order to regulate the supply of money, controls of exchange were diminished and floating of currency was allowed. All of these were significant breaks from the orthodoxies of the post-war period. The consequence was a drastic rise in the rate of unemployment against a world recession background (Cowdrill, 2010, p. 89). The police was dealing with the Molotov-cocktail-throwing protestors on a lot of Britain’s streets in the year 1981 when the joblessness had reached 2.7m. This was the low-water mark of Margaret Thatcher. At one point in time, she had become the most unpopular prime minister in the history of Britain. At that time, many of her colleagues anticipated her retrieval, but she chose otherwise. The year before, she had cried, “U-turn if you want to, the Lady’s not for turning” (Thatcher). She dismissed all those wets and ministers that desired the course change and filled her cabinet with those people that followed her ideologically. The budget of 1981 had more cuts on spending and depressed the demand more. In a letter to the Times, her policies were condemned by 364 economists. More than anything, this was what witnessed the development of Margaret Thatcher’s reputation as a ruthless decider. The invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 turned her political fortunes while the economy was yet at the low ebb. Margaret Thatcher was overwhelmed with anger and shock and so she formulated a task force to regain the islands. “In some ways, the very incongruity of Thatcher’s position was her strength. She was the perfect war leader – uncompromising about the end and pretty much indifferent about the means” (Vinen, 2013). Her decision to defend the choice of the islanders to be British rather than trying to appease the dictatorship of Argentine strongly resounded with the British people that had experienced retreat and defeatism for several years. This along with the Labour Party’s haplessness under Michael Foot led Margaret Thatcher to the victory in the second general-election in the year 1983 (Vinen, 2013), that provided her with a way to press forward with some radical adjustments in the structure of the economy. The big round of privatizations started in the year 1984 in which such behemoths as British Gas, British Airways, and British Telecom were sold. The encouragement received by the individuals to purchase shares helped form the image of popular capitalism. After the enemy was vanquished in the South Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher dealt with the various forces existing at home that included but were not limited to the universities, the BBC, and the local government, thus abolishing many. Organized labour was her first target because it had sapped the tendency of the government to efficiently govern the country in general and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in particular. The NUM had intimidated the government of Heath with the militant strategies. From the year 1984 to 1985, the NUM going strike paved way for the inevitable showdown (Vinen, 2013). Margaret Thatcher argued that the battle was being fought for the management’s right to manage over the union power’s arbitrary use thus outlasting the miners, and the victory she attained destroyed the unions. This was one of the most important accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher from the British perspective. This did not affect her competence for pragmatism in any way. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) brought Margaret Thatcher’s soul iron out as she could not even be moved by the movement’s members that had starved themselves to death demanding the treatment of political prisoners. Likewise, she remained undaunted when the IRA blew up the hotel in retaliation in the year 1984 which was the venue of the annual conference of the Tory Party, and which incident almost assassinated her. Even then, in the year 1985, Margaret Thatcher entered the Anglo-Irish Agreement putting her feelings aside. In doing so, she transferred part of the power to the Northern Ireland and made the circumstances conducive of a later peace settlement. In a way, that year was the apotheosis of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. Her policies proved successful at home as well as abroad and proved her and Ronald Reagan as the most distinctive advocate in the world’s revived capitalism. The Anglo-American special relationship, under her, was subject to mutual adoration. As a loyal warrior of the cold-war, she was praised and appreciated wherever she followed the Iron Curtain as the freedom’s herald that she was. By the 1990s, a new intellectual century commenced with uncertain features (Barker, 1996). This decade marked the demise of conservatism and socialism which had been replaced by a division between right and left, each side of the divide containing elements of liberalism. Around the very time, many societies replaced the society and two major themes that emerged were religion and gender. In spite of that, most of the new things were based on the old recessive themes. References: Bale, T 2012, The Conservatives Since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change, Oxford University Press. Barker, R 1996, Political ideas since 1945, or how long was the twentieth century?, Contemporary British History, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 2-19. Campbell, J 2003, Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady, pp.351-352. Clarke, P 1999, The Rise and Fall of Thatcherism, Historical Research, Vol. 72, No. 179, pp. 301-322. Cowdrill, D 2010, The Conservative Party and Thatcherism, 1970-1979: A grass-roots perspective, Unpublished MPhil Thesis, University of Birmingham, [Online] Available at http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/725/1/CowdrillMPhil10.pdf [accessed: 11 February 2014]. Cowley, P, and Bailey, M 2000, Peasants Uprising or Religious War? Re-examining the1975 Conservative Leadership Contest, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 599-629. Fry, GK 2010, Commentary: ‘A bottomless pit of political surprise’?: The Political “Mystery” of the Thatcher Era, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 540-557. Gamble, A 1988, The Free Economy and the Strong State, London: Macmillan. Jackson, B, and Saunders, R (eds.) 2012, Making Thatcher’s Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutcliffe-Baithwaite, F 2012, Neo-liberalism and morality in the making of Thatcherite social policy, Historical Journal, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp. 497-520 Vinen, R 2013, Thatchers Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era, Simon and Schuster. Read More