Forty years ago today, the British people went to the polls and elected their first female prime minister. This was the most seismic political event in my lifetime – before Brexit – due to the national changes she wrought and her combative style of politics, rather than her gender.
Voters were fed up with industrial strife, frustrated by political paralysis, perhaps even frightened by decline so extreme that, as it later emerged, her Downing Street predecessor Jim Callaghan had been talking about a possible breakdown of democracy. He said he would have emigrated if younger.
We should never forget what a dark decade the Seventies was. Not least as another Labour leader focuses on turning back the clock with his anachronistic brand of socialism and crass anti-Americanism. There was a reason punk rock exploded from dull suburbs in those days amid drought, a falling pound, high taxes, power cuts, racist police, rampant inflation, rising crime and routine strikes. There was a six-month waiting list for telephone installation in London, something that seems incredible in this digital age when we constantly check our mobile phones.
I was one year too young to vote in this watershed election – and probably more focused on my family moving house for the first time on the day of polling. I doubt I would have backed Margaret Thatcher in 1979, however, given my dislike for her social conservatism.
Yet as time passes, society liberalises and smoke clears from those long-distant political battlefields, I have come to appreciate how this extraordinary woman merged pragmatism and principle so astutely in her politics – and not just when lamenting the sorry mess being created under Britain’s second female prime minister.
There is a supreme irony in the fact that Thatcher is now a progressive icon on some of the most important issues of our age – especially as Right-wingers tear apart her party and torture the nation while claiming to be devout followers of her creed. Few people would admit this, of course, since six years after her death she still divides opinion sharply: loved by conservatives, loathed by liberals and the Left. Yet like it or not, she was largely on the correct side of critical issues that still plague politics today, amid the rise of nationalism and populism: on Britain’s place in Europe, on climate change and on globalisation.
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SubscribeI read some years ago now that not one-third but one-half of London’s population was born overseas. I don’t suppose that proportion is declining.
Mrs Thatcher messed up the NHS, and the country by squandering billions in oil revenue on tax cuts to keep herself in office.
Those tax cuts went to the city-boys who in turn frittered the money away on champagne lifestyles.
That money should have been saved,and invested, as Norway did, or spent on the infrastructure, NHS, Transport, flood defences etc.
The UK could have had the best Railway system in the world if it wasn’t for that stupid, selfish woman.
Didn’t the Blessed Margaret recant all the Climate Change cr*p in her autobiography?