Journey of the Maggie

Magi...

She was only a grocer's daughter,

But she did things she didn't oughta...

Many forget that when Margaret Hilda Thatcher took her first steps into 10 Downing Street as its 51st – and first female – tenant, she became Prime Minister of a Britain that was closer to World War II than to the present day. The guns of the 20th century’s bloodiest conflict had fallen silent just 33 years before and the UK was, even in 1979, still coming to terms with its aftermath.

Post-war rationing had finished just 25 years earlier and the last National Servicemen – compulsory conscripts to the country’s armed services – had been demobbed in 1962. The 33 years since the armistice had also seen Britain’s Empire, once the mightiest the world had ever known, dwindle away. The country’s territories in India, the Middle East, Asia and, finally, Africa all either secured independence or declared it unilaterally. Internationally, the country’s lowest ebb came in 1956 when its combined military and political weight failed to secure control of the Suez Canal, a highly strategic waterway and one seen as vital to Britain’s access to its few remaining colonies.

Internally, things were little better. The post-war euphoria that promised a new deal for Britain had all but dissipated. The 1948 arrival of the National Health Service (alongside a raft of other social benefits, assurances and entitlements), offering free healthcare for all had been billed as a just reward for the exigencies of two global conflicts within just over 20 years of each other. By the 1970s, though, life in many parts of Britain was still pretty grim, utilitarian and riddled with conflict.

The consumer boom that transformed the lives of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s made little impact on life in regional Britain. Giant refrigerators and even larger automobiles, staples of the American cultural imports that flooded the UK’s cinemas, black and white televisions and newsstands, were every bit as alien to English sensibility as the nuclear-powered extra-terrestrials that stalked their colonial cousins at the drive-in every-week. Even the home telephone did not become the norm in UK households until the early 1970s.

Against this rather austere backdrop, the “swinging 60s” came and went. As London briefly became the style-capital of the world – a status partly due to the northern musicians and artists who traded in their own dour landscapes for celebrity and success in the capital – the rest of the United Kingdom remained largely unchanged.

...Maggie...

While the residents of Chelsea and Kensington, two of London’s more affluent areas, became ever more Bohemian, beat-focused and laid back, life in Hull, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast Newcastle and Manchester remained pretty similar to its pre-war existence. It did, however, have a slightly more contemporary soundtrack, thanks largely the growth in popular music and its almost universal adoption by the country’s teenagers, the first generation that century to know no war.

Amid all this social change, both cosmetic and profound, two great power groups were battling for control of the British way of life – the unions and the establishment. On one side were the traditionally moneyed classes, the mill owners and the aristocracy of yesteryear. On the other side were the trade unionists, hard-nosed activists from the pit and the factory floor, now freshly aligned with a new generation of politically astute left-wing graduates.

With a sense of entitlement driven by generations in the political wilderness and the promises of post-war change, the unions sought to control the UK’s political agenda. Organised, restrictive, dogmatic and belligerent, they terrified the institutions that had dominated the UK’s social and political landscape for centuries. Bereft of the cheap labour in the far extremes of the empire and hamstrung by a variety of restrictive labour practices, aggressive wage demands and the very real threat of industrial action at home, the British economy faltered.

The gentlemanly understandings that had seen old money and the old school tie run Britain like the world’s biggest family business were no longer being honoured. The ruling class, lacking the underpinning of popular support and acceptance, were impotent in the face of this wide-spread social rejection of the hierarchies of the past. Fortunately, for them at least, their salvation was at hand – in the form of the 53-year-old grocer’s daughter who became Britain’s first woman prime minister on 4 May 1979.

While not the first leader of the traditionally right-wing Conservative party to be of middle-class stock (that honour belongs to her immediate predecessor as party leader, Edward Heath, himself the son of a carpenter turned small businessman), Thatcher was certainly the first to actively make a virtue of it. Despite having attended a highly-regarded girls’ grammar school and later graduating with a chemistry degree from Cambridge University, it was her heritage as a grocer’s daughter that she traded on.

Tellingly, it was her combination of a home-spun desire to better yourself, together with frequent allusions to the need to “balance the household budget”, that were to prove the basis of her defining deceptively simple philosophy.

...Mag-E...

Upon entering office in 1979, she memorably told the world’s press: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Citing the prayer of St Francis of Assisi as a battle cry was a bold, if politically naïve, move and attracted far more condemnation than it did approbation. The words were long come back to haunt her term in office.

Ultimately, though, it was an assertion she was to live up to. Her means of achieving harmony, the nature of her truth, the faith she was to inspire and the exact identity of those she was to bring hope to were, at that juncture, probably not even clear to the nascent PM herself. Although, an apparent plea for consensus and unity, her statement marked the arrival on the world stage of one of the most divisive political figures of the second half of the 20th century.

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Although this was her entrée to global renown, her domestic debut came as Education Secretary in 1970. It was then that she launched the first policy to bring her public vitriol, when she abolished the right of primary school children to daily free milk. In a label that was to stick throughout her career, The Sun, a daily British tabloid branded her: “Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher”. This early vilification is perhaps ironic, given that the Murdoch-owned Sun was later a keen advocate of all things Thatch and has been credited by many as playing a key role in Maggie’s three election victories.

Having tackled the excesses of the nation’s toddlers ten years earlier, her first challenge in office – and for many the defining issue of her political career – was to go head-to-head with the unions. The three previous administrations – those of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan – had signally failed to bring these powerful interest groups to heel.

The union grip was formidable. Across many industries and service sectors – manufacturing, mining, local government, utilities, teaching and public transport – it was inescapable. Union membership was compulsory and the use of “closed shop” agreements – practices that forbade the employment of non-union members – were widespread. Even the emergency services and the media were in thrall to the union barons.

After generations of subservience, the endurance of wars of unimaginable horror and the example of revolutionary furore elsewhere in Europe, the British electorate were willing to tolerate the excesses of the unions, even if stopping short of endorsing them. Throughout the 1970s, the unions held the governments of the day to ransom, striking frequently over pay and conditions.

Actions by the militant electricians and mining unions made power cuts a regular feature of British life at the time. This saw families’ bulk-buying candles and making the best of the inevitable nights without lighting, heating and electricity. 　　The long-anticipated collision between the Thatcher government and the unions came during the course of the miners’ strike. Running from March 1984 till March 1985, the strike was one of the longest and bloodiest in British industrial history. Triggered by government moves to close a number of supposedly nonviable pits, the action was, in truth, High Noon for two opposing ideologies.

During the course of the 13-month strike, livelihoods were lost, communities were forever divided and the police came to be seen as an increasingly partisan political tool. When the strike finally collapsed, so too did the British trade union movement’s chance of having any controlling role in the future of the country’s economy or having any wider societal impact. It was a turning point for her administration.

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Speaking in 1987, during her third and final term as prime minister, Thatcher famously said: “There is no such thing as society.” It was the cornerstone of her beliefs. By dividing and conquering the miners, she had ended the threat of collective bargaining. From there on, the needs of the individual (and their immediate families) were enshrined as paramount, with the notion of wider responsibility being the province only of the out-flanked “loony” left and a number of young idealists, all largely expected to soon grow out of the notion.

From then on, Thatcher and her supporters managed to bridge the gap between the disenfranchised British establishment and the newly impassioned electorate. With nationalised industries sold off to first-time shareholders, work in the trading rooms of the city’s financial institutions suddenly put on a newly-egalitarian footing and those dependent on welfare forever stigmatised, the Thatcher revolution was complete.

For her opponents, it was greed that had become venerated, for supporters it was, more palatably, seen as self-reliance or ambition. With her administration coinciding with Britain’s delayed consumer boom, ostentatious acquisition was endorsed, while state reliance was discouraged by both statutory means and via widespread denunciation in the Thatcher-friendly print media.

It was an unsavoury transformation, but a necessary one. Pre-Thatcher Britain was an anachronism, with the self-interest of the labour movements stymieing social and economic progress. The process of change was, perhaps, unnecessarily brutal with Thatcher clearly revelling in the obvious vicissitudes facing devastated communities.

It was this glee, as much as any economic impact, that earned her the undying enmity of many sectors of British society. That enmity was hereditary, with many of the protestors at her funeral last month still intent on righting the wrongs done to their parents or even grandparents.

Forget the Falklands war or the fall of the Berlin Wall as the Iron Lady’s defining moments. Her lasting legacy is in transforming the post-war, post-colonial United Kingdom into the country it is today.

Quite how you view that legacy depends very much on how you see 21st century Britain. The jury, as they say, is very definitely still out...out...out...

...Out!