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British historian Paul Johnson gets the honors on Margaret Thatcher Day.
Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around—decisively—the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries. “Thatcherism” was the most popular and successful way of running a country in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Her origins were humble. Born Oct. 13, 1925, she was the daughter of a grocer in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. Alfred Roberts was no ordinary shopkeeper. He was prominent in local government and a man of decided economic and political views. Thatcher later claimed her views had been shaped by gurus like Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, but these were clearly the icing on a cake baked in her childhood by Councillor Roberts. This was a blend of Adam Smith and the Ten Commandments, the three most important elements being hard work, telling the truth, and paying bills on time.
Hard work took Miss Roberts, via a series of scholarships, to Grantham Girls’ School, SomervilleCollege, Oxford, and two degrees, in chemistry and law. She practiced in both professions, first as a research chemist, then as a barrister from 1954. …
… Thatcher’s long ministry of nearly a dozen years is often mistakenly described as ideological in tone. In fact Thatcherism was (and is) essentially pragmatic and empirical. She tackled the unions not by producing, like Heath, a single comprehensive statute but by a series of measures, each dealing with a particular abuse, such as aggressive picketing. At the same time she, and the police, prepared for trouble by a number of ingenious administrative changes allowing the country’s different police forces to concentrate large and mobile columns wherever needed. Then she calmly waited, relying on the stupidity of the union leaders to fall into the trap, which they duly did.
She fought and won two pitched battles with the two strongest unions, the miners and the printers. In both cases, victory came at the cost of weeks of fighting and some loss of life. After the hard men had been vanquished, the other unions surrendered, and the new legislation was meekly accepted, no attempt being made to repeal or change it when Labour eventually returned to power. Britain was transformed from the most strike-ridden country in Europe to a place where industrial action is a rarity. The effect on the freedom of managers to run their businesses and introduce innovations was almost miraculous and has continued. …
… She also reduced Britain’s huge and loss-making state-owned industries, nearly a third of the economy, to less than one-tenth, by her new policy of privatization—inviting the public to buy from the state industries, such as coal, steel, utilities and transport by bargain share offers. Hence loss-makers, funded from taxes, became themselves profit-making and so massive tax contributors.
This transformation was soon imitated all over the world. More important than all these specific changes, however, was the feeling Thatcher engendered that Britain was again a country where enterprise was welcomed and rewarded, where businesses small and large had the benign blessing of government, and where investors would make money.
As a result Britain was soon absorbing more than 50% of all inward investment in Europe, the British economy rose from the sixth to the fourth largest in the world, and its production per capita, having been half that of Germany’s in the 1970s, became, by the early years of the 21st century, one-third higher. …
… She was not a feminist, despising the genre as “fashionable rot,” though she once made a feminist remark. At a dreary public dinner of 500 male economists, having had to listen to nine speeches before being called herself, she began, with understandable irritation: “As the 10th speaker, and the only woman, I wish to say this: the cock may crow but it’s the hen who lays the eggs.”
Her political success once again demonstrates the importance of holding two or three simple ideas with fervor and tenacity, a virtue she shared with Ronald Reagan. One of these ideas was that the “evil empire” of communism could be and would be destroyed, and together with Reagan and Pope John Paul II she must be given the credit for doing it.
Among the British public she aroused fervent admiration and intense dislike in almost equal proportions, but in the world beyond she was recognized for what she was: a great, creative stateswoman who left the world a better and more prosperous place, and whose influence will reverberate well into the 21st century.
… She was for me, and no doubt many women of the 20th century, a towering figure who attained real power by virtue of her own hard work and excellence. She did not derive her power from men or from victimology. In contrast to the 20th century feminists, she was painfully aware of sexism but did not obsess about it. She simply got the job done. No excuses, no whining and no personal drama. (Her 41 years of devoted marriage to Denis was evocative of the love match between Ronald and Nancy Reagan.)
In an era in which posers, celebrities, self-made victims and the simply mediocre have a lock on political power in the U.S., conservatives can’t help but regard her passing with a great deal of melancholy. She was a tower of strength because of her ideas and she challenged the post-war socialist consensus, eventually proving it pathetically unsuccessful. Her declaration that “first you win the argument, then you win the vote” is a favorite aphorism on the right because it speaks to their greatest aspiration: that the power of their ideas will carry the day.
She was quite simply the finest female political leader and conservative of the 20th century, and among the best of either gender in both categories. To say she will be missed falsely infers that her absence on the world stage has not already been keenly felt by those who had the privilege to be on the planet when the Iron Lady inspired Brits and non-Brits and when she not only ruled but transformed Britain as few had.
The gnomes at the Hoover Institution have provided a treat – two columns by Milton Friedman on Margaret Thatcher from Newsweek (1979 & 1983).
We have become so accustomed to politicians making extravagant campaign promises and then forgetting about them once elected that the first major act of Margaret Thatcher’s government— the budget unveiled on June 12—was a surprise. It did precisely what she had promised to do.
Margaret Thatcher campaigned on a platform of reversing the trend toward an ever more intrusive government—a trend that had carried government spending in Great Britain to somewhere between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the nation’s income. Ever since the end of World War II, both Labor and Tory governments have added to government-provided social services as well as to government-owned and -operated industry. Foreign-exchange transactions have been rigidly controlled. Taxes have been punitive, yet have not yielded enough to meet costs. Excessive money created to finance deficits sparked an inflation that hit a rate of over 30 per cent a year in mid-1975. Only recently was inflation brought down to the neighborhood of 10 per cent, and it is once again on the rise.
Most important of all, the persistent move to a centralized and collectivist economy produced economic stagnation. Before World War II, the British citizen enjoyed a real income that averaged close to twice that of the Frenchman or German. Today, the ratio is nearly reversed. The Frenchman or German enjoys a real income close to twice that of the ordinary Briton.
Margaret Thatcher declared in no uncertain terms that the long British experiment was a failure. She urged greater reliance on private enterprise and on market incentives. …
Michael Barone posts on the ‘divisive’ Margaret Thatcher.
“Divisive.” That’s a word that appeared, often prominently, in many news stories reporting the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
One senses the writers’ disapproval. You’re not likely to find “divisive” in stories reporting the deaths of liberal leaders, although every electoral politician divides voters.
“Divisive” here refers to something specific. It was Thatcher’s special genius that she systematically rejected the conventional wisdom, almost always well-intentioned, of the political establishment.
Instead she insisted on hard, uncomfortable truths.
British Conservatives like Harold Macmillan accepted the tyranny of trade unionism because they had guilty memories of the slaughter of the working-class men who served under them in the trenches in World War I.
Thatcher, who as an adolescent before World War II saved money to pay for a Jewish girl to escape from Austria to England, felt no such guilt. …
Another Brit historian, Andrew Roberts, is next.
Seldom does the emergence of a single individual undeniably change the course of history. It was true of Winston Churchill becoming prime minister in May 1940, of course, but normally one person’s efforts cannot significantly alter the tide of human events. Yet undoubtedly such a person was Margaret Thatcher, for it is no exaggeration to say that she saved Great Britain from bankruptcy, made it great again, won a war and with Ronald Reagan helped sound the death knell of Soviet communism.
Yet her obituaries on both the left and the right hint that her battles were all in the past, that she was solely a figure from an earlier era, whose struggles bear no relation to today’s politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The principles that she established—which together form the coherent political program called Thatcherism—have perhaps more relevance now than at any time since the 1980s. To write her off as a historical figure is to discard the timelessness, and thus the most important aspect, of her political thought.
With the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (the so-called P5+1) nowadays adopting what she once described in another context as “the politics of the pre-emptive cringe” toward Iran’s development of a nuclear bomb, we could do with the late Lady Thatcher’s clear-sighted and full-throated denunciation of pusillanimity in international affairs. When she was in power, her attitude toward dictatorships’ threats and bullying—be it the Argentine junta over the Falkland Islands or Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War—was precisely the tough and uncompromising stance from which the P5+1 group constantly shrinks. The advice she gave to President George H.W. Bush in 1990—”This is no time to go wobbly, George”—is desperately needed today. …
James Pethokoukis posts on one of the left’s ugly comments about Lady Thatcher.
What a strange column on Thatcherism by Paul Krugman.
1) Krugman acknowledges that 1970s Britain was a country with “huge economic problems.”
2) Krugman also acknowledges that there was a “huge turnaround.”
3) But Krugman is hesitant to credit Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies because “the big improvement in British performance doesn’t really show in the data until the mid-1990s. Does she get credit for a reward so long delayed?”
Again, let’s compare UK economic performance to that of France. In 1961, UK real per capita GDP was 104% of France’s. By 1978, UK real per capita GDP had fallen to just 81% of France’s.
Quite a two-decade decline.
Then Thatcher arrives in May 1979 as the UK decides to embrace free-market economics. France stays the statist course.
As the above chart shows, the UK almost immediately begins gaining ground on France. By 1990, UK real per capita GDP is 87% of France’s. Then we have another seven years of Conservative government, and by 1997 UK real per capita GDP is 94% of France’s. But here is Krugman’s conclusion:
“Anyway, I guess there is a case that the Thatcher changes in taxes, labor regulation, etc. created a more flexible economy, which made the good years under Blair possible. But it’s an awfully long lag.”
Tony Blair didn’t become prime minister until May 1997! By that time, the UK had already reversed most of its two-decade decline vs. more statist France.
I think as that last quote reveals, Krugman is fully aware that 1970s Britain was overtaxed and overregulated and overunionized — and that Thatcherism was a necessary if imperfect remedy. But in today’s hyperpartisan world, an explicit admission would hurt his brand. (It might also mean conceding Reaganomics was successful.) Too bad for Krugman and the liberal readers of The New York Times.