In the end, man proposes and God disposes. We might deserve success, but we could not command it. It was perversely a comforting thought. I slept well. – Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years.
One of the souvenir magazines produced to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee shows a 1985 picture of Elizabeth II surrounded by the six prime ministers who served during her reign. They were Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher, Alex Douglas-Home, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Of these, Margaret Thatcher must clearly be the most significant both in relation to British internal politics and externally to Britain’s place in the world.
A political commentator rightly noted that Winston Churchill was the most important British prime minister in the first half of the 20th century and Thatcher the most so in the latter half.
As the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, said at the funeral, not many politicians grow to be an “ism”. Thatcher-ism.
She is unquestionably the most controversial. The loathing that continued after her death seemed surprisingly un-British. Iron Lady . . . Rust In Peace or Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead. One TV picture showed persons stamping on her photos, the kind of response one would expect of Middle East protesters, not of the ostensibly self-restrained British.
The most agreed notion held by both her disciples and her detractors is that she was “a conviction politician”, a “politician of beliefs”.
Her critics see her as given “too much to self-belief” and her autobiography bears this out. Those who deride her ideological position seem to forget that she won three elections and was never defeated at the polls. She must therefore have had not inconsiderable support within the British public at large.
Secondly, as Fareed Zakaria pointed out, her position on the British economy in terms of limiting the frontiers of the state has been largely vindicated by history. In fact, Thatcher, when asked about her greatest legacy, cheekily replied “Tony Blair”, alluding to the fact that many of her policies were lasting and that New Labour accepted many of her reforms related to the privatization of business and correcting the over-reaching role of the trade unions.
Rightly or wrongly, within the context of a capitalist democratic polity, it is now widely accepted that the private sector is the main engine of economic growth.
Ken Livingstone, one of her severest critics, admits that “she won the ideological war”. Very few now espouse the socialist-oriented, centralized, command-type economy.
Ed Milliband, in his tribute, accepted that “she reshaped the politics of a generation”, and Sir Malcolm Rifkin, former foreign secretary, credits her with creating “a modern competitive economy, not one that is nostalgic for the past”.
In reviewing Thatcher’s politics, there is a tendency to forget the state of Britain in the late 1970s. The International Monetary Fund came to Britain in the late 1970s when the country was widely regarded as the proverbial “sick man of Europe”. In 1979 she inherited a massive deficit. There was rising unemployment, double-digit inflation and significant fall-off in foreign investment. Internationally, Britain had clearly lost whatever standing it still had in the world.
All ideologies are theoretically flawed and even the best theoretical constructs will prove faulty in the execution by inevitably flawed individuals.
In a critique of Mario Vargas Llosa, whose novels portray the seemingly vain “recurrent Latin American search for Utopia”, one writer noted that revolution “is liberating when pursued as artistic vision, but leads to disaster, bloodshed and tragedy when it becomes a political project”. This is as true of the Grenada Revolution of 1983 as it was the French of 1789.
Thatcher’s fall from power had its roots in flaws in an ideology that suggested there was no such thing as society, only individuals. Such a belief system is subject to all kinds of insensitivity. Her reforms produced severe social casualty in the mining communities in the North and in South Wales. I am not sure that “atomization”, the rampant individualism of British society, can be blamed solely or mainly on Thatcher’s embrace of free enterprise capitalism. What is being called “atomization” – the selfishness and greed that has emerged in much of Western society – may be more the result of the decline of communitarian religious values. But capitalist zeal has always to be tempered by a real sense of civic responsibility and collective obligation.
The downfall of Margaret Thatcher on that memorable November 28, 1990, was a consequence of the hubris of too much self-belief, of a reluctance to see the possibility that one could be wrong.
Her evident maltreatment of Chancellor Nigel Lawson over the poll tax and of Geoffrey Howe, with whom she failed to consult over Europe, was the beginning of her political decline. Hubris, one writer notes, always gets you in the end. Convinced of her own infallibility, she became less and less collegial, better at defining differences than creating unity, perhaps ultimately, more of a destroyer than a builder.
As was said of Abraham Lincoln, “Now she belongs to the Ages.”
• Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator.
