Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher has died. Her spokesman, Lord Bell, confirmed that the 87-year-old groundbreaking politician passed away after suffering a stroke Monday morning. Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979, leading the country and its Conservative Party for 11 years with a notorious fierceness that earned her the nickname the “Iron Lady.” It was a stroke that ultimately prompted Thatcher to retire in 2002, after which she continued to suffer strokes and kept a very low profile in the last few months of her life.
NY TIMES
She pulled her country back from 35 years of socialism, led it to victory in the Falklands war and helped guide the United States and the Soviet Union through the cold war’s last years.
Hard-driving and hardheaded, she led her Conservative Party to three straight election victories and held office for 11 years — May 1979 to November 1990 — longer than any other British politician in the 20th century.
The tough economic medicine Mrs. Thatcher administered to a country sickened by inflation, budget deficits and industrial unrest brought her wide swings in popularity, culminating with a revolt among her own cabinet ministers in her final year and her shout of “No! No! No!” in the House of Commons to any further integration with Europe.
But by the time she left office, the principles known as Thatcherism...had won many disciples....Mrs. Thatcher’s political successes were decisive. She broke the power of the labor unions and forced the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to nationalized industry, redefine the role of the welfare state and accept the importance of the free market.
...But her third term was riddled with setbacks...By the time she was ousted in another Tory revolt — this time over her resistance to expanding Britain’s role in a European union — the economy was in a recession and her reputation tarnished. To her enemies she was — as Denis Healey, chancellor of the Exchequer in Harold Wilson’s government, called her — “La Pasionaria of Privilege,” a woman who railed against the evils of poverty but who was callous and unsympathetic to the plight of the have-nots. Her policies, her opponents said, were cruel and shortsighted, widened the gap between rich and poor and worsened the plight of the poorest.
.....She called for an all-out attack on inflation, pledged to denationalize basic industry and promised to curb union power. Brisk and argumentative, she was rarely willing to concede a point and loath to compromise... Britain’s arts and academic establishments loathed her for cutting their financing and considered her tastes provincial, her values narrow-minded.
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By the mid-1970s, Britain was the sick man of Europe. Nearly half of the average taxpayer’s income went to the state, which now determined compensation for a third of the nation’s work force: those employed by nationalized industries. In late 1978 and early ’79, strikes paralyzed Britain. As the “winter of discontent” dragged on, Prime Minister James Callaghan, of the Labour Party, failed to survive a no-confidence vote and called an election for May 3.
Callaghan, who was known as Sunny Jim, drew higher personal ratings in opinion polls than Mrs. Thatcher. But on election day the Tories walked away with 43.9 percent of the vote. Labour received 37 percent and the Liberals 13.8 percent. It was the largest swing to the right in postwar history.
Mrs. Thatcher moved swiftly. “I came to office with one deliberate intent,” she later said. “To change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society, from a give-it-to-me to a do-it-yourself nation.”
It was a painful beginning. Income tax cuts balanced by rising gasoline duties and sales taxes fueled inflation. Unemployment spread as she slashed subsidies to faltering industries. Tight money policies drove up interest rates to as high as 22 percent, strengthening the pound, hobbling investment at home and hurting competitiveness overseas. A record 10,000 businesses went bankrupt. Saying it would take years to cure Britain of the havoc wrought by socialism, Mrs. Thatcher warned, “Things will get worse before they get better.”
...[But]There were...compromises. The government retreated from its declaration that state industries must sink or swim in the free market and came to the aid of British Airways and British Steel.
Mrs. Thatcher later said that 1981 was her worst year in office. But by the spring of 1982, things were looking up. Inflation was falling; so was the value of the pound, which gave a boost to Britain’s exports and, along with tax cuts, began to feed economic growth.
In foreign affairs, she won some small victories. Standing up to the European Community over the amount of money Britain provided to the organization, she argued that her country paid out much more than it got back in benefits, and won a significant reduction in contributions.
...Her political fortunes were enhanced by squabbling among her opponents. Far-left factions and militant union leaders were gaining strength in the Labour Party as economic discontent and tensions with the Soviet Union grew.
When Mrs. Thatcher called an election in June 1983, Labour’s new chief, Michael Foot, called in the campaign for a unilateral ban on nuclear weapons, withdrawal from the European Community, further nationalization of industry and a huge jobs program.
Mr. Foot’s swing to the left alienated Labour’s center and right wing, and disaffected members fell away from the Social Democratic Party, which supported private enterprise and a mixed economy, membership in the European Community and a nuclear defense in which Britain and the United States had dual control over weapons.
... The conservatives[sailed to victory], the biggest swing in voting since Labour’s landslide victory against Churchill in 1945. The working class voted heavily for the Conservatives. Even Dartford, the “safe” Labour seat where Mrs. Thatcher had made her first failed bid for office in 1950, elected a Tory.
It was an axiom of British politics that one never picked a quarrel with the pope or the National Union of Mineworkers. Mrs. Thatcher flouted it. The coal mines, nationalized in 1947, were widely seen as unprofitable, overstaffed and obsolescent, and in 1984 the government announced plans to shut down several mines and to eliminate 20,000 of the industry’s 180,000 jobs.
In response, Arthur Scargill, the Marxist president of the union, used union rules to elude a rank-and-file vote and, on March 6, 1984, called a walkout.
It was a violent strike. Night after night, the television news broadcast images of hundreds of miners battling the police....[Though the violence] shocked the Labour Party and many miners, Mr. Scargill refused to condemn it, alienating Neil Kinnock, the new Labour leader, and other supporters. ... members of his own union sought to have the strike declared illegal,...The strike finally ended in March 1985, after 362 days, without a settlement.
Mrs. Thatcher now pushed harder to fulfill her vision of “popular capitalism.” The sale of state-owned industries shifted some 900,000 jobs into the private sector. More than one million public housing units were sold to their occupants. And the chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, announced in 1985 that for the first time since the 1960s, the Treasury would not require deficit spending in its next fiscal budget.
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Mrs. Thatcher did not fare so well in other battles. In the face of popular opposition, she retreated from plans to privatize the water industry and the National Health Service, replace college grants with a student loan program, cut back pensions and revamp the social security system. Many predicted that she would not win a third term.
But the economy continued to work in her favor. When she called an election in 1987, the Tories were returned to power on June 11.
[During her third term,] the government’s tax-cutting and easy-credit policies fed an investment and housing boom, again fueling inflation....As inflation rose, [the government] raised interest rates. The sudden effort to stanch the money flow threw Britain into recession....many devoted Thatcherites admitted that she bore much of the blame.
Other misjudgments were laid at her door. In an effort to make local authorities more accountable for the way they spent tax money, Mrs. Thatcher pushed through a measure that replaced the income tax with a “poll tax” on all adult residents of a community. The tax — so named because it used voter registration lists to identify prospective taxpayers — was intended to make everyone, not just property owners, pay for local government services. In practice, the measure was manifestly unfair and deeply unpopular. In March 1990, protests in Trafalgar Square flared into riots. Within her own party, there was a growing feeling that the Iron Lady had become a liability.
... Michael Heseltine, a former defense minister who favored greater links with Europe, announced that he would challenge Mrs. Thatcher for the party leadership. On Nov. 20, as the prime minister was attending a summit meeting in Paris, the Tories took a vote. For Mrs. Thatcher, whose approval ratings in the polls were falling, the outcome was bleak: though she beat Mr. Heseltine, 204 votes to 152, under party rules her majority was not strong enough for her to keep her place.
...Though vowing at first to “fight on and fight to win” ..., she was persuaded to withdraw. After speaking to the queen, calling world leaders and making a final speech to the House of Commons, she resigned on Nov. 28, 1990, leaving 10 Downing Street in tears and feeling betrayed.
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Mr. Blair’s victory ...in 1997 seemed in a curious way to emphasize the success of Mrs. Thatcher’s policies. Mr. Blair led his “New Labour” party to victory on a platform that promised to liberate business from government restrictions, end taxes that discouraged investment and reduce dependence on the state.
Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy, “in most respects, is uncontested by the Blair government,” Mr. Young, her biographer, said in a 1999 interview. “It made rather concrete something she once said: ‘My task will not be completed until the Labour Party has become like the Conservative Party, a party of capitalism.’ ”