'So farwell, Maggie......'

At the 1979 General Election I was Returning Officer for a safe Labour constituency. When the result came in I thought for a moment that there had been a mistake. The right-wing Tory candidate had romped home. As this was a bellwether constituency I knew that we were getting  a  Conservative government with our first woman Prime Minister and that we were in for a bumpy ride.

 

I returned to the UK in 1970, perhaps the most dismal decade of modern times. I found a country that was like an impoverished old dowager, living on memories, stony broke, and facing inevitable decline.

 

We had nationalized industries that were always hemorrhaging money and providing a terrible service. In those days, it took a least 3 months just to get a telephone. British Steel was losing £1 million a day, perhaps £10 million in today’s money. And so it went on.

 

Maggie set about privatizing them, but she made sure that in the IPOs small investors were favoured – ‘Tell Sid!’. For the first time ordinary people became investors in their own economy, a new class of capitalist.

 

She gave the right to buy for council house tenants and created the ’property owning democracy’.

 

Manufacturing industry was being ruined by trade union militancy under the leadership of the likes of Jack Jones (recently revealed as  a KGB plant), Red Robbo, and others of that ilk. The print unions were rotten with Spanish practices, such as clocking on for night-shift and then going home. Dockers seemed to be in almost permanent dispute.

 

And we had the miners constantly holding the nation to ransom with double-digit pay demands. They could, and did, bring down governments. They had to be tamed and they were.

 

In 1979, nearly 30 million days were lost by strike action. Maggie changed the law to ban secondary picketing and other abuses, and introduced strike ballots. In 1997, when the Tories lost office, the number had fallen to 235,000. Today, strikes in the private sector are almost a thing of the past, with 93% of strikes being in the public sector.

 

With the ‘Big Bang’ in the City, the UK changed from ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the world’s banker, its number one financial centre.

 

In foreign affairs, she was undoubtedly the stiffening behind Reagan in bringing the Cold War to an end, helped, no doubt, by Gorbachev apparently being smitten by her.

 

And what I did not know until reading Robin Renwick’s piece in the Sunday Times about his time under Maggie as Ambassador in South Africa, that she had a deep hatred of apartheid. It was probably she of any foreign leader who cajoled FW de Klerk into the final settlement. She formed a sound friendship with Mandela, who was visited  frequently by Renwick when he was still in jail, and Number Ten was his first on his visiting list when he came to Britain.

 

She also lanced the boil of Rhodesian UDI after every effort had failed in the previous 15 years; she can scarcely be held responsible for the way things turned out many years after she left politics.

 

Then there was the Falklands war which made the world realise that the old lion still had teeth (the cover of ‘Time’ magazine had a picture of a RN carrier and the headline ‘The Empire strikes back!’).

 

Her biggest failure was the poll tax, which contributed to her downfall.

 

During her rise to power her biggest enemies were within the Tory Party itself and the  Establishment. This was not only because of her  sex and the difficulty of the old guard accepting a woman as leader, but sheer snobbishness over a grocer’s daughter. The Establishment had to go and it did.

 

She was the greatest peace-time Prime Minister of the 20^th Century. She saved Britain in 1980 as assuredly as Winston saved it in 1940.

 

So farewell, Maggie. We shall not see your like again.