Thatcher: A heroine to some, she-devil to others

IN 2001, a decade after she left office, a large once-sealed brown Cabinet folder on Margaret Thatcher was publicly released under the 30-year rule.

The file noted her time as education minister and the decisions she made in 1971, particularly one that was to define both her political and public image and provide the setting of her as a hate figure for a generation.

Edward Heath's Conservative government was in financial trouble and in a bid to raise money, a decision was made to stop free milk for primary school children.

At the time the milk program cost 14 million pounds a year, almost twice as such as that spent on school books.

The government passed a bill and stopped the program, earning Maggie the moniker "Thatcher the milk snatcher" in a move seen as ruthless by Labour but also her Tory colleagues who thought she would go to any lengths to save a penny. She wore the resentment as a badge of honour that only drove her harder to succeed to become the first female British prime minister eight years later.

But in 2001, the once confidential documents about the milk affair actually revealed publicly for the first time Thatcher was against the cut predicting the action would cause more "widespread public antagonism than the saving justified".

She proposed a compromise restricting milk to nursery and primary schools instead, a move that was accepted.

The revelation spoke volumes of a woman who cared less about what people thought of her than making a difference – for better or worse – for a country she loved and hated to see sinking into global irrelevance.

She wanted to be Britain's savior and be judged by history not the public in the moment, perhaps a sentiment that showed she did not understand or at least appreciate the intertwining of both.

In Britain, her passing this week aged 87 revealed she was still a heroine to some a hate figure for others with no room for indifference. Incredibly, years after she left public life and now in death she still polarises opinion and it remains whose history you read to decide whether her legacy is one of success or failure.

INDUSTRIAL

By the time Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, Britain had lost its way, very much hamstrung by cronyism and old-world deals and partnerships that ensured bloated unprofitable industries remained untouched by change and continued to receive hefty government subsidies.

Thatcher's program of change did away with all that.

Buoyed after having won the war with Argentina over the Falklands, she set about battling what she dubbed the "enemy within", the unions that were keeping Britain uncompetitive and uneconomic.

It was an era of mass stoppages, the "winter of discontent", in which unions dictated public life despite public fury, declaring pickets and walk offs regularly leaving garbage uncollected and public transport in disarray.

She tackled first the unprofitable steel industry, closing unprofitable operations, to the detriment of the townships that provided the workforce, including Durham in north east England where unemployment reached 50 per cent.

She simultaneously took on the unions with her government creating laws to make balloting before a strike compulsory and banning compulsory union membership and flying pickets before turning to the miners and looking to close unprofitable pits.

Tens of thousands lost their jobs in that action prompting National Union of Mineworkers boss Arthur Scargill to call a strike in 1984 that would last an incredible one year.

The action also led to many violent clashes with police across the country and the arrest of more than 11,000 people, many family men simply worried about their future.

She went after Scargill - the man she saw that epitomized all that was wrong with Britain - since he broke the new law by holding a strike without a ballot. The NUM was heavily fined, he was arrested and had his unions assets sequestered.

Next she offered support in action against the printers who dictated to newspaper barons how many staff they should have on threat of costly rolling strikes, with many rosters forced to include non-existent "ghost" workers allowing some printers to pick up two wages.

Staff at News International walked off the job when Rupert Murdoch moved his newspaper operations to a new site in Wapping and brought in replacement workers including number of Australians and told the then heavily unionised workforce to accept stricter working practices and new technology that effectively replaced a number of roles; the unions conceded defeat.

General, days lost through union-led stoppages fell from 29 million days in 1979 to 500,000 a year by the end of the 1990s. Thatcher later claimed her greatest victory was when Tony Blair and his New Labour team adopted many of her industrial reforms.

ECONOMY

In 1979 just after Thatcher was elected PM, a leaked diplomatic memo famously portrayed England as very much the sick man of Europe both economically and in stature.

"Our economic decline in relation to our European partners has been so marked that today we are not only no longer a world power we are not in the first rank even as a European one," British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson wrote.

The nation was in decline and few believed there was anything to do about.

In 1981 Thatcher defied her critics including from within her own Cabinet by raising taxes and slashing public expenditure in a recession that while saw the economy grow, pushed unemployment to triple to three million out of work. When she deregulated the financial sector the economy soared and suddenly London City became a global financial capital.

The sector only grew in strength when her other policies kicked in such as selling off inefficient state owned giants such as British Telecom and British Gas as well as council homes. Inflation dropped from 22 per cent in 1980 to 4.2 per cent by 1987.

The national transformation dubbed Thatcherism had begun. By her second term as PM Thatcherism was making Britain competitive again for the first time in the 20th century, overtaking other European nations such as France in terms of per capita GDP.

Many saw the changes as having been detrimental to the working class, largely though job losses, in favour of capitalism and globalisation. Domestically the ugliest effect from her policies came in 1989 with the Community Charge, or poll tax as it was called.

The tax replaced the notional rental value of a property and instead was based on the number of people living in a house as a fair way to pay for council services. The poor were hit hardest as councils raised rates with the culmination leading to the poll tax riots in 1990 involving some 200,000 people in the centre of London. There were multiple injuries in running battles between protesters and police. The tax was dumped as was Thatcher later that year.

At the time it was made it was intended as an insult, but after the Kremlin through its newspaper mouthpiece dubbed her the "Iron Lady" it became a tag to wear with pride.

She once noted: "I stand before you tonight … my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved. The Iron Lady of the Western World. Me? A Cold warrior? Well yes." Her iron will came to the fore when she ignored the advice from her own administration as well as that of the United States and sent warships to recapture the Falkland Islands from Argentina. Many regard her victory to end the war swiftly as the highlight of her career, decisively seizing back an outpost and promoting a wave of patriotism at home.

She couldn't conjure the same success with negotiating with Northern Ireland with Sinn Fein convinced her uncompromising approach led to an extension of hostilities. She did eventually sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement paving the way for peace. The IRA made an assassination attempt on her life with a bombing at a Tory conference which killed a number of her colleagues. It was an act that haunted her for years.

Her liberal economic reform saw her win a rebate from the European Union saving the country billions and battled against perceived abuses of power by Brussels. These Eurosceptic sentiments continue today under David Cameron's leadership.

Probably her greatest achievement though was identifying Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984, then a junior in the Kremlin, as someone who "we can do business together". The Cold War was still raging but by the time Gorbachev came to power they already had a working relationship and mutual appreciation for reformist ways.

Thatcher

Similarly Ronald Reagan liked her straight talking and together they dazzled on the international stage.

Eventually the three saw the Iron Curtain lift and the Cold War thaw. She did not win any concessions with the Chinese however and lost intense negotiations in the mid 1980s over the future of Hong Kong, agreeing to hand it back and not extend British administration.

By the time she left office in November 1990 she had lost the faith of the people and her party. Ironically for a woman who introduced so much change she refused to change her own agenda for the country.

She failed to admit mistakes and correct them. In her own infamous words, she didn't believe in the u-turn. She told her party faithful during her second term: "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning."

But her commitment to Britain however perceived then and judged now was unmistakable in one thread.

"She created a legend, a story to tell to future generations – a story about how if only you stop thinking you must lose, you can start to win," her authorised biographer Charles Moore wrote yesterday in an opinion piece in the British press.

"Her love for her country was expressed even more in her action than in her words. As with all great loves, it was often spurned but she was always true to it. Her love was deep and we shall miss it more than we yet know."

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