Margaret Thatcher’s real legacy

I heard the news of Margaret Thatcher’s passing today with a pang of sadness. Not that I had any great affection for the former British Prime Minister, but the death of someone who played such a significant role during one’s lifetime is like a little death of one’s self – or at least a reminder of one’s own mortality.

As a convinced Europhile I could never come to terms with her visceral hatred of everything across the English Channel and while miners got what they deserved when she crushed their strike in 1984, her attempts to introduce a poll tax was a policy too far. A clear case of a leader in office too long who had begun to believe she was invincible.

If there was one point that defined her 11 years in Downing Street it was the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982. It was an opportunity she seized and a turning point in Britain’s post war history.

Until then the nation had been in obvious decline: a crumbling giant that had given away its empire and, despite its membership of the European Union, had yet to find a role with which it could be comfortable. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson had rebuffed President Lyndon Johnson’s request that it send forces to the Vietnam War; instead its once formidable army was reduced to acting as policemen in the Northern Ireland quagmire.

Whether Thatcher saw the Falklands as an opportunity to unite the nation in a good old fashioned piece of biffo, or was simply following her gut instincts, will never be known for certain, but the fact of her sending a task force to the South Atlantic to reclaim the islands in a short and victorious war unleashed a wave of patriotic fervour unseen since 1945.

More importantly, it ensured she would win the next election and the election after that, keeping from office Labour’s then Leader of the Opposition, Michael Foot who, despite his powerful intellect and a command of the English language unmatched since Churchill, would have been an unmitigated disaster as Prime Minister.

Britain’s decline can be firmly laid at the door of Labour Prime Ministers Wilson and James Callaghan, two men more intent on holding on to power than using it constructively. Their combined reign, interrupted by the four years of Edward Heath’s valiant attempts to give the country a role within the European Union, were characterised by high inflation, soaring unemployment and flat-lining economic growth.    

Thatcher’s nascent administration was struggling to meet these challenges and its popularity was plummeting. Without the Falklands Foot would probably have come to power with his utopian vision of converting the country into a socialist paradise. Where this would have placed Britain in the mid-1980s and beyond is too terrible to contemplate.

After the Falklands Britain did begin to have confidence in a role as an influential middle-range power, closely allied to the United States and ready (in the case of the Second Iraq War too ready) to embrace the American view of the world.

The knee-jerk anti-Americans would maintain this was a bad, even terrible thing for the nation. I believe the alternative would have been a Britain today lining up with Greece, Ireland and Cyprus for International Monetary Fund bailouts.