11/04/2014
Alfredo Crespo Alcázar is a researcher attaché at Instituto de Estudios Riojanos (IER)
One year after the death of the “Iron Lady”, it seems mandatory to make some comments on her figure and her political leadership. Margaret Thatcher was a world-renowned stateswoman. This is not only due to her three election victories (1979, 1983 and 1987), but also to the loyalty she always showed to her principles, specially to her unconditional defence of freedom, to which she linked a disused concept (then and now): responsibility. To Thatcher, freedom and responsibilities were inextricably linked. It was not an empty or rhetoric statement. Quite the opposite, it implied a veiled criticism against the way her country had been managed, with an overloaded State that had turned the mankind into beings without aspirations, indifferent to any work, savings or self-fulfilment ethic, after previously undermining their ability to choose.
In 1996, when she no longer had political responsibilities, she stated, on the occasion of the homage paid by the Centre for Policy Studies to one of her most faithful colleagues, Keith Joseph, “the State is the servant, not the master; it is a guardian, not a collaborator; a referee, not a player”. Therefore, according to her, everything that undermined individual freedom hindered the development of society.
In her defence of freedom, she realistically listed its enemies, holding Communism a privileged position. This is a fundamental aspect when it comes to analysing her ideas and her figure. Indeed, when she first became leader of the Conservative Party (1975) and later prime minister (1979), the scene she witnessed was devastating. The western world had deliberately given up on fighting Communism. In fact, in many cases it had preferred the comfort of admitting the moral superiority of the doctrine linked to personalities such as Marx, Lenin or Stalin.
Margaret Thatcher did not accept that sort of “inescapable fate” and fought to change it. For said task, she found an exceptional ally in Ronald Reagan, thus revitalising the “special relationship”. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the acclaims she received in countries under the Soviet aegis symbolised gratitude for her work on the victory over Communist tyranny. In fact, the British leader always supported Mihail Gorbachov’s liberalisation and reformism.
After the victory over Communism, Thatcher maintained her ideas and her stateswoman personality, adjusting them to the new post Cold War scenery. Thus, she warned about the error that could be made by the free world if fell into self-complacency, since there were still threats to security and freedom. And this had to be translated into the need for a strong western defence, mainly articulated through the NATO, because, she insisted, “the enemies of freedom are well able to disguise themselves”.
Relativism was alien to her modus operandi. Had she opted for it, she would not have altered the dynamics of the Conservative Party throughout the 1970s, when it unreservedly imitated the Labour Party, making it difficult to distinguish one from another. Being politically incorrect, she rejected the post-war consensus, describing it as a “fraud” and blaming her party for most of it. She openly stated that “it was such fundamental weakness in the heart of Conservatism that made even conservative politicians to regard themselves as if their only task was to manage a rapid change toward some kind of Socialist State”.
Her ideas, which were not new, but revolutionary, firstly caught on the British society, then on her party and, later, on her great opponent, the Labour Party. The latter, throughout Michael Foot’s leadership (1979-1983), naïvely tried to defeat Thatcher with an extreme-left programme structured around demagogic claims such as advocating for United Kingdom’s unilateral disarmament or regarding the European Economic Community as a Capitalist club. Obviously, with such stances (which neither Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell nor Harold Wilson would have dared to take) the Labour defeat in 1983 went down in history linked to the term “collapse”.
Tony Blair took account of the development of events in the United Kingdom throughout the 1980s. When he succeeded John Smith as leader of the party (1994) he eliminated the Marxist influence from the Labour Party and introduced in its philosophy essential aspects of Thatcherism: from economic postulates (defence of free market) to those of political nature (the Government enforcing the law), including those related to security issues (the imperative relationship with the United States).
Margaret Thatcher was an exceptional personality, both to her country (which stopped being the sick man of Europe) and to the world. Apart from analysis that explain the improvement in the British economy throughout her term of office or prioritise her election victories, it is the principles of responsibility, freedom and security which she advocated for that need to prevail as her great legacy.