Thatcher's tenure at No 10 changed British politics and society for ever. Four historians look back on her achievements
*Antony Beevor*
Margaret Thatcher is usually remembered for her forthright advocacy of free-market capitalism. Yet I think that a century from now she will be thought of even more as the champion of military intervention in the post cold war age. This is slightly ironic, because her relations with the military hierarchy started inauspiciously. Just after she became prime minister, a small group of generals requested a meeting. They crossed Whitehall from the Ministry of Defence to warn her that if she took on the trade union movement, the armed forces would not be able to run essential services. The army had learned the hard way after the Ulster Workers' Council strike, which had brought Northern Ireland to a halt. The prime minister, however, misread the message. She seems to have concluded that the army, based on a code of collective loyalty, harboured sympathies for trade union solidarity. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the prime minister turned to the Royal Navy, which, eager to regain power lost in the inter-service battle of a defence review, immediately agreed that a task force should be sent to the South Atlantic.
The Thatcher doctrine, that tyranny and oppression (when it affected British interests) must be fought and defeated, had a far greater influence than has perhaps yet been acknowledged. In the US, politicians and generals, still smarting from the Vietnam war and the debacle of the attempt to free the hostages in Iran, sat up and took notice not just of the British victory but of the way developing countries suddenly went quiet. The rapid collapse of the appalling military junta in Argentina seemed an object lesson. I suspect that the influence of her leadership in that strange dispute – the last imperial conflict yet also a foretaste of post-cold war intervention – set the agenda for the Pax Americana of our age. International law – a foggy concept since law had always stemmed from domestic power – became subject to definition-creep. As a result of Margaret Thatcher, any regime guilty of despotism and the trampling of human rights could conveniently be targeted at will.
*Michael Burleigh*
When someone writes the history of greed, chapter one will be devoted to Margaret Thatcher, for, notwithstanding Balzac, she apparently invented it in about 1980. She should certainly figure in a history of British political irrationality. Not her own, which is exaggerated, but that of, say, the college chaplain who whispered his regrets that the Brighton bomb had merely injured Norman Tebbit and missed the prime minister.
Any credible history of Thatcher will have to deal with her remarkable advocacy of freedom, the quality for which she is valued in eastern Europe, the former USSR and in the US. Throughout the 1980s she was like a beacon to the people living under communist totalitarian tyrannies. She rightly recognised the unique role of the US in defending freedom, paving the way for the respect Britain receives in the counsels of the only superpower.
Thatcher was also a beacon to the British people who voted for her in three elections. They had had enough of consensual management of decline and the machinations of power-mad trade union leaders. Her defeats of the miners and printers were the most important events in the history of industrial relations in these islands, though the Tolpuddle Martyrs deserve a line or two.
Failures? The BBC continues to get away with a left-liberal bias. Universities grind along as nationalised dinosaurs, with no one having the guts to release the best of them from the stranglehold of the state sector and the courage to smother those that make no contribution to refining rather than coarsening the cultural life of this country. In those two respects her philistinism was as unfortunate as her political achievements were remarkable.
*Professor Ian Kershaw*
Her place in history is assured as the most ideologically dogmatic, most divisive, but also strongest peacetime British prime minister in the 20th century. No one who recalls the Falklands war, the bitterness of the miners' strike, her battles over Europe, or the drama of her forced resignation will doubt the personal imprint Thatcher left on her era. She was a conviction politician par excellence – possessed of an unwavering, almost messianic certainty that she was always right and her opponents either evil or weaklings. The images of the Iron Lady and the handbagging will prove indelible. She basked in the adulation of her followers, but prompted hatred, not just dislike, in her opponents. Even so, she won respect for her political courage, particularly abroad (where she was far more admired than at home), from many who opposed her philosophy and were repelled by her personality. She presided over some of the most important changes in Britain since the second world war. Her talent was to see the necessity of radical change – a task made easier by the lamentable state of the Labour party – and to push it through with the assistance of huge Commons majorities. The ending of the postwar economic and political settlement through the destruction of nationalised industries, the breaking of trade union power, the privatisation of public utilities, and the first major inroads into the accepted beliefs underpinning the welfare state were her lasting legacy. Along the way she also forced the transformation of the Labour party.
Even so, the Thatcher myth outruns her actual personal achievement. She changed history less than she thought she had done. The 1970s ushered in economic retrenchment that led to a rightwing shift in many parts of the world, with similar trends as experienced here. Much of the major economic restructuring that took place under Thatcher would have proved necessary under the impact of globalisation – though would probably have been undertaken less brutally. There was economic recovery, but nothing like the miracle that she claimed. The pressure for European integration has survived Thatcher, and has intensified since the events of 1989‑90. Even mentalities in this country were altered less than many thought by 12 years of Thatcherism. Towards the end of her era, four-fifths of the country still wanted a society that valued caring more than wealth-creation. The country was indeed different after 12 years of Mrs Thatcher. But in the broad sweep of historical change, she rode the tide rather than pushed it back – though she did make a very big wave.
*Andrew Roberts*
Thatcher changed the atmosphere of the pre-emptive cringe that government and management had exhibited towards the trade unions ever since the second world war. She changed the sense of embarrassment that Britons felt towards the concept of profit. She changed the post-Suez attitude of appeasement and post-imperial guilt. She changed British politics so fundamentally that the Labour party had to drop socialism and change its name to get itself elected.
Margaret changed the failing policy of detente with communism into the confrontational one that eventually brought the Berlin Wall down during her premiership.
She changed the ownership structure of vast industries, exchanging the nebulous concept of "national" ownership for the purer one of shareholder ownership. She changed the way we financed the European budget.
Meanwhile, she fundamentally changed the career paths of Jim Callaghan, General Galtieri, Michael Foot, Arthur Scargill, Neil Kinnock and Bobby Sands.
Those things that she did not change for the better she would have, if she hadn't been knifed by an over-ambitious cabal of cowards, fools and traitors – who split the Tory party and left it feuding for half a generation.
By encouraging George Bush Sr not to "wobble" during the first Gulf war, she set the international scene that allowed Tony Blair to finish off the campaign against Saddam Hussein that she started in 1990.
Most pleasing for devout Thatcherites such as myself, however, is that Margaret changed everything in that glorious decade the 1980s to the beauteous, musical sound of Guardian readers' teeth-gnashing.
As she herself put it during the liberation of South Georgia: "Rejoice! Rejoice!" Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
*Antony Beevor*
Margaret Thatcher is usually remembered for her forthright advocacy of free-market capitalism. Yet I think that a century from now she will be thought of even more as the champion of military intervention in the post cold war age. This is slightly ironic, because her relations with the military hierarchy started inauspiciously. Just after she became prime minister, a small group of generals requested a meeting. They crossed Whitehall from the Ministry of Defence to warn her that if she took on the trade union movement, the armed forces would not be able to run essential services. The army had learned the hard way after the Ulster Workers' Council strike, which had brought Northern Ireland to a halt. The prime minister, however, misread the message. She seems to have concluded that the army, based on a code of collective loyalty, harboured sympathies for trade union solidarity. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the prime minister turned to the Royal Navy, which, eager to regain power lost in the inter-service battle of a defence review, immediately agreed that a task force should be sent to the South Atlantic.
The Thatcher doctrine, that tyranny and oppression (when it affected British interests) must be fought and defeated, had a far greater influence than has perhaps yet been acknowledged. In the US, politicians and generals, still smarting from the Vietnam war and the debacle of the attempt to free the hostages in Iran, sat up and took notice not just of the British victory but of the way developing countries suddenly went quiet. The rapid collapse of the appalling military junta in Argentina seemed an object lesson. I suspect that the influence of her leadership in that strange dispute – the last imperial conflict yet also a foretaste of post-cold war intervention – set the agenda for the Pax Americana of our age. International law – a foggy concept since law had always stemmed from domestic power – became subject to definition-creep. As a result of Margaret Thatcher, any regime guilty of despotism and the trampling of human rights could conveniently be targeted at will.
*Michael Burleigh*
When someone writes the history of greed, chapter one will be devoted to Margaret Thatcher, for, notwithstanding Balzac, she apparently invented it in about 1980. She should certainly figure in a history of British political irrationality. Not her own, which is exaggerated, but that of, say, the college chaplain who whispered his regrets that the Brighton bomb had merely injured Norman Tebbit and missed the prime minister.
Any credible history of Thatcher will have to deal with her remarkable advocacy of freedom, the quality for which she is valued in eastern Europe, the former USSR and in the US. Throughout the 1980s she was like a beacon to the people living under communist totalitarian tyrannies. She rightly recognised the unique role of the US in defending freedom, paving the way for the respect Britain receives in the counsels of the only superpower.
Thatcher was also a beacon to the British people who voted for her in three elections. They had had enough of consensual management of decline and the machinations of power-mad trade union leaders. Her defeats of the miners and printers were the most important events in the history of industrial relations in these islands, though the Tolpuddle Martyrs deserve a line or two.
Failures? The BBC continues to get away with a left-liberal bias. Universities grind along as nationalised dinosaurs, with no one having the guts to release the best of them from the stranglehold of the state sector and the courage to smother those that make no contribution to refining rather than coarsening the cultural life of this country. In those two respects her philistinism was as unfortunate as her political achievements were remarkable.
*Professor Ian Kershaw*
Her place in history is assured as the most ideologically dogmatic, most divisive, but also strongest peacetime British prime minister in the 20th century. No one who recalls the Falklands war, the bitterness of the miners' strike, her battles over Europe, or the drama of her forced resignation will doubt the personal imprint Thatcher left on her era. She was a conviction politician par excellence – possessed of an unwavering, almost messianic certainty that she was always right and her opponents either evil or weaklings. The images of the Iron Lady and the handbagging will prove indelible. She basked in the adulation of her followers, but prompted hatred, not just dislike, in her opponents. Even so, she won respect for her political courage, particularly abroad (where she was far more admired than at home), from many who opposed her philosophy and were repelled by her personality. She presided over some of the most important changes in Britain since the second world war. Her talent was to see the necessity of radical change – a task made easier by the lamentable state of the Labour party – and to push it through with the assistance of huge Commons majorities. The ending of the postwar economic and political settlement through the destruction of nationalised industries, the breaking of trade union power, the privatisation of public utilities, and the first major inroads into the accepted beliefs underpinning the welfare state were her lasting legacy. Along the way she also forced the transformation of the Labour party.
Even so, the Thatcher myth outruns her actual personal achievement. She changed history less than she thought she had done. The 1970s ushered in economic retrenchment that led to a rightwing shift in many parts of the world, with similar trends as experienced here. Much of the major economic restructuring that took place under Thatcher would have proved necessary under the impact of globalisation – though would probably have been undertaken less brutally. There was economic recovery, but nothing like the miracle that she claimed. The pressure for European integration has survived Thatcher, and has intensified since the events of 1989‑90. Even mentalities in this country were altered less than many thought by 12 years of Thatcherism. Towards the end of her era, four-fifths of the country still wanted a society that valued caring more than wealth-creation. The country was indeed different after 12 years of Mrs Thatcher. But in the broad sweep of historical change, she rode the tide rather than pushed it back – though she did make a very big wave.
*Andrew Roberts*
Thatcher changed the atmosphere of the pre-emptive cringe that government and management had exhibited towards the trade unions ever since the second world war. She changed the sense of embarrassment that Britons felt towards the concept of profit. She changed the post-Suez attitude of appeasement and post-imperial guilt. She changed British politics so fundamentally that the Labour party had to drop socialism and change its name to get itself elected.
Margaret changed the failing policy of detente with communism into the confrontational one that eventually brought the Berlin Wall down during her premiership.
She changed the ownership structure of vast industries, exchanging the nebulous concept of "national" ownership for the purer one of shareholder ownership. She changed the way we financed the European budget.
Meanwhile, she fundamentally changed the career paths of Jim Callaghan, General Galtieri, Michael Foot, Arthur Scargill, Neil Kinnock and Bobby Sands.
Those things that she did not change for the better she would have, if she hadn't been knifed by an over-ambitious cabal of cowards, fools and traitors – who split the Tory party and left it feuding for half a generation.
By encouraging George Bush Sr not to "wobble" during the first Gulf war, she set the international scene that allowed Tony Blair to finish off the campaign against Saddam Hussein that she started in 1990.
Most pleasing for devout Thatcherites such as myself, however, is that Margaret changed everything in that glorious decade the 1980s to the beauteous, musical sound of Guardian readers' teeth-gnashing.
As she herself put it during the liberation of South Georgia: "Rejoice! Rejoice!" Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.