How you think of her now, how you thought of her then, what she did for/to your country, etc. Have at.
My impression of Margaret Thatcher:
fluffs hair, sticks nose in air “Bwah bwah bwah bwah. Bwah bwah bwah bwah bwah!”
A great woman. She turned the country around, but she caused a great deal of hardship in the short term to a lot of people (including me). As such she is still a very divisive figure in the U.K. She broke the power of the unions, privatised many state-owned industries, and reversed the march of socialism in the U.K. Along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, she caused the collapse of communism in Russia. She recovered the Falklands after Argentina invaded. She stood up to the E.U. and Russia. She was the right person at the right time, the greatest Prime Minister since Churchill, but she did not know when her time had passed.
Well I lived through her time, so here’s what I remember.
I think it was a surprise to her party (Conservatives) when she got elected. Usually some male from a ‘good background’ headed the party. Thatcher was not only the first female to lead the party, but her father was in ‘trade’.
(Yes, this sort of thing mattered a lot in UK politics. For example, many Prime Ministers have come from expensive private schools - Thatcher came through the state system.)
She always had incredible determination.
This could be beneficial, as when the UK received a massive reduction in money contributions made to Europe, simply because she wore out the other leaders.
Unfortunately she also refused to ever ‘change course’, which lead to financial disasters like monetarism and (what probably led to her demise) the poll tax.
She clashed bitterly with the trade unions.
This is a complex situation, because the trade unions did need some reforming. But Thatcher only knew one way to negotiate - her opponents must surrender - and the country suffered greatly from the miner’s strike, which was provoked by Thatcher.
The Falklands War was another example of both Thatcher’s tenacity and lack of understanding. It would have been better to negotiate, rather than fight a war over an island thousands of miles away.
She did lead the conflict with total belief and gained a boost in the polls.
However once we won, the Church of England proposed a service of healing, inviting both sides. Thatcher simply couldn’t understand why the Argentinians should be present, since we had ‘won’.
I think Thatcher was shaped by her circumstances. She could never have broken the total male domination in politics without being grimly determined herself. However although some of her reforms went well, the majority caused intense bitterness and suffering.
Her chosen heir, John Major, lost the country billions in a financial fiasco:
‘The delay has raised fears among Treasury officials that publication could be delayed indefinitely, or that key passages will be removed to prevent embarrassment to figures in one of the most humiliating episodes in recent economic history, when Britain left the European exchange-rate mechanism on September 16, 1992, and the Bank of England reputedly spent £27 billion of reserves propping up sterling.’
The Conservatives also collapsed as a political force a few years later, due to widely perceived corruption. It’s not clear if Thatcher is to blame for that.
On the whole, I personally think she was bad for the country.
A woman who used armed conflict as a means to hold onto power. A fanatical devotion to the “private sector good, public sector bad” which has left us with an appalling legacy in many areas, from public transport to healthcare. Exactly what glee says about the unions - and add in the willingness to allow brutal police tactics to further the anti-union position. Not a good woman.
A George in Brit clothing.
Horrible nasty bitchcow.
The day she resigned we had a party. My buddy was in a cab in Cardiff when it happened, and a voice came over the radio going: “Calling all cars; calling all cars! Ding dong the wicked witch is dead!” Everyone was grinning, cars were beeping their horns and people were practically dancing in the streets.
In retrospect, I realise something had to be done about union abuse of power, and a rationalisation of which industries were nationalised. It’s a shame it happened the way it did, with such divisiveness and harm.
Her gravestone will be inscribed “Licensed for Dancing”.
Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s manliest man since Winston Churchill.
Not true: it was Arthur Scargill that was spoiling for a fight. He led the miners out on strike at just about the worst time, and demonstrated exceptionally poor leadership abilities.
This is simply not true. We did negotiate - Americans may remember Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy
Thatcher made sure coal stocks were at their highest before she provoked Scargill into striking.
‘This Strike was bitter and prolonged with miner pitched against the government and miner pitched against miner. In particular the Nottingham miners who mostly, but not totally refused to strike using the fact that they had not been given a vote as the reason for not striking.
…
The timing of the strike was wrong; coming into the summer with massive coal stocks was a massive mistake.’
http://www.durham-miner.org.uk/miner/projects.nsf/0/c7dc3c7593ffc43980256e7d0038f395?OpenDocument
‘It started when National Coal Board chairman Ian McGregor announced plans to cut production, the equivalent of 20 pits or 20,000 jobs.
Miners walked out and were soon joined by colleagues around the country.
However, large stockpiles of coal and the National Union of Mineworkers’ decision not to ballot its members meant the strike was not as successful and it ended exactly one year later. ’
You are innocent in the ways of the world. 
Apart from refusing to seriously discuss the Argentinian claim to the islands, Thatcher withdrew the UK marine patrol around the islands just before the war.
‘On 2 March the hawkish Argentine Foreign Minister Costa Mendes disowned the communique, apparently objecting to the proposed review in one year’s time, and issued a statement saying that Argentina had been negotiating in good faith for long enough…’
‘However, the cumulative effect of stalled sovereignty negotiations, the British Nationality Act 1981 which would deprive many Islanders of their rights as full British citizens, the announced withdrawal of HMS Endurance, the shelving of plans to rebuild the Royal Marine barracks at Moody Brook, and the proposed closure of the British Antarctic Survey base at Grytviken on South Georgia, was to convince Argentina that Britain had no future interest in the Islands.’
http://www.falklands.info/history/history6.html
Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy was abandoned after just a couple of weeks…
‘The American Secretary of State Alexander Haig began shuttle diplomacy between Britain and Argentina, but without success. The European Economic Community supported Britain by approving trade sanctions against Argentina on 10 April. On 12 April Britain declared a 200 mile exclusion zone around the Islands. The main task force, under the command of Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, departed from Ascension Island on 17 April and five days later the British government advised all British nationals to leave Argentina. Alexander Haig abandoned his shuttle diplomacy…’
http://www.falklands.info/history/history7.html
The Belgrano was sunk in highly dubious circumstances, which collapsed other peace talks…
'The Belgrano sinking was the most controversial event of the Falklands War. Many people, both inside and outside the British Parliament said it was an unnecessary use of force - the ship was outside the exclusion zone and apparently sailing away from the Falklands.
A few months later, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was famously grilled on national television by a British housewife who said that the bombing ensured a halt to peace talks being brokered by the UN and the Peruvian Government at the time.’
I never warmed to her as a person, and towards the end she really seemed to lose her marbles. “We are a grandmother”, remember that? WTF was that about?
On economic policies, there was a general shift in opinion starting in the 70s towards a more market-oriented economy and against union power, so I think the Thatcher reforms would have happened anyway, it might just have taken longer. You could say that she implemented the reforms with callous disregard for e.g. devasted mining communities, but there’s no nice way of abandoning uneconomic industries. Maybe it was better to get it over with quickly.
I’ve also never bought the idea that she welcomed or even engineered the Falklands war, as a means of boosting her popularity. The whole thing seemed more like a huge Foreign Office cock-up that took the government by surprise. And you can say a lot of things about Thatcher, but she never struck me as a cynical politician.
Apologies to Quartz - in post 11 I misattributed a quote.
I said “The Falklands War was another example of both Thatcher’s tenacity and lack of understanding. It would have been better to negotiate, rather than fight a war over an island thousands of miles away.”
Thatcher and her supporters definately used the Falklands war to maintain her hold on power, there is no doubt whatsoever of that, if you want I’ll go through it all again, but I’ve stated this before on these boards, and it is aknowledged by most politcal pundits.
The argument then has to go on to, given that Thatcher did maintian power, was it a good thing ?
Probably not.
The previous Labour administration leader, Jim Callaghan, was startlingly prescient when he stated prior to the election he lost to Thatcher.
“Whoever wins the next election will stay there for the forseeable future”
At the time he was referring to the North Sea oil revenues that were just about beginning to come on stream, the reality is that as long as there is some certainty of a return on oil investment in the medium term, this gives any economy confidence and stability.
It was oil revenue that was used to finance the Conservative government dealings, to pay out on the national debt, to reduce borrowings, to gain lower interest rates, and with the massive under selling of state industries, also known as ‘selling the family silver’, it meant that industrial production, especially manufacturing, was seen as old fashioned, and ready for dismantling.
There is no doubt that industrial relations needed reforming, it’s also unlikely that a Labour administration could have done this as brutally as Thatcher, however it was obvious, even back then, that this would have occurred as the ‘winter of discontent’ was in fact a union reaction to Labour administration policies on their reform.
The fact is that that first term of her administration was immensely unpopular and had it not been for the Falklands war then they were set to be completely wiped out.
It’s interesting to speculate on a wider picture, because there is no doubt that our intelligence services had been instructed to become involved at some level.
There is plenty of evidence for this, from the Spycatcher Affair through to the Shayler affair, but the reasons behind it are fairly obvious.
What we had had over the previous decade to Thatcher was two democratically elected governements brought down by unionised workers, especially the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and this was without doubt an unnacceptable threat to our form of governance.
Added to this was the percieved Soviet threat, with the attendant US air bases, especially at Greenham common.
The Labour party when it lost that first election to Thatcher, went on to commit electoral suicide, by passing a motion that, had they got into power, would have committed the UK to unilaterally disarm its nuclear arsenal, and furthermore, remove all other nuclear devices from its soil. This would have been devastating to NATO.
The media was incredibly heavily biased toward Thatcher, basically the Labour Party did not have any media voice working in its favour whatsoever.
Its notable that when the Soviet union threat passed, and Labour scrapped its unilateral disarmement policy, it was able to court the media, and this was instrumental in the downfall of that Conservative regime which had become utterly corrupt and itself a threat to democracy.
Thatcher herself was not immune to corruption, as witnessed by the huge growth in the lobby industry which concentrated on just a few influencial ministers and their families, as real power was gathered away from distircts, councils and public bodies, to her group of ministers.
Her idiot son Mark benefitted hugely from this, as did her husband, both wound up as serious millionaires when this would have been extremely unlikely had they not been so closely related to Ms Thatcher.
Its also worth noting that several of her top aides and ministers ended up in prison for perjury, corruption etc, its hard to see that Thatcher didn’t have any involvement.
In short, she was dictatorial, corrupt devious liar who used and manipulated the UK into a war that need never have occurred.
There are whole areas of the UK that have not recovered from the depradations of the Thatcher years, and they are not likely to either, for example, Liverpool prior to WWII was one of the UKs foremost cities, the economic decline in which Thatcher played an important part has resulted in that city declining in population by around one third.
You can go around most of the Northern UK towns and see this, her policies were highly London-centric and we are living with this today, at best, we are now effectively a city state, where the ony region that matters is London, and the rest of the nation is pretty much irrelevant, except for election purposes.
Thatcher has probably done more to push the UK into a complete break-up than any leader since the time of the Jacobites, the result of her polices marginalised Scotland and Wales so much that both have now got national assemblies as those populations demanded more say in how centralised policies affected them.(actually Scotland now has its own parliament)
There was even a vote in the North of England for a regional assembly which fell by the wayside, but it serves to show just how much the Thatcher legacy has divided the UK.
Thatcher made many folk feel they could have a slice of the pie, but only if you were a Conservative supporter, or if you lived in the home counties.
You can get the measure of her unpopularity, by looking at the number of seats they hold, in Scotland and Wales where they were completely wiped out, and even after the incompetance and warmongering lies of Tony Blair, the chances of the Conservatives regaining office since they last held office 10 years ago is not at all certain, they have a reputation for poor fiscal policy, given their fall out from the ERM, and their boom and bust spending to bribe the electorate just prior to an election, their promise not to tax fuel and then to go ahead and tax it, and their much hated and utterly unfair poll tax.
Since they were forced from office, the UK has enjoyed stable and low interest rates, which largely stems from a decision by the incoming Chancellor to make the Bank of Engalnd independant from poltical control - a policy to which Thatcher was deeply opposed.
Yes, but apart from all that she was OK, wasn’t she?
Hasn’t recent evidence shown this to be false i.e. that the Belgrano was sailing into the exclusion zone?
Given that the Falklands war had to happen, that the peace talks were a sham - it would have been politcal suicide to not take them back, sinking the Belgrano was a huge strategic opportunity in military terms as it ensured the Argentine Navy stayed well out of the conflict.
I was in the Royal Navy at the time, I’m reasonably sure of the capabilities fo the sub concerned, and quite honestly, the Argentine Navy were fortunate that day that more of their ships were not sunk.
That sums it up perfectly.
I lived in the UK during Thatcher’s “reign” - I remember it as a time of hardship, millions became unemployed and life was grim… She started the ‘buy your council house’ didn’t she? that seems to have gone a bit tits up of late (so I’m told). There was some malarkey about her policies were meant to wean the population off the ‘government tit’ (Welfare), only nowadays there are more people claiming one benefit or another (per head) than ever before…
I remember when the IRA bombed a hotel that she was in - people were pissed as hell cos they “missed the bitch”