ONLY a handful of peacetime politicians can claim to have changed the world. Margaret Thatcher was one. She transformed not just her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Her enthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingness to stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “-ism”.
The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom—odd, since as a prim, upwardly mobile striver, she was in some ways the embodiment of conservatism. She thought nations could become great only if individuals were set free. Unlike Churchill’s famous pudding, her struggles had a theme: the right of individuals to run their own lives, as free as possible from micromanagement by the state.
In this section
- Freedom fighter
- Revolution in the air
- Right target, wrong shots
- Memento Modi
- A new specie
Related topics
In her early years in politics, economic liberalism was in retreat, the Soviet Union was extending its empire, and Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were dismissed as academic eccentrics. In Britain the government hobnobbed with trade unions (“beer and sandwiches in Number 10”), handed out subsidies to failing nationalised industries and primed the pump through Keynesian demand management. To begin with the ambitious young politician went along with this consensus (see article). But the widespread notion that politics should be “the management of decline” made her blood boil. The ideas of Friedman and Hayek persuaded her that things could be different.
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