Thatcher, Margaret (1925–)

BORN OCTOBER 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher, née Roberts, grew up in the small British town of Grantham. Her father owned a grocery store there and early on inculcated her with the Victorian virtues of hard work and thrift, along with a strong Methodist faith. Her childhood in the store and her father would both be major influences on Thatcher and would help to shape her intense dislike of borrowing and of the welfare state. Her father, Alfred, was an autodidact and a passionate conservative. Thatcher performed well in school and went to Oxford during World War II to study chemistry. In 1951, she married businessman Denis Thatcher. She later read law and became a tax attorney, a job that offered a thorough grounding in how the government could deprive its citizens of their property in order to fund various socialist schemes.

During the 1940s, Thatcher read a book that would have a lasting influence on her outlook: Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Hayek's polemic argued that socialist government controls of the economy inevitably led to the kind of despotic states of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. This intellectual grounding in free-market economics and anti-communism would complement the shopkeeper's values that she absorbed in her childhood and help turn her into one of the most vociferous and successful critics of the welfare state in history. For one who made her way in the world through discipline and hard work, the free rides offered by British socialism were an abomination.

Thatcher was first elected to Parliament in 1959 and received her first ministerial job as secretary of state for education 11 years later in the cabinet of conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath. Heath and his party lost the 1974 general election; the following year, Thatcher [Page 905]seized control of the leadership of the Conservative Party. Four years later, on May 4, 1979, Thatcher and the Conservative Party won a general election with a 44seat majority, making Thatcher prime minister. Thatcher sought to introduce free-market reforms to Britain's socialist economy. Her government sought to reduce taxes and government spending as well. In the introduction to her memoir, The Downing Street Years, Thatcher listed three points that she emphasized as she took power: to reverse the economic decline of Britain, to keep government spending within planned limits, and to remain resolute in the implementation of conservative reforms.

When Thatcher took over as prime minister, Britain was in the midst of severe economic difficulties after suffering through decades of socialist mismanagement. Trade unions crippled the country with strikes. Abroad, the Soviet menace expanded unchecked, spreading into Afghanistan and extending its power into Latin America, unhindered by the malaise-stricken America of the Jimmy Carter years. While her American counterpart sought peace at almost any price, Thatcher, because of her tough rhetoric, anti-communism, and resolute assertion of Britain's place in the world, earned the nickname “The Iron Lady” from the Soviets.

Thatcher repudiated détente, the approach to the Soviet Union pioneered by the administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon, which sought peaceful coexistence with the Soviets. By contrast, Thatcher believed that the nations of the West could only deal with the Soviet threat from a position of strength. Likewise, she also opposed many ideas popular in Europe, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament. Considering the vast disparity in numbers of conventional forces between the West and the Soviet Union, such disarmament would be an invitation for a communist invasion of Western Europe. Instead, Thatcher preferred to maintain a credible deterrent to aggression.

...