Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.
– Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990
I have always admired Margaret Thatcher. Many said with admiration that she was the only one in the British cabinet with balls.
I truly believe she was the last of the great politicians who thought about the nation and not herself and not how she could dance to the tunes of the lobbyists.
Which is why they didn’t let her continue. Like they would not allow any leader who thought for themselves and the betterment of their country to continue.
We have weak leaders these days. Those who are happier to do whatever it takes to keep themselves in power, while making life difficult for the citizens who trust in them to create a brighter future.
Let’s bring back the Thatchers and the Gaddafis and the Mosaddeghs. For weak men and women create hard times, while strong men and women create good times.Let me tell you about Baroness Margaret Thatcher.
“You cannot enrich the poor by impoverishing the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.” – Abraham Lincoln
This was the very essence of Margaret Thatcher’s political ethos. Why then is Abraham Lincoln held in such reverence and Margaret Thatcher, considered the most outstanding peacetime leader of the 20th century, reviled by so many? It is because, in my opinion, she forced a nation to grow up – to cut the umbilical cord, wean off the milk, to stand on its own two feet… and walk and to keep walking, without crutches. She was a meteor of change, and the rude jolting out of one’s complacency, I suspect, may have a lot to do with the dislike. More probably it was because she never went out on a limb trying to be popular. “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and would achieve nothing,” she famously said.
I guess the reason why I admire Margaret Thatcher is because I have so much in common with her. I am a physicist, whereas she was a chemist. We have both undertaken roles far different than what we were groomed for. We are both straight-talking women, unashamedly capitalist, stubborn headstrong, tire out the people we work with by driving them hard, demanding the best from everyone and confident of whatever we do (even if we are wrong). But that is about as close I will ever get to being like Margaret Thatcher. She went out and changed a nation, and the world will always remember Thatcherism, and a strong-willed woman with superhuman courage who was brilliant and unflinching in the face of uncalled-for and unnecessary ridicule and criticism from lesser men and women, who did not and could never, give as much, or try as hard. I, on the other hand, will remain comfortably unknown, and undertake this essay to once and for all remove – at least from my mind – all the questions and doubts people have asked about Maggie T. Who was the real Margaret Thatcher? Was she good or bad? Was she a National Hero or a Milk Snatcher? My answer is an unapologetic “National Hero”. So, please bear with me, for to understand Maggie’s legacy is to understand the huge multi-faceted volume of untiring work she did, in all of her three terms, to bring about that meteor of change. One just cannot sum it up in a few paragraphs. That is like condensing a mountain into my teaspoon. You will have to read, and at the end of my essay, if I have changed your mind for the better about her, it will be my best work yet. This is the least I can do for the greatest leader of our times, and the one most misunderstood, and unappreciated.
Britain before Thatcher was a dispirited, over manned, under-managed, union-bullied, poorly-performing, benefit-demanding, thoroughly bureaucratised, class-ridden society. Of 25 million employed, almost 30 per cent were in the public sector. The subsidies (GBP4.6 billion) and borrowings (GBP2.5 billion) of the nationalised industries in 1979 were almost equal to the cost of servicing the national debt (GBP8.4 billion).
Britain had the lowest growth of productivity of any major industrial economy at that time, with an eight-fold increase in strikes compared with the 1930s. National per capita income – 40 per cent above the West European average in the late 1950s – was below average by 1979.
A loaf of bread – a basic necessity – which cost 1.5p in 1938 cost 65p in 1979, increased by 4,200 per cent in just 40 years, but the biggest blow, to the dignity of the British at least, was the arrival of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ‘look at the books’ before agreeing to give a loan in 1976 – something that usually happens to Third World countries.
● To be continued next week for Part 2 on how ‘The Baroness pulverised the unions and privatised Britain’.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
