Page 1506 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 April 2013
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responsibility and traditional morality that she had learned from her parents, Mrs Thatcher became the spirit of her times and led a hitherto sceptical Conservative Party to bring forth a new birth of freedom and enterprise in Britain, rekindling economic growth, crushing inflation and ending irresponsible industrial militancy.
Breaking the power of the extremist miners union, Margaret Thatcher faced down and defeated one adversary after another, and rolled back the three-decade-long march to government control of every means of production, distribution and exchange. Privatising bloated and loss-making state-owned industries, allowing government houses to be owned by their tenants, Mrs Thatcher created an economic renaissance in Britain that saw the material wealth of the average person soar, and for the first time in their lives ordinary families were able to own their own homes.
As the Cold War reached its climax, Mrs Thatcher and her great friend President Ronald Reagan worked hard to support the champions of freedom in the benighted Soviet empire. In Moscow the Soviet press called Mrs Thatcher the Iron Lady, intending to insult her, but it was a badge that she adopted with pride, and the name stuck. One by one, Poland, East Germany, Romania and other Warsaw Pact nations overthrew their oppressors until, at last, the Soviet Union itself was brought down by the long-suffering Russian people and the long, dark night of socialism finally ended.
In South America the fascist dictatorship of General Galtieri mistakenly thought that with a woman running Britain they could seize the British Falklands and get away with it. The generals thought wrong; they underestimated the Iron Lady. Mrs Thatcher’s army smote the aggressor, finally raising the Union Jack over Port Stanley and freeing the British Falklands from Argentinean tyranny.
In her later years, Mrs Thatcher championed British sovereignty in the face of an increasingly meddlesome European Union, warning that the benefits of a free trade union did not extend to membership of an over-bureaucratic centralist European state, which is unravelling as we speak.
Perhaps Mrs Thatcher’s greatest legacy is the political paradigm shift that she created. Before her, politicians of the right and left generally accepted that consensus between unions and government was necessary to run the country. They accepted the premise that government had an increasingly large role to play in the economy and ordinary people’s lives.
Mrs Thatcher broke the mould. In rejecting the postwar consensus which she correctly saw as a blind alley at the heart of Britain’s demise, she embraced the politics of conviction. She forcefully articulated the view that governments alone are elected to govern based upon what they believe and that unions should be restricted to representing their members’ interests in a lawful and socially responsible manner.
Against the views of many of her time, she rejected that governments know what is best for us. Inspired by Hayek’s seminal work The Road to Serfdom, Mrs Thatcher recognised that collectivism is the siren song that leads only to poverty, misery and oppression. She saw that government is often the source of the problem in society rather than any solution and that less government, less regulation and more self-reliance are the answer.
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