A 20-foot-high bronze likeness of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, cloaked in the Baronial Gown of Kesteven and wearing the chain of the Order of the Garter, recently appeared in her hometown of Grantham, a market town in south Lincolnshire. The £300,000 statue, created by sculptor Douglas Jennings and paid for by the Public Memorials Appeal, was erected surreptitiously, with little fanfare, on a 10-foot-high granite plinth, at around 6 AM on Sunday, 15 May 2022. By 7 AM, 59-year-old Jeremy Webster, a local resident and deputy director of the Attenborough Arts Centre at the University of Leicester, was at the scene. Sporting a white t-shirt and khaki trousers, Mr. Webster came armed with a carton of four eggs. Constrained by the height of the memorial and a temporary surrounding fence, he only managed one direct hit at the lower part of the statue, thereby gaining the dubious distinction of being the first person to have done so.
The statue was originally meant to have graced London’s Parliament Square, but Westminster Council turned down the opportunity, fearing “civil disobedience and vandalism”. It has instead ended up in St Peter’s Hill Green in Grantham, flanked by statues of the most illustrious Sir Isaac Newton and a less-renowned local dignitary, the Hon. Frederick James Tollemache. Thatcher aficionados planning to travel to Grantham to pay their respects will be pleased to know that nearby Grantham Museum, on St Peter’s Hill, hosts a permanent exhibition dedicated to Margaret Thatcher, further enhancing their visit.
It is widely accepted, even by her most fervent supporters, that Margaret Hilda Thatcher, who left her indelible stamp on 1980s Britain during three consecutive terms as the first female British Prime Minister, and is also widely acclaimed as the “Iron Lady”, was a particularly divisive person. To understand the strength of feelings both for and against her, it is necessary to revisit the history books in an attempt to understand the wide-ranging impact of her policies on the British political landscape and on the national economy.
Baroness Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on 13 October 1925, in an upstairs room above her father’s corner grocery store at No 1 North Parade, Grantham. Her birthplace is marked by a plaque at the corner of North Parade and Broad Street. She was the younger of two daughters of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. The elder daughter, Muriel, trained as a physiotherapist, married a farmer from Norfolk, and led a most private life. Alfred Roberts was a prominent figure in Grantham and a potent influence on Margaret, who inherited his thrifty habits and traditional morals. Alfred served as a lay preacher at Finkin Street Methodist Church, a trustee of Grantham Savings Bank, and president of the local Rotary Club. He was also a councillor, and then alderman, on Grantham Borough Council, between 1927 and 1952, with a term as Mayor in 1945.
Margaret Roberts passed through Huntingtower Road County Elementary School and Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School on her way to Somerville College, Oxford, where she served successively as Treasurer and President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Graduating with a second-class degree in chemistry in 1947, she worked as a research chemist in industry while staying active in the Young Conservatives. Margaret was adopted as prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for Dartford in February 1949 and fought her first general election the following February. While campaigning, she met Denis Thatcher, the wealthy owner of a paint and chemical business, a member of the Dartford Conservative Association, and a divorcé. The romance blossomed and they ended up married, on 13 December 1951, at Wesley’s Chapel in City Road, London. Around this time, Margaret Thatcher abandoned the world of science and turned to the study of the law instead, serving her pupillage at four sets of chambers in London. Called to the Bar from Lincoln’s Inn in January 1954, three months after giving birth to twins Carol and Mark, she became a tax and patent law barrister.
Opportunity beckoned in Finchley in north London, where she was adopted as prospective parliamentary candidate in March 1958. Her long parliamentary career began with her election as MP in the October 1959 general election, only ending when she finally stood down as MP on 9 April 1992. Front bench roles as shadow transport and then education spokesperson, while in opposition, were followed by her appointment as Secretary of State for Education in June 1970. Her connivance in the £8 million cut in free school milk for pupils aged seven and under earned her the label of “Milk Snatcher” and overshadowed her work in support of comprehensive school education. Thatcher returned to the opposition benches in 1974, only to be elected leader of the Conservative Party on 11 February 1975.
The ‘Winter of Discontent’ (December 1978 to March 1979) triggered a no-confidence motion against the Labour government on 28 March 1979, which passed by the slender margin of 311 to 310. Thatcher then led the Conservatives to victory in the ensuing 3 May 1979 general election, beginning an unbroken eleven-year stint as Prime Minister. After an unsteady start, marked by a recession, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and inner-city rioting on the British mainland, Thatcher’s fortunes changed for the better in the aftermath of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982. The Falklands operation ended in British victory on 14 June, at the cost of 649 Argentinian and 255 British lives, leading to an outpouring of patriotism and national pride. The islands have since reverted to backwater status, while still actively coveted by Argentina.
Early in her political career, Thatcher embraced the libertarian views of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and displayed a fondness for Victorian morality. She thus came to believe in individual freedoms, family values, self-determination, civic responsibility, and the supremacy of free markets. Since then, her various distinguishing beliefs, ideas and policies have come to be lumped together under the term ‘Thatcherism’, although commentators differ on what this entity actually comprises.
Thatcher’s belief in monetarism and fiscal prudence defined her handling of the economy. Thatcher strived to keep inflation low by restricting the rate of growth of money supply through high interest rates, which were supposed to curb any tendency to inflationary wage-spirals. Her emphasis on high interest rates came instead at the heavy cost of mass unemployment, driven by a fall in aggregate demand for goods and services. Thatcher’s fiscal policies combined cutting taxes and reducing government spending and public sector borrowing requirements. But while basic and top rates of income tax were progressively cut, the actual tax burden rose from simultaneous increases in National Insurance and a host of indirect and regressive taxes, such as VAT, and alcohol, tobacco, and petrol duties. Higher earners benefited the most from Thatcher’s tax cuts, as spending was taxed rather than earnings. It was indeed another regressive tax, the Community Charge, more commonly known as the poll tax, that finally ended her tenure as Conservative leader in November 1990.
Thatcher regarded the public sector, frequently propped up by government subsidies in the face of declining productivity and frequent disputes with the trade unions, as inefficient and uncompetitive. Her antipathy to the public sector led to the denationalisation and privatisation of many public sector industries and utilities, the sub-contracting of government-financed goods and services to private contractors, and the removal of regulatory restrictions on businesses and financial services-the latter declaring itself by the “Big Bang” in the City of London. Her “5E” approach to public sector management comprised economy, efficiency, enterprise, effectiveness, and excellence.
Thatcher had a major gripe with the trade unions and pursued labour market reform. The crippling trade union disputes of the 1970s had been driven by secret ballots, restrictive closed shop practices, repeated strikes for high wage settlements, secondary picketing, and a resistance to the adoption of technological innovation. Under Thatcher, the trade union leaders were disempowered and their immunities and privileges under the law curtailed. Strikes could now only be called after open and compulsory membership ballots, secondary picketing was made illegal, the closed shop was outlawed, and no-strike agreements encouraged. A series of closures of so-called ‘uneconomic’ pits led to the Miners’ Strike (12 March 1984-5 March 1985), which saw scenes of violent rioting in which miners and the police took on each other in one of the most unsavoury episodes of industrial strife in Britain.
Thatcher also took on local government, while centralising power in direct contradiction to her belief in a small state. The Greater London Council and Metropolitan County Councils were abolished in 1986, while Enterprise Zones, Urban Development Corporations, and Housing Action Trust were created to take over certain local government functions. Rate-capping, a Unified Business Rate, and the community charge were imposed on councils from above. Two million council houses were sold to their tenants under the Right to Buy scheme, thereby multiplying numbers of property-owners while simultaneously depleting the public housing stock for future welfare recipients.
The reasons for Thatcher’s unpopularity with the left-wing of British politics frequently overlap with those which made her an iconic figure for those on the right. Her focus on privatisation and on cuts in government spending, her legacy of rising income inequality and crippling austerity, a decline in manufacturing output accompanied by widespread deindustrialisation, a growing north-south divide, the less desirable effects of financial deregulation, and the marketisation of state education are among the issues that most concern her opponents. Her opposition of sanctions against South Africa during the apartheid era, and her unqualified support for Chilean dictator Auguste Pinochet are considered misplaced by most, while her views on homosexuality have been overtaken by contemporary government policy. You might still admire her strict work ethic, her steadfastness, or maybe inflexibility, of purpose, and her incorruptibility, even if her ideas, actions, and combative style are not to your liking. It is ironic that she could not have her own statue in Parliament Square, yet Nelson Mandela, leader of “a typical terrorist organisation”, in Thatcher’s own words, made it there. Nevertheless, a bronze statue of Thatcher has stood in the Members’ Lobby of the Houses of Parliament since February 2007. While the town of Grantham may choose to honour its most illustrious daughter by erecting her statue in public, it seems that the controversy over her memorial is not likely to go away soon, being likely to last as long as she continues to divide public opinion in Britain.
Ashis Banerjee