Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, passed away last night at the age of 87. I am reading her second autobiography about her early years and to be honest, I am having a really hard time liking this woman. Listening to the memorial statements on BBC radio by both proponents and opponents provided some really good words that mirrored my opinion after reading only 70 pages of her 600+ page book. I'm at the point in the book where she has been elected a Tory MP and is getting married to her husband and I already have so many opposing issues with her world view that I was considering putting this book aside and looking for a Thatcher biography written by a disinterested historian. I was told that I was unlikely to find an author that met my criteria as she was such a polarizing personality that unbiased historians would be hard to find. Her uncompromising and unsympathetic viewpoint that England after World War II and the people who voted for a more socialist state were wrong headed and have led the country to destruction is hard to read as she gives no indication that she sees or cares about the individual consequences for this uncompromising and unsympathetic viewpoint.
This uncompromising and, frankly, arrogant world view seems to have started early as the young Margaret Thatcher had opinions about the wrong headedness of appeasement before Great Britain entered the War. She writes that her family was in the minority over their opposition to the Peace Ballot and that those that were enthusiast for the Peace Ballot, like Rev. Skinner who married her and Denis, were hard-headed. She was frankly blunt in her writing that Rev Skinner's "...personal virtue is no substitute for political hard-headedness."(page 11) It is this arrogance in her and her families superior intellect and political virtue along with her own hard-headedness and lack of sympathy for those with less like-minded virtue and intellect that makes her unlikable, if not right in hindsight about her family's political stance.
For someone who considered herself intellectually smart (the early years drips with this conviction), it is appalling to read examples of her strange simplistic connective logic about social issues. One example of this is her comment that England has "since removed the stigma of illegitimacy not only from the child but also from the parent - and perhaps increased the number of disadvantaged children thereby."(page 11) This implies that if we make a behavior more socially 'acceptable', more people will choose it which makes sense in a very simplistic world view, but ignores the real social root causes behind that behavior such as a lack of education, contraception, and the lack of opportunities for upward mobility (plus many other factors not limited to the economy). It also ignores why (if this is really true) the numbers of reported illegitimate children was low when it was stigmatized (murder, forced adoption, lying, etc...). I would have expected a scientist to use better logic, but her upbringing seems to have trumped her training.
Margaret Thatchers world view was colored by the fact she was a teenager during the War. She has an arrogance that came from her conviction that she was one of the Greatest Generation due to having survived that great conflict. I think this harden her heart towards the following generations as they did not show the same moral fortitude or virtues of those that "fought" the War. This attitude extended to her conviction that one of the lessons she learned from that time "...was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than by the government."(page 31) This Norman Rockwell sentiment is ridiculous after reading how restrictive her childhood was in a devoutly religious family in a small religious community where her family had great influence and wealth from the family business as the local market merchant for the area which I'm sure provided some insulation from the worst deprivation of the war time rationing. It is also an exclusive world view as it does not allow that another upbringing could be as virtuous and wholesome. This only leads to a polarizing world view that along with a lack of compassion (the ability to walk in someone else's shoes) likely contributed to why she was the most hated Prime Minister in history.
Her absolute conviction in the rightness of her political course extended to her party which lost power after the war. She states several times in various ways that "...the Left were extremely effective after Dunkirk in portraying the Conservatives as exclusively responsible for appeasement, and managed, by skilful sleight of hand, to distance Churchill from the party he led."(page 43/44) She has consistently blamed everyone but her party for the perceived degeneration of England and the British Empire. I'm not sure if the term 'Conviction Politics' was coined during her time in power, but that term definitely defines Margaret Thatchers political stance. I would add Blind in front of that term, but as I have only read 10% of this autobiography so far, I may have to take that back.
It is interesting to hear what other powerful people thought of Margaret Thatcher and whether her legacy was good or bad for England. She was so polarizing that the thoughts of others only vary from Saving England (from a failing economy, lost of world influence, and labor unions) to Destroying England (which the additional statement that England is still dealing with the damage she and her party caused). What they do agree on is that she was a highly influential woman who's conviction and integrity never wavered. It has been said that it was the uncompromising conviction of her political stance that led to her eventual downfall.
Whether you hated her or loved her, there is no doubt that she was a massive influence on English politics and socialism. I look forward to getting to the time frame that has relevance to me (the 1970s) and hearing how this fundamental conviction conservative handled this time of social enlightenment in England. It would be fun to read Michael Palin's next 10 years of diary entries covering that same period to get his liberal viewpoint of the Thatcher government. I may switch off between the two just to keep it fun.
ADDENDUM: Could the reason Margaret Thatcher was so polarizing be as simple as the following analogy? She expected the people to adapt to her parties changes in the national infrastructure, while many people expect the national infrastructure to be adapted to the peoples wants and needs.
This thought occurred to me while I was listening to the BBC radio report about Margaret Thatcher's legacy with the hand over of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1984 (40secs to 10mins - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016tng7). A woman was arguing (Emily Lau) that Thatcher should have done more to protect the rights and freedoms of the Hong Kong citizens. Emily talked about a question she posed to Thatcher about why Thatcher negotiated the treaty as she did and Thatcher responded that she was concerned with National policies, not International policies. This made me realize that Thatcher was not concerned with people as individuals but in laying down her foundation for the infrastructure of her national policy and she expected the people to adapt to that new infrastructure without regard to how individuals would fair in that new environment. Adapt and survive or perish. Pretty harsh and it explains why many disliked her and her policies.
The question remains - Could she have 'saved' England while still maintaining individuals safety nets and entitlements or at least cushioning the blows brought about by her changes to the infrastructure? Could she have just been more sympathetic in her responses or was a brutal program management style truly the only way to run 1980s Great Britain? Her legacy is still hotly debated, but Margaret Thatcher will not be forgotten for all she did for Great Britain and the end of the Cold War. She may not have been likable, but no one can deny her influence and important on the world stage.
