Friday Interview: Margaret Thatcher's Lasting Legacy | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is the CJ Staff at the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

Biographer Blundell discusses the Iron Lady's major achievements

    RALEIGH     More than 20 years after she left office, the late Margaret Thatcher's name still evokes strong positive and negative reactions in Great Britain and around the world. John Blundell, former director general at the Institute of Economic Affairs and current visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, wrote the 2008 book, Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady. Blundell discussed his memories of Thatcher during a presentation to the John Locke Foundation's Shaftesbury Society. He also discussed Thatcher's legacy with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: You knew Margaret Thatcher for years and years, long before she became the prime minister of Great Britain. Are you surprised that she still evokes such strong reactions today?

    Blundell: No, not at all surprised. On the positive side, of course, she changed her country enormously. She took it from being the "sick man of Europe," with a terrible economy ranked 19th in the [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] ladder, to second-ranked in the OECD. And she transformed the unions, she transformed the nationalized industries, she slashed taxes, cut regulations, and turned the British economy around.

    In doing so, though, of course, certain communities suffered. The coal industry, which had been nationalized, had not been allowed to decline gently. And so small towns, mining towns in northern England, for example, which should've been losing, say, 50 jobs a year for 30 years, suddenly lost 1,500 jobs in one afternoon. So, of course, there was resentment, but I think it's unfairly placed. It should have been her predecessors who got the brunt of that anger because it was her predecessors who didn't let these industries gradually decline.

    Kokai: Now someone in her position could have tried to find a way to help prop up the jobs that were left. She didn't do that. What was it about her and her approach to public policy that said, "Look, we've got to take these steps to get the ship righted"?

    Blundell: Well, there was very much a feeling that we were in the last-chance saloon. We'd just been through the winter of discontent, January through March of 1979, so called as in the opening line of Shakespeare's Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent." And to give you a feel of what it was like, as well as the unemployment and the inflation and the industrial unrest, the gravediggers were on strike, so coffins were piling up. Ambulance drivers were on strike, so 911 calls were not answered. And ... the garbage collectors were on strike, so garbage just piled up in the streets. I mean it was truly awful.

    In fact, one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, ran a headline, and the headline was "Cheer Up, Things Are Getting Worse," meaning that things were getting so bad that it was stoking up a huge appetite for change, and people really had begun to realize that we simply had to change or else we were going to become a third-world country.

    Kokai: Still, no one likes change, but she had the fortitude to stick with her ideas.

    Blundell: Oh, yes.

    Kokai: What was it that convinced her that despite all of the cat calls, despite all the criticism, she was heading in the right direction?

    Blundell: She had a very strong personal moral compass. I mean, she knew what was right and what was wrong, and she had great courage. Remember she took on the [Irish Republican Army]. They tried to kill her. She took on the Argentinian dictators over the Falklands. She took on the mine workers when they tried to unseat her. Time and time again, she showed incredible fortitude and incredible courage and tenacity. I mean, she fought the mine workers for a year. That was how long that strike went on for, a year of incredible violence.

    Kokai: It's been more than 20 years since she left office. I was, in fact, in England right about the time the Conservatives displaced her and put John Major in; I remember that distinctly. In the 20-plus years since she's left office, have we been able to appreciate even more the work that she did because of things that have happened since she left?

    Blundell: I think so. I mean, there's a saying that we're all Thatcher's children now. In fact, her impact on the Labour Party was huge. The Labour Party realized that it had to move back toward the center if it was ever to be re-elected to power, and Tony Blair, of course, became its leader when his predecessor, John Smith, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. And he persuaded the Labour Party to remove Clause IV of its constitution. This is the clause, or this was the clause, that committed the Labour Party to public ownership of the economy. Maybe not small shops, but other than sort of small family businesses, everything was to be owned and run by the government. And that was an enormous shift for the Labour Party to abandon Clause IV.

    And, of course, her union reforms have by and large not been touched. Contracting out has continued. And privatization continued and has spread worldwide. Many African and Asian and Latin American countries adopted Margaret's privatization plans, and Britain became a big exporter of expertise on how to privatize your copper mine or your coal mine or your airline or your bus company or whatever it might be. And privatization became a worldwide phenomenon because of Margaret, and you simply can't have the same attitudes that prevailed in '50s, '60s, and '70s anymore in the United Kingdom, toward free enterprise and business.

    We became a nation of homeowners through her selling off of public housing units. Homeownership soared. Before Thatcher hardly anybody owned stocks and shares. You did through your pension plan, but you had no idea what stocks and shares you owned in your pension plan. And people started buying shares, and by the time she left power, 30 percent of Britons owned shares in companies that they had chosen. And so the BBC and newspapers and the TV and radio people were forced to add business coverage, because now if a third of your population owns shares, that becomes a major part of your market, like sports or entertainment or what have you. And so there was a massive change of attitude. And she impacted the Liberal Party as well, the Liberal Democrats. They moved much closer to the center than they had been previously.

    Kokai: ... I would suspect that having seen the role that Margaret Thatcher played, you would hope that the Britain of today - the United States of today, Western Europe of today - would adopt a little bit more Thatcher ideas for the types of policy challenges we face today.

    Blundell: Yes. I think particularly on the deficit and the debt and on socialized medicine. I think if Margaret were here today on your radio program, she would be worried about Obamacare than about the deficit. She was able to fix the annual deficit in the British government, and she was able to retire a lot of the debt. But she wasn't able to take on the nationalized health system at all. And once that gets embedded, it is a really difficult job to change it. So I think if she were here today, she would say beware of Obamacare more than anything else.
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