Margaret Thatcher has long been reviled by the British left, so much so that the singer Elvis Costello once fantasized about stomping on her grave in his 1989 song “Tramp the Dirt Down.” But Mrs. Thatcher achieved more than any other British peacetime prime minister of the 20th century. It is rumored that, when she dies, she will receive a state funeral — an honor rarely accorded to anyone except monarchs. There are also plans for a public celebration.
Her life is the inspiration for a new movie that opens later this month, starring Meryl Streep as “The Iron Lady.” It chronicles Mrs. Thatcher’s divisive policies as prime minister as she led Britain through the economic doldrums of the 1980s. It was a time when the country faced financial ruin and politicians were compelled to make hard choices.
Mrs. Thatcher was a tough, adversarial leader. She was never liked, even by those who supported her policies, and she was hated by those who opposed her.
Yet her political style may be just what Britain needs right now. The country is in the midst of an economic crisis that will force the government to make difficult, unpopular decisions. And that is what Mrs. Thatcher did so well. Facing long-term economic decline and the brooding menace of the Soviet Union, she broke the trade unions, sold off nationalized industries and helped imbue British capitalists with a confidence that they had not felt since the death of Queen Victoria.
She was at her best when the odds seemed against her or when she had clear enemies. In 1982, she sent an armada to fight the Argentines in the Falkland Islands. And in 1984-85, she held out against a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, which had been powerful enough to bring down a government 10 years before.
Although Mrs. Thatcher has become a respected symbol of statesmanship outside Britain, she remains a reminder of social division within it. In 2008, the future foreign secretary, William Hague, sought to reassure American officials that he and David Cameron, soon-to-be prime minister, were “Thatcher’s children.” When his comment leaked, the Labour opposition seized upon it, keen to circulate the quote in the hopes that it would stir up old anti-Thatcher feelings. And despite being in power today, Conservative leaders still worry that they are associated with the bitterness of the Thatcher years. They speak of changing their image as “the nasty party” and the need to “detoxify the brand.”
One reason British politicians feel uncomfortable with Thatcherism is that Britain has been relatively prosperous in the last two decades, at least in part because of things the Thatcher government did: tax cuts, financial-sector deregulation and weaker unions all made Britain a more attractive place to do business.
A new generation of politicians who grew up in an age of prosperity has ceased to think of politics in terms of hard choices and scarce resources; Mr. Cameron belongs to that generation. He was just 12 years old when Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979 and he became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, when the current economic storms seemed almost unimaginable. Even when Mr. Cameron became prime minister last year, the financial crisis still felt, to most of the British electorate, like something short-term and vaguely unreal.
But British politics has lost something with its post-Thatcher embrace of consensus and optimism. Thatcherism was a galvanizing force. It mobilized right-wingers to do things, such as selling off huge state-owned corporations, that many of them would once have considered impossible. It also mobilized the left to develop radical alternatives: during the 1980s, the Labour Party veered toward support for unilateral nuclear disarmament and increased state intervention in the economy.
Unlike today, voters in 1983 faced clear choices. A vote for Thatcher’s Tories was a vote for large-scale privatization; a vote for Labour was a vote for socialism. A Conservative vote meant keeping Britain in the European Economic Community; a Labour vote meant withdrawal. A Tory vote meant stationing American cruise missiles in Britain; a Labour vote meant that they would be stopped.
There are no longer such clear-cut choices. Explicit talk of class interests and inequality have been replaced by a vaguer and less divisive language of “fairness” and “equal opportunity.”
The major political parties look remarkably similar today. All are led by clean-cut 40-somethings who blend social liberalism (support for same-sex marriage and opposition to the death penalty) with acceptance of the free market. Indeed, the Conservatives now find themselves governing with strange bedfellows, in a coalition with the small Liberal Democrat Party, whose president recently described Thatcherism as “organized wickedness.” Mrs. Thatcher hated coalitions. She most likely would have preferred to lose an election than to govern without an outright parliamentary majority.
Unlike Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Thatcher came to power at a time when people felt desperate. This desperation, and the sense that she might be the last chance to restore Britain’s fortunes, accounted for much of her success.
Thatcherism was not an alien invasion. It reflected a consensus by many members of the British establishment that things could not go on as they were. This is why so many supported Mrs. Thatcher’s policies, even when they disliked her personally.
Mr. Cameron is certainly a more likable figure than Mrs. Thatcher, but likability may not be enough when the British people realize that their current predicament — requiring government spending cuts at a time of rising unemployment and financial chaos in Europe — is actually worse than the crisis when Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979.
In these circumstances, it will take a bracing dose of Thatcherite ideological confrontation to revive British politics.
By Richard Vinen, a professor of history at King’s College, London, and the author of Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s.