08/04/2018
Today marks 5 years since the passing of perhaps the greatest leader of our time – Baroness Thatcher.
To refer to her still as the Iron Lady, I believe, is an insult to her memory – for iron has the capacity to bend. She is much more comparable, rather, to that of steel.
She turned the Tory party on its head: she was disliked by Aristocratic Conservatives, she wasn’t a typical Tory Toff, she wasn’t ‘one of the boys’, and she was never going to be a member of the Bullingdon Club.
She insisted her policy was ‘for people in all walks of life’, and, although she had some tough decisions to make, which were not applauded by everyone, I believe that it was.
She was closer to the average working person than her predecessors. She understood the aspirations of working-class people who wanted more for themselves, because she was one. She wasn’t working on the side of the Toffs, like many Conservatives are, perhaps rightly so, accused of today. Rather, she transformed the lives of ordinary working Britons.
When she first walked into Number 10, British society worked as a solid hierarchy – everyone had their place and it didn’t change. If you grew up in a working-class background, you were going to stay there, and your children were going to stay there. If your parents grew up in a council house, you were going to grow up in a council house. There was no use for ambition – you were either born there or you didn’t belong there. It was effectively North Korea but without the hope.
The idea was that the working class were never going to have much in life, they were just going to survive, and the government would maybe try and look after them a little bit. Their prospects were pretty grim. This idea shook Mrs. Thatcher to the core. She recognised that people wanted more than the State handing them stuff. And so, she led a revolution which, for the first time in British history, saw the working-class moving up the ladder.
The Labour government, which superseded her for many years, complained about she had done, but they kept what she had done. The only criticism that they truly had to make against her was that she converted many of what they thought to be their own people.
It’s no secret that she ruffled a lot of feathers because of her dogmatic approach. Around the cabinet table, it was only her opinion that counted. But what she did, she did out of a sincere and whole-hearted belief that what she was doing was for the genuine benefit and good of the country – which is more than we can say for most of the ‘career’ politicians that we see today.
Whether you loved her or loathed her, one thing that can be certain is that the Thatcher Revolution, as it is known, changed Britain forever.
