1999년에 미국의 주간지 타임誌는 마가렛 대처를 20세기의 20大 정치인 가운데 한 명으로 뽑았다. '대처리즘'이란 말을 남길 정도로 대처의 정치적 유산은 영국뿐 아니라 세계 도처에서 지금도 큰 영향력과 상상력을 행사하고 있다. 法治주의, 작은 정부, 시장경제, 민간의 자율과 책임을 강조한 대처의 신보수주의적 개혁은 한국에서도 유력한 모델로 연구되고 있다.

대처는 아마도 가장 많은 名言을 남긴 정치인중 한 사람으로 꼽힐 것이다. 그는 말을 명쾌하고 도전적으로 하는 이였다. 대처는 1987년 9월23일 '우먼즈 오운(Woman's Own)'이란 잡지의 더글라스 키 기자와 인터뷰하면서 이런 말을 남겼다. 요지는 이러했다.

'우리는 너무나 오랫동안 너무나 많은 어린이들에게 이렇게 잘못 가르쳤다고 생각합니다. '내 문제는 정부가 해결해주어야 한다' '내게 문제가 있지만 정부를 찾아가면 경제적 지원을 해줄 것이다' '나는 집이 없다. 정부가 집을 마련해줘야 한다'는 식이지요. 그들은 자신들의 문제를 사회에 전가하고 있어요. 그런데 사회가 누구예요? 사회? 그런 건 없습니다! 개인으로서의 남자와 여자가 있고, 가족들이 있는 것뿐입니다. 정부는 (사회가 아니라) 사람들을 통해서만 일을 할 수 있습니다. 사람들은 먼저 스스로를 도와야 합니다. 스스로를 돕고 이웃을 돕는 것은 여러분들의 의무입니다. 삶이란 것은 주고 받는 거예요. 주는 것 없이 받을 생각만 하면 안 됩니다.'

'사회? 그런 건 없습니다!'라는 말이 유명해졌다. 한국의 자칭 진보적 인사들은 인간의 모든 문제들을 개인이 아니라 사회에 돌린다. 30명을 연쇄살인한 犯人의 책임도 사회의 냉대에 있다고 한다. 북한의 배고픔과 살육도 김정일이 아니라 국제사회에 있다고 한다. '사회'라는 개념을 만들어 모든 책임을 거기에 떠넘기곤 '우리는 결백하다'고 홀가분해하는 꼴이다. 이런 위선적 태도에 대해서 대처는 가차 없는 비판을 가한 것이다.

'사회? 그런 건 없습니다'
***********************************************************
*'Society? There is no such thing!'

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations...[81]


*Margaret Thatcher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, England, she went on to read Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. She was selected as Conservative candidate for Finchley in 1958 and won the seat in the general election the following year. Upon the election of Edward Heath in 1970, Thatcher was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science. In 1974, she backed Sir Keith Joseph for the Conservative party leader, but after falling short he dropped out of the race. Thatcher entered herself and became leader of the Conservative party in 1975. As the Conservative party maintained leads in most polls, Thatcher went on to become Britain's Prime Minister in the 1979 General Election.

Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister was the longest since that of Lord Salisbury and was the longest continuous period in office since the tenure of Lord Liverpool who was Prime Minister in the early 19th century.[1] She was the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK, and the first of only three women to have held any of the four great offices of state. Among other things, she defiantly opposed the Soviet Union, and her tough-talking rhetoric gained her the nickname the 'Iron Lady'.[1] She currently has a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the House of Lords.



Early life and education
Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on the 13 October 1925[2] to Alfred Roberts, originally from Northamptonshire, and Beatrice Stephenson Roberts from Lincolnshire. Thatcher spent her childhood in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, where her father owned two grocery shops.[3] She and her older sister Muriel (1921–2004) were raised in the flat above the larger of the two located near the railway line.[4] Her father was active in local politics and religion, serving as an Alderman and Methodist lay preacher. He came from a Liberal family but stood—as was then customary in local government—as an Independent. He lost his post as Alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950.[5]

Thatcher was brought up a devout Methodist and has remained a Christian throughout her life.[6] After attending Huntingtower Road Primary School, she received a scholarship and attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School.[7] Her school reports show hard work and commitment, but not brilliance. Outside the classroom she played hockey and also enjoyed swimming and walking.[8] Finishing school during the Second World War, she subsequently applied for a scholarship to attend Somerville College, Oxford and was only successful when the winning candidate dropped out.[9] She went to Oxford in 1943 [10] and studied Natural Sciences and specialised in Chemistry. [3] She became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, the third woman to hold the post. Thatcher graduated with a BA from Oxford in 1946 with Second Class Honours in Final Honours School. She subsequently[citation needed] studied crystallography and received a postgraduate B.Sc. degree in 1947. Her BA status was converted to MA by Oxford in 1950.[3]

Following graduation, Margaret Roberts moved to Colchester and worked as a research chemist for BX Plastics.[11] During this time she joined the local Conservative Association and attended the party conference at Llandudno in 1948, as a representative of the University Graduate Conservative Association.[12] She was also a member of the Association of Scientific Workers. In January 1949, a friend from Oxford, who was working for the Dartford Conservative Association, told her that they were looking for candidates.[12] After a brief period, she was selected as the Conservative candidate, and she subsequently moved to Dartford to stand for election as a Member of Parliament. To support herself during this period, she went to work for J. Lyons and Co., where she helped develop methods for preserving ice cream and was paid £500 per year.[12]


Political career between 1950 and 1970
At the 1950 and 1951 elections, she fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford. Although she was unsuccessful in winning the seat she did reduce the Labour majority in the constituency by 6,000.[13] She was at the time the youngest ever female Conservative candidate and her campaign attracted a higher than normal amount of media attention for a first time candidate.[14][3] While active in the Conservative Party in Kent, she met Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951.[15] Denis was a wealthy divorced businessman[15] and he funded his wife's studies for the Bar.[16] She qualified as a barrister in 1953 specialising in tax law. In the same year her twin children Carol and Mark were born.[17]

Thatcher then began to look for a safe Conservative seat and was narrowly rejected as candidate for the Orpington by-election, 1955. She was subsequently not a candidate in the 1955 election and spent her time practising law.[17] She had several other rejections before being selected for Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat after hard campaigning in the 1959 election and was elected as a member of Parliament.[18] Her maiden speech was in support of her Private Member's Bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960) to force local councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching.

She was given early promotion to the front bench as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in September 1961, retaining the post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 election. When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down, Thatcher voted for Edward Heath in the leadership election over Reginald Maudling, and was rewarded with the job of Conservative spokesman on Housing and Land. In this role she adopted the policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses, an idea first developed by her colleague James Allason. The policy would prove popular.[19] She moved to the Shadow Treasury team after 1966.

Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality. She voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion and in favour of a ban on hare coursing.[20] She supported the retention of capital punishment and voted against the relaxation of divorce laws. Thatcher made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966 with a strong attack on the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps 'not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism'. In 1967 she was selected by the Embassy of the United States in London to participate in the International Visitor Leadership Program (then called the Foreign Leader Program), a professional exchange program in which she spent about six weeks visiting various U.S. cities, political figures, and institutions like the International Monetary Fund[21]. Thatcher won promotion to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted to shadow Transport and, finally, Education before the 1970 election.


Education Secretary (1970 - 1974)
When the Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science. In her first months in office, forced to administer a cut in the Education budget, she was responsible for the abolition of universal free milk for school-children aged seven to eleven (Labour had already abolished it for secondary schools). This provoked a storm of public protest, and led to one of the more unflattering names for her: 'Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher'. However, she also successfully resisted the introduction of library book charges.

Her term was marked by support for several proposals for more local education authorities to close grammar schools and adopt comprehensive secondary education; support for this change in education policy was not restricted to the left. Thatcher also saved the Open University from being abolished. The Chancellor Anthony Barber wanted to abolish it as a budget-cutting measure, as he viewed it as a gimmick by Harold Wilson. Thatcher believed it was a relatively inexpensive way of extending higher education and insisted that the University should experiment with admitting school-leavers as well as adults. In her memoirs, Thatcher wrote that she was not part of Heath's inner circle, and had little or no influence on the key government decisions outside her department.


Leader of the Opposition (1975 - 1979)

Margaret Thatcher elected as Leader of the Opposition on 18 September 1975.After the Conservative defeat in February 1974, Heath appointed her Shadow Environment Secretary. In this position she promised to abolish the rating system that paid for local government services, which was a favoured policy proposal within the Conservative Party for many years.

Thatcher agreed with Sir Keith Joseph and the Centre for Policy Studies that the Heath Government had lost control of monetary policy—and had lost direction—following its 1972 U-turn. After her party lost the second election of 1974, Joseph decided to challenge Heath's leadership but later withdrew after an unwise speech seen as supporting eugenics. Thatcher then decided that she would enter the race on behalf of the Josephite/CPS faction. Unexpectedly she out-polled Heath on the first ballot, forcing him to resign the leadership. On the second ballot, she defeated Heath's preferred successor William Whitelaw, by 146 votes to 79, and became Conservative Party leader on 11 February 1975.[22] She appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained disenchanted with Thatcher to the end of his life for what he (and many of his supporters) perceived as her disloyalty in standing against him.

On 19 January 1976, she made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union. The most famous part of her speech ran:[23]

“ The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.
”

In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) gave her the nickname 'Iron Lady', which was soon publicised by Radio Moscow. She took delight in the name and it soon became associated with her image as having an unwavering and steadfast character. Her reaction to her other chief nickname, 'Attila the Hen' (thought to have been coined by party grandee Sir Ian Gilmour) is unrecorded.

Thatcher appointed many of Heath's supporters to the Shadow Cabinet, for she had won the leadership as an outsider and had little power base of her own within the party. One, James Prior, gained the important brief of shadow Employment Secretary. Thatcher had to act cautiously to convert the Conservative Party to her monetarist beliefs. She reversed Heath's support for devolved government for Scotland. In an interview for Granada Television's World in Action programme in January 1978, she said 'people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture', arousing particular controversy at the time.[24] Critics regarded the comment as a veiled reference to people of colour—and thus pandering to xenophobia and reactionary sentiment. She received 10,000 letters thanking her for raising the subject and the Conservatives gained a lead against Labour in the opinion polls, from both parties at 43% before the speech to 48% for Conservative and 39% for Labour immediately after.[25]

The Labour Government ran into difficulties with industrial disputes, strikes, increasing unemployment, and collapsing public services during the winter of 1978–79, dubbed the 'Winter of Discontent'. The Conservatives used campaign posters with slogans such as 'Labour Isn't Working'[26] to attack the government's record over unemployment and its over-regulation of the labour market. James Callaghan's Labour government fell after a successful Motion of No Confidence in spring 1979.

In the run up to the 1979 General Election, most opinion polls showed that voters preferred James Callaghan as Prime Minister even as the Conservative Party maintained a lead in the polls. The Conservatives would go on to win a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons and Margaret Thatcher became the United Kingdom's first female Prime Minister. Arriving at 10 Downing Street, she said, in a paraphrase of St. Francis of Assisi:

“ Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope. ”


Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Main article: Premiership of Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher's Ministry meets with Reagan's Cabinet at the White House, 1981Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979, with a mandate to reverse the UK's economic decline and to reduce the role of the state in the economy. Thatcher was incensed by one contemporary view within the Civil Service, that its job was to manage the UK's decline from the days of Empire, and she wanted the country to assert a higher level of influence and leadership in international affairs. She became a very close ally, philosophically and politically, with President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 in the United States. During her tenure as Prime Minister she was said to need just four hours sleep a night.[27]


Domestic reforms

Irish hunger strike
Main article: 1981 Irish hunger strike
In 1981, a number of Provisional IRA and Irish National Liberation Army prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison (known by most Irish people as 'Long Kesh', due to its previous official name) went on hunger strike to regain the status of political prisoners, which had been revoked five years earlier under the preceding Labour government. Bobby Sands, the first of the strikers, was elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone a few weeks before he died. Thatcher refused at first to countenance a return to political status for republican prisoners, famously declaring 'Crime is crime is crime; it is not political.'[28] Nevertheless, after nine more men had starved to death and the strike had ended, some rights relating to political status were restored to paramilitary prisoners. Thatcher's public hard line on the treatment of paramilitaries was reinforced during the 1980 Iranian Embassy Siege where for the first time in 70 years British armed forces were authorised to use lethal force in Great Britain.

On 15 November 1985, Thatcher signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish Agreement with Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, the first time a British government gave the Republic of Ireland a say (albeit advisory) in the governance of Northern Ireland. The agreement was greeted with fury by Northern Irish unionists.


Economy
Thatcher took over three years after the James Callaghan Government had concluded that the Keynesian approach to demand-side management failed to do everything, realising that the economy is not self-righting and that new fiscal judgements had to be made to concentrate on inflation, a view accepted by the Thatcher Government.[29] As a monetarist, Thatcher began her economic reforms by increasing interest rates to slow the growth of the money supply and thus lower inflation. It has been argued that this heavy reliance of government control of money supply was partly responsible for the failing of early Monetarist approaches to macroeconomic management.[30]

Thatcher had a preference for indirect taxation over taxes on income, and value added tax (VAT) was raised sharply to 15%, with a resultant actual short-term rise in inflation.[31] These moves hit businesses – especially the manufacturing sector – and unemployment quickly passed two million, doubling the one million unemployed under the previous Labour government.[citation needed]

Political commentators harked back to the Heath Government's 'U-turn' and speculated that Thatcher would follow suit, but she repudiated this approach at the 1980 Conservative Party conference, telling the party: 'To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catch-phrase—the U-turn—I have only one thing to say: you turn if you want to; the Lady's not for turning.'[32] That she meant what she said was confirmed in the 1981 budget, when, despite concerns expressed in an open letter from 364 leading economists,[33] taxes were increased in the middle of a recession. In January 1982, the inflation rate had dropped back to 8.6% from earlier highs of 18%, and interest rates were then allowed to fall. Unemployment continued to rise, reaching an official figure of 3.6 million. By 1983, manufacturing output had dropped 30% from 1978, while overall economic growth was stronger, and inflation and mortgage rates were at their lowest levels since 1970.[34]


Thatcher with close ally and friend, United States President Ronald Reagan, 1981Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasised reduced state intervention, free markets, and entrepreneurialism. After the 1983 election, the Government sold off most of the large utilities, starting with British Telecom, which had been a publicly owned monopoly since 1912. Many people took advantage of share offers, although many sold their shares immediately for a quick profit and therefore the proportion of shares held by individuals rather than institutions did not increase. The policy of privatisation, while anathema to many on the Left, has become synonymous with Thatcherism. Wider share-ownership and council house sales became known as 'popular capitalism' to its supporters (a term coined by John Redwood). In 1985, as a deliberate snub, the University of Oxford voted to refuse her an honorary degree in protest against her cuts in funding for higher education.[35] This award had always previously been given to all Prime Ministers who had been educated at Oxford.

At the Dublin European Council in November 1979, Thatcher had argued that the United Kingdom paid far more to the European Economic Community than it received in spending. She declared at the summit: 'We are not asking the Community or anyone else for money. We are simply asking to have our own money back'. Her arguments were successful and at the June 1984 Fontainebleau Summit, the EEC agreed on an annual rebate for the United Kingdom, amounting to 66% of the difference between Britain's EU contributions and receipts. This still remains in effect, although Tony Blair later agreed to significantly reduce the size of the rebate. It periodically causes political controversy among the members of the European Union.[citation needed]

Thatcher's new system to replace local government taxes, outlined in the Conservative manifesto for the 1987 election, was introduced in Scotland in 1989 and in England and Wales in 1990. The rates were replaced by the Community Charge or 'Poll Tax', which applied the same amount to every individual resident, with an 80% reduction for the unwaged. This was to be the most universally unpopular policy of her premiership. Individuals seeking to avoid paying their share of the costs of local government effectively disenfranchised themselves by removing themselves from the electoral register, and causing problems over uncollected revenue for several years, and a rise in indirect taxation.

Thatcher's popularity declined in 1989, as the economy suffered from high interest rates. She blamed her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who had been following an economic policy which was a preparation for monetary union; in an interview for the Financial Times, in November 1987, Thatcher claimed not to have been told of this and did not approve.[36]

At a meeting before the Madrid European Community summit in June 1989, Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe persuaded Thatcher to agree to the circumstances under which she would join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a preparation for monetary union and the abolition of the Pound Sterling. At the meeting, they both said they would resign if their demands were not met.[37] Thatcher responded by demoting Howe and by listening more to her adviser Sir Alan Walters on economic matters. Lawson resigned that October, feeling that Thatcher had undermined him.

Additional problems emerged when many of the tax rates set by local councils proved to be much higher than predicted. Opponents of the Community Charge banded together to resist bailiffs and disrupt court hearings of Community Charge debtors. The Labour MP, Terry Fields, was jailed for 60 days for refusing on principle to pay his Community Charge. As the Prime Minister continued to refuse to compromise on the tax and as many as one in five people had still not paid, unrest mounted and culminated in a number of riots. The most serious of these happened in London on 31 March 1990, during a protest at Trafalgar Square, London, which more than 100,000 protesters attended. The huge unpopularity of the tax, and in particular the rioting in London on that day, was seen as a major factor in Thatcher's downfall.[38]

On the Friday before the Conservative Party conference in October 1990, Thatcher ordered her new Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major to reduce interest rates by 1%. Major persuaded her that the only way to maintain monetary stability was to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism at the same time, despite not meeting the 'Madrid conditions'. The Conservative Party conference that year saw a large degree of unity.


Trade unions
Further information: Opposition to trade unions
Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trades unions. Several unions launched strikes in response to legislation introduced to curb their power, but these actions eventually collapsed, and gradually Thatcher's reforms reduced the power and influence of the unions.

In 1982 the National Union of Mineworkers accepted a Government offer of a 9.3% raise, rejecting their leaders' call for a strike authorisation.[39]

The confrontation over strikes, ordered illegally without a national ballot in 1984–85 by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in opposition to proposals to close a large number of mines, proved decisive. Police tactics during the strikes came under criticism but the militancy of the miners attempting to prevent other miners from working was also controversial. Two miners, Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, were convicted of the murder of David Wilkie, a taxi driver, whom they killed by throwing a 46 pounds (21 kg) slab of concrete through the windscreen of his car from a bridge as he drove beneath it. He was driving a colleague of theirs, David Williams, to work. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.[40] A group of workers, resigned to the impending failure of the actions, worn down by months of protests, and angry at the NUM's failure to hold a national strike ballot, began to defy the Union's rulings, starting splinter groups and advising workers that returning to work was the only viable option. The Miners' Strike lasted a full year before the NUM leadership conceded without a deal. The Conservative government proceeded to close all but 15 of the country's pits, with the remaining 15 being sold off and privatised in 1994. Thatcher succeeded, for good or ill, in curbing the power of the British unions.


South African controversy
At the end of March 1984, four South Africans were arrested in Coventry, remanded in custody, and charged with contravening the UN arms embargo, which prohibited exports to apartheid South Africa of military equipment. Thatcher took a personal interest in the Coventry Four, and 10 Downing Street requested daily summaries of the case from the prosecuting authority, HM Customs and Excise.[41] Within a month, the Coventry Four had been freed from jail and allowed to travel to South Africa on condition that they returned to England for their trial later that year. In April 1984, Thatcher sent senior British diplomat, Sir John Leahy, to negotiate the release of 16 Britons who had been taken hostage by the Angolan rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi. At the time, Savimbi's UNITA guerrilla movement was financed and supported militarily by the United States and apartheid regime of South Africa. On 26 April 1984, Leahy succeeded in securing the release of the British hostages at the UNITA base in Jamba, Angola.[42] In June 1984 Thatcher invited apartheid South Africa's president, P. W. Botha, and foreign minister, Pik Botha, to Chequers in an effort to stave off growing international pressure for the imposition of economic sanctions against South Africa, where Britain had invested heavily. She reportedly urged President Botha to end apartheid; to release Nelson Mandela; to halt the harassment of black dissidents; to stop the bombing of African National Congress (ANC) bases in front-line states; and to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and withdraw from Namibia.[43] However Botha ignored these demands. In an interview with Hugo Young for The Guardian in July 1986, Thatcher expressed her belief that economic sanctions against South Africa would be immoral because they would make thousands of black workers unemployed.[44] In August 1984, foreign minister, Pik Botha, decided not to allow the Coventry Four to return to stand trial, thereby forfeiting £200,000 bail money put up by the South African embassy in London.


Brighton bombing
Main article: Brighton hotel bombing

Thatcher with U.S. first lady Nancy Reagan at 10 Downing Street, 1986On the early morning of 12 October 1984, the day before her 59th birthday, Thatcher escaped injury in the Brighton hotel bombing during the Conservative Party Conference when her hotel was bombed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army; five people died in the attack, including Roberta, the wife of Cabinet Minister John Wakeham. A prominent member of the Cabinet, Norman Tebbit, was injured, and his wife Margaret was left paralysed. Thatcher herself would have been injured had she not been delayed from using the bathroom (which suffered more damage than the room she was in at the time the bomb detonated). Thatcher insisted that the conference open on time the next day and made her speech as planned in defiance of the bombers, a gesture which won widespread approval across the political spectrum.[45]


Attitude towards Labour party
In 1986, her government controversially abolished the Greater London Council, then led by the strongly left-wing Ken Livingstone, and six Metropolitan County Councils. The government claimed this was an efficiency measure. However, Thatcher's opponents held that the move was politically motivated, as all of the abolished councils were controlled by Labour, had become powerful centres of opposition to her government, and were in favour of higher local government taxes and public spending. Several of them had however rendered themselves politically vulnerable by committing public funds to causes seen as extreme.


Elections

1983
The 'Falklands Factor', along with an economic recovery in early 1983, bolstered the government's popularity. The Labour party at this time had split, and there was a new challenge in the SDP-Liberal Alliance, formed by an electoral pact between the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party. However, the alliance failed to 'break the mould of British politics' as it intended, despite briefly holding an opinion poll lead before the Falklands War in 1982.[citation needed] In the June 1983 general election, the Conservatives won 42.4% of the vote, the Labour party 27.6% and the Alliance 25.4% of the vote. Although the Conservatives' share of the vote had fallen slightly (1.5%) since 1979, Labour's vote had fallen by far more (9.3%) and in Britain's first past the post system, the Conservatives won a landslide victory even though it had the support of less than 43% of the electorate. This resulted in the Conservative Party having an overall majority of 144 MPs.


1987
By leading her party to victory in the 1987 general election with a 101 seat majority, riding an economic boom against a weak Labour opposition advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament, Margaret Thatcher became the longest continuously serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since Lord Liverpool (1812 to 1827). Most United Kingdom newspapers supported her—with the exception of The Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent—and were rewarded with regular press briefings by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham.


1989
Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer. As Meyer was a virtually unknown backbench MP, he was viewed as a 'stalking horse' candidate for more prominent members of the party. Thatcher easily defeated Meyer's challenge, but there were sixty ballot papers either cast for Meyer or abstaining, a surprisingly large number for a sitting Prime Minister. Her supporters in the Party, however, viewed the results as a success, claiming that after ten years as Prime Minister and with approximately 370 Conservative MPs voting, the opposition was surprisingly small.[46]


Views on homosexuality
Though an early backer of decriminalisation of male homosexuality, Thatcher, at the 1987 Conservative party conference, issued the statement that 'Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay'. Backbench Conservative MPs and Peers had already begun a backlash against the 'promotion' of homosexuality and, in December 1987, the controversial 'Section 28' was added as an amendment to what became the Local Government Act 1988. This legislation was subsequently abolished by Tony Blair's Labour administration.


Foreign policy

The Falklands
Main article: Falklands War
On 2 April 1982, a ruling military junta in Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory that Argentina had claimed since an 1830s dispute on the British settlement. Within days Thatcher sent a naval task force to recapture the islands. Despite the huge logistical difficulties the operation was a success, resulting in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm and support for her government, with Newsweek declaring 'The Empire Strikes Back'. There were also several controversies that arose as a result of the Falklands War and Thatcher's handling of the conflict.


Cold War
Main article: Cold War

The Thatchers with the Reagans standing at the North Portico of the White House prior to a state dinner, 16 November 1988In the Cold War, Mrs Thatcher supported United States President Ronald Reagan's policies of deterrence against the Soviets. This contrasted with the policy of détente which the West had pursued during the 1970s, and caused friction with allies who still adhered to the idea of détente. US forces were permitted by Mrs. Thatcher to station nuclear cruise missiles at Greenham Common, arousing mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. However, she later was the first Western leader to respond warmly to the rise of the future reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring that she liked him, and told Ronald Reagan, describing him as 'a man we can do business with' after a meeting in 1984, three months before he came to power. This was a start of a move by the West back to a new détente with the USSR under Gorbachev's leadership, which coincided with the final erosion of Soviet power prior to its eventual collapse in 1991. Thatcher outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1989, and those who share her views on it credit her with a part in the West's victory, by both the deterrence and détente postures.

Her liking for defence ties with the United States was demonstrated in the Westland affair when she acted with colleagues to allow the helicopter manufacturer Westland, a vital defence contractor, to refuse to link with the Italian firm Agusta in order for it to link with the management's preferred option, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation of the United States. Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had pushed the Agusta deal, resigned in protest after this, and remained an influential critic and potential leadership challenger. He would eventually prove instrumental in Thatcher's fall in 1990.

According to Helmut Kohl, West Germany's ex-Chancellor, Margaret Thatcher was also a strong opponent of the German reunification that was developing at unexpected speed in 1989. However she failed to halt it.[47]


Hong Kong
Main article: Transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong
In 1984, she visited China and signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration with Deng Xiaoping on 19 December, which committed the People's Republic of China to award Hong Kong the status of a Special Administrative Region. Under the terms of the One Country, Two Systems agreement, which Deng himself proposed, China agreed to leave Hong Kong's economic status unchanged after the handover on 1 July 1997 for a period of fifty years—until 2047. Britain agreed to leave, unconditionally, in 1997.[48]


European Union
At Bruges, Belgium, in 1988, Thatcher made a speech in which she outlined her opposition to proposals from the European Community for a federal structure and increasing centralisation of decision-making. Although she had supported British membership, Thatcher believed that the role of the EC should be limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that new EC regulations would reverse the changes she was making in the UK: 'We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels'. The speech caused an outcry from other European leaders, and exposed for the first time the deep split that was emerging over European policy inside her Conservative Party.

Thatcher, the former chemist, became publicly concerned with environmental issues in the late 1980s. In 1988, she made a major speech[49] communicating the problems of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain. Referring to her important role in the struggle against ozone depletion, Carl Sagan claimed that she demonstrated the importance in the modern world of leaders having an understanding of science.


Gulf War

Thatcher reviews Bermudian troops, 12 April 1990Main article: Gulf War
One of Thatcher's acts in her last year in office was to put pressure on US President George H. W. Bush to deploy troops to the Middle East to drive Saddam Hussein's (Iraqi) army out of Kuwait. Bush was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, but Thatcher's memoirs summarise her advice to him during a telephone conversation with the words, 'this was no time to go wobbly!'[50] Thatcher's government provided military forces to the international coalition in the Gulf War to pursue the ouster of Iraq from Kuwait.[51]


Fall from power
See also: Conservative Party (UK) leadership election, 1990
Thatcher's political downfall was, according to witnesses such as Alan Clark, one of the most dramatic episodes in British political history. By 1990, opposition to Thatcher's policies on local government taxation (the community charge, or poll tax),[52] and the divisions opening in the Conservative Party over European integration made her seem increasingly politically vulnerable and her party increasingly divided. Her distaste for consensus politics and willingness to override colleagues' opinions, including that of Cabinet, emboldened the backlash against her when it did occur.[53] The dislike for Thatcher that had previously come primarily from her political opponents was now being expressed by some members of her own party.

On 1 November 1990, Sir Geoffrey Howe, one of Thatcher's oldest and staunchest supporters, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister in protest at Thatcher's European policy. In his resignation speech in the House of Commons two weeks later, he suggested that the time had come for 'others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties' with which he stated that he had wrestled for perhaps too long. Her former cabinet colleague Michael Heseltine subsequently challenged her for the leadership of the party, and attracted sufficient support in the first round of voting to prolong the contest to a second ballot. Though she initially stated that she intended to contest the second ballot, Thatcher decided, after consulting with her Cabinet colleagues, to withdraw from the contest. On 22 November, at just after 9.30 a.m., she announced to the Cabinet that she would not be a candidate in the second ballot. Shortly afterwards, her staff made public what was, in effect, her resignation statement:

“ Having consulted widely among my colleagues, I have concluded that the unity of the Party and the prospects of victory in a General Election would be better served if I stood down to enable Cabinet colleagues to enter the ballot for the leadership. I should like to thank all those in Cabinet and outside who have given me such dedicated support. ”

Neil Kinnock, Leader of the Opposition, proposed a motion of no confidence in the government, and Margaret Thatcher seized the opportunity this presented on the day of her resignation to deliver one of her most memorable performances:

“ ...a single currency is about the politics of Europe, it is about a federal Europe by the back door. So I shall consider the proposal of the Honourable Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner). Now where were we? I am enjoying this. ”

She supported John Major as her successor and he duly won the leadership contest, although in the years to come her approval of Major would fall away. After her resignation a MORI poll found that 52% agreed with the proposition that 'On balance she had been good for the country', while 48% disagreed, thinking she had not.[54] In 1991, she was given a long and unprecedented standing ovation at the party's annual conference, although she politely rejected calls from delegates for her to make a speech. She did, however, occasionally speak in the House of Commons after she was Prime Minister. She retired from the House at the 1992 election, at the age of 66 years.


Career after leaving House of Commons

Orders and honours
Since leaving the House of Commons, Thatcher has remained active in the politics of the United Kingdom, as well as the world. She was raised to the House of Lords by the conferment of a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire in 1992; she did not take a hereditary title.[55] By virtue of the life barony, she entered the House of Lords. Thatcher had already been honoured by the Queen in 1990, shortly after her resignation as Prime Minister, when awarded the Order of Merit, one of the UK's highest distinctions.[56] At the same time it was announced that her husband, Denis Thatcher, would be given a baronetcy, which was confirmed in 1991[56][57] (ensuring that their son Mark would inherit a title). This was the first creation of a baronetcy since 1965. In 1995, Thatcher was raised to the Order of the Garter, the United Kingdom's highest order of Chivalry.[58]


Post-Prime Ministerial influence
Further information: Euroscepticism
Thatcher authored her memoirs in two volumes, The Path to Power and The Downing Street Years. In 1993 The Downing Street Years were turned into a documentary series by the BBC, in which she described the Cabinet rebellion that brought about her resignation as 'treachery with a smile on its face'. This series, on BBC Two, was accompanied by a special ident, in which the famous 2 logo became a door-knocker affixed to 10 Downing Street.

Thatcher made a series of speeches in the Lords criticising the Maastricht Treaty, describing it as 'a treaty too far' and stated 'I could never have signed this treaty'.[59] She cited A. V. Dicey, to the effect that, since all three main parties were in favour of revisiting the treaty, the people should have their say.[60]

On 6 August 1992 she called for NATO to stop the Serbian assault on Goražde and Sarajevo in order to end ethnic cleansing and to preserve the Bosnian state. She described the situation in Bosnia as 'reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Nazis,'[61] warning that there could be a 'holocaust' in Bosnia and described the conflict as a 'killing field the like of which I thought we would never see in Europe again.'


Thatcher arrives at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, United States to fly to California with the family of American President Ronald Reagan during the state funeral honoring him in 2004From 1993 to 2000, she served as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which, established by Royal Charter in 1693, is the sole royal foundation in the contiguous United States. She was also Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, the UK's only private university, a position from which she retired in 1998.

Although she remained supportive in public, in private she made her displeasure with many of John Major's policies plain, and her views were conveyed to the press and widely reported. She was critical of the rise in public spending under Major, his tax increases, and his support of the European Union. After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, Thatcher gave an interview in May 1995 in which she praised Blair as 'probably the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved.'[62]

In 1998, Thatcher made an unofficial visit to the former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, while he was under house arrest in Surrey. Pinochet was fighting extradition for human rights abuses committed during his tenure. Thatcher expressed her support and friendship for Pinochet.[63] Pinochet had been a key ally of Britain during the Falklands War. Also in 1998, she made a £2,000,000 donation to Cambridge University for the endowment of a Margaret Thatcher Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies. She also donated the archive of her personal papers to Churchill College, Cambridge where the collection continues to be expanded.

At Thatcher's first speech to a Conservative Party conference in nine years in 1999, she not only defended Pinochet's actions as Chilean president, but made some controversial remarks on a continental Europe.[64] Her comments aroused some criticism from Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary under John Major, who claimed that Lady Thatcher was giving 'the impression that Britain and British opinion is somehow prejudiced and anti-European'.[65]

Margaret Thatcher actively supported the Conservative general election campaign in 2001. In the Conservative leadership election shortly after, Lady Thatcher came out in support of Iain Duncan Smith because she believed he would 'make infinitely the better leader' than Kenneth Clarke due to Clarke's 'old-fashioned views of the role of the state and his unbounded enthusiasm for European integration'.[66]

In 2002, she published Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World detailing her thoughts on international relations since her resignation in 1990. The chapters on the European Union were particularly controversial; she called for a fundamental renegotiation of Britain's membership to preserve the UK's sovereignty and, if that failed, for Britain to leave and join NAFTA. These chapters were serialised in The Times on Monday, 18 March and caused a political furore.


Health concerns
Thatcher was advised by her doctors in 2002 to make no more public speeches on health grounds, having suffered several small strokes.[67] According to her former press spokesman Bernard Ingham, Thatcher has no short-term memory as a result of the strokes.[68] On 7 March 2008, Thatcher was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital, Central London for tests due to health concerns, after she felt ill whilst attending a House of Lords' dinner.[69]


Activities since 2003

Thatcher attends the official Washington, D.C. memorial service marking the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, pictured with Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney.
Thatcher talks with then-United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, 12 September 2006Lady Thatcher was widowed upon the death of Sir Denis Thatcher on 26 June 2003. A funeral service was held honouring him at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea on 3 July with Lady Thatcher present, as well as her children Mark and Carol.[70] Thatcher paid tribute to him by saying, 'Being Prime Minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be—you cannot lead from a crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend'.[71]

On 11 June 2004, Thatcher attended the funeral of, and delivered a tribute via videotape to, former United States President Ronald Reagan at his state funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. In view of her failing mental faculties following several small strokes, the message had been pre-recorded several months earlier. Thatcher then flew to California with the Reagan entourage, and attended the memorial service and interment ceremony for President Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

In December 2004, it was reported that Thatcher had told a private meeting of Conservative MPs that she was against the British Government's plan to introduce identity cards. She is said to have remarked that ID cards were a 'Germanic concept and completely alien to this country'.[72]

Thatcher marked her 80th birthday with a party at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde Park on 13 October 2005, where the guests included Queen Elizabeth II, The Duke of Edinburgh, and Princess Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy. There, Geoffrey Howe, now Lord Howe of Aberavon, commented on her political career: 'Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.'

To commemorate the September 11th terror attacks on the United States, Thatcher attended the official Washington, D.C. memorial service marking the 5th anniversary. She attended as a guest of the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, and met with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit. Thatcher was last in the United States for the funeral of former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in April 2006.[73]

On 12 November 2006, she appeared at the Remembrance Day parade at the Cenotaph in London, leaning heavily on the arm of former Prime Minister, John Major. One week later, she released an effusive statement of condolence on the death of her friend and economic mentor, Milton Friedman, the man often described as the inspiration behind Thatcherism. On 10 December she announced she was 'deeply saddened' by the death of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet.[74]

A statue of Lady Thatcher was unveiled in the British Houses of Parliament on 21 February 2007. Thatcher made a rare and brief speech in the members' lobby of the House of Commons. She gibed, 'I might have preferred iron—but bronze will do... It won't rust. And, this time I hope, the head will stay on' - a previous statue in stone had been attacked and decapitated while on public exhibition.[75]


Thatcher in October 2007.On 13 September 2007, Lady Thatcher was invited to 10 Downing Street to have tea with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah. Gordon Brown referred to Lady Thatcher as a 'conviction politician' and said of himself, 'I'm a conviction politician just like her.'[76] However William Hague attacked this decision, saying to Gordon Brown:

“ You may fawn now at the feet of our greatest prime minister – but you are no Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher would never have devastated the pension funds of this nation, nor kicked its small businesses in the teeth. We, Gordon, backed her when she rescued our country in the face of every denunciation and insult from the likes of you.[77]
”

Brown's spokesman, however, denied these claims and insisted that the meeting was 'not unusual', it was customary for Prime Ministers to invite their predecessors to tea and that Mr Brown would be 'happy' to meet any former Prime Minister.[78]

On 30 January 2008, Lady Thatcher met the incumbent Tory Leader, David Cameron at an awards ceremony at London's Guildhall where she was presented with a 'Lifetime Achievement Award'. [79]


Legacy
Main article: Thatcherism
Thatcher is well remembered for her famed remark 'There is no such thing as society'[80] to the reporter Douglas Keay, for Woman's Own magazine, 23 September 1987:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations...[81]

In 1996, the Scott Inquiry into the Arms-to-Iraq affair investigated the Thatcher government's record in dealing with Saddam Hussein. It revealed how £1bn of public money was used in soft loan guarantees for British exporters to Iraq. The judge found that during the Iran-Iraq war, officials destroyed documents relating to the export of Chieftain tank parts to Jordan which ended up in Iraq. Ministers clandestinely relaxed official guidelines to help private companies sell machine tools which were used in munitions factories. The British company Racal exported sophisticated Jaguar V radios to the former Iraqi dictator's army on credit. Members of the Conservative cabinet refused to stop lending guaranteed funds to Saddam even after he executed a British journalist, Farzad Bazoft, Thatcher’s cabinet minuting that they did not want to damage British industry.

New Labour and Blairism have incorporated much of the economic, social and political tenets of 'Thatcherism' in the same manner as, in a previous era, the Conservative Party from the 1950s until the days of Edward Heath accepted many of the basic assumptions of the welfare state instituted by Labour governments.[citation needed] The curtailing and large-scale dismantling of elements of the welfare state under Thatcher have largely remained.[citation needed] Among others, Thatcher's program of privatising state-owned enterprises has not been reversed.[citation needed] Indeed, successive Tory and Labour governments have further curtailed the involvement of the state in the economy and have further dismantled public ownership.[citation needed]

Thatcher's impact on the trade union movement in Britain has been lasting, with the breaking of the miners' strike of 1984-1985 seen as a watershed moment, or even a breaking point, for a union movement which has been unable to regain the degree of political power it exercised up through the 1970s.[citation needed] Unionisation rates in Britain have permanently declined since the 1980s, and the legislative instruments introduced to curtail the impact of strikes have not been reversed.[citation needed] The Labour Party has worked to loosen its ties to the trade union movement[citation needed]. Although the power of trade unions is still significantly lower than it was before Thatcher came to power, the Employment Relations Act 2004 was introduced under the Blair government to make statutory recognition of trade unions accessible and to further protect workers taking industrial action.[citation needed]

Thatcher's legacy has continued to strongly influence the Conservative Party itself.[citation needed] Successive leaders, starting with John Major, and continuing in opposition with William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, have struggled with real or perceived factions in the Parliamentary and national party to determine what parts of her heritage should be retained or jettisoned.[citation needed]

Thatcher is credited by Ronald Reagan with persuading him that Mikhail Gorbachev was sincere in his desire to reform and liberalise the Soviet Union.[citation needed] The resulting thaw in East-West relations helped to end the Cold War. In recognition of this, Lady Thatcher was awarded the 1998 Ronald Reagan Freedom Award by Mrs. Nancy Reagan. President Ronald Reagan, who was not able to attend the ceremony, was a longtime friend of Lady Thatcher.[82]

In February 2007, she became the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to be honoured with a statue in the House of Commons while still alive. The statue is made of bronze and stands opposite her political hero and predecessor, Winston Churchill.[83] The statue, by sculptor Antony Dufort, shows her as if she were addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched.[84] Thatcher said she was thrilled with it.[85]


Songs
Thatcher was the subject or the inspiration for a number of protest songs. In 1982, The Jam released Town Called Malice, containing the lyrics, 'It's enough to make you stop believing when tears come fast and furious in a Town Called Malice' - the song reached Number One in February 1982. The song, according to the BBC, was 'an elegy to humdrum everyday existence and broken dreams which barely disguised Paul Weller's fury about the state of Britain'.[86] Other songs included 'Stand Down Margaret' by The Beat (1980); 'Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards' on the album Workers Playtime by Billy Bragg (1988); 'Two Million Voices' by Angelic Upstarts (1981) - a reference to the numbers of unemployed people in Britain (a similar theme was the subject of 'One in Ten' by UB40 (1981)); 'Goose Green (Taking Tea With Pinochet)' by Christy Moore; 'Margaret On The Guillotine' from the album 'Viva Hate' by Morrissey; Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert on the album The Final Cut by Pink Floyd; 'Sowing the Seeds of Love' by Tears for Fears (1989); and, even as late as 1991, 'Wonderland' (from the album Stars) by Simply Red.

'Tramp the Dirt Down' recorded by Elvis Costello, contains the lyrics

Well I hope I don’t die too soon
I pray the lord my soul to save
Oh I’ll be a good boy, I’m trying so hard to behave
Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live
Long enough to savour
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

TV, films and plays
In March 2007, Variety reported that the makers of the Oscar-winning drama The Queen were planning a film on Thatcher's days leading up to the Falklands War. As of late summer 2007, no stars have been attached to the project, which is still in planning stages.[87]

In October 2007, Maggie's End, a satirical play set in the immediate aftermath of her death, and written by Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood, examined the contrasting emotions generated by the Thatcher legacy.[88] She also appeared as a major character in The Falklands Play.

In June 2008 the BBC screened The Long Walk to Finchley, covering Thatcher’s life from her early twenties to mid-thirties.

In April 2008 plans were announced for a TV drama, Thatcher, focusing on her final year in power. Filming is scheduled to begin in summer 2008, with Lindsay Duncan starring in the title role.[89] Also starring are Ian McDiarmid as husband Denis Thatcher, James Fox as Charles Powell, Robert Hardy as Willie Whitelaw, Philip Jackson as Bernard Ingham, Kevin McNally as Ken Clarke, Oliver Cotton as Michael Heseltine, [90] John Sessions as Geoffrey Howe, Michael Cochrane as Alan Clark, Michael Maloney as John Major, Roy Marsden as Norman Tebbit, Nigel Le Vaillant as Ted Heath, Nicholas Le Prevost as Douglas Hurd and Rosemary Leach as HM The Queen. [91]


Titles and honours

The arms of Margaret Thatcher. The admiral represents the Falklands War, the image of Sir Isaac Newton her background as a chemist and her birth town Grantham.
Styles from birth
Styles and titles Baroness Thatcher has held from birth, in chronological order:

Miss Margaret Roberts (13 October 1925 – 13 December 1951)
Mrs Denis Thatcher (13 December 1951 – 8 October 1959)
Mrs Denis Thatcher, MP (8 October 1959 – 22 June 1970)
The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher, MP (22 June 1970 – 7 December 1990)
The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher, OM, MP (7 December 1990 – 4 February 1991)
The Rt Hon. Lady Thatcher, OM, MP (4 February 1991 – 16 March 1992)
The Rt Hon. Lady Thatcher, OM (16 March 1992 – 26 June 1992)
The Rt Hon. The Baroness Thatcher, OM, PC (26 June 1992 – 22 April 1995)
The Rt Hon. The Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC (since 22 April 1995)

Honours
Lady of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (LG)
Member of the Order of Merit (OM)
Member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council (PC)
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
Honorary member of the Carlton Club, a gentlemen's club, and the first woman entitled to full membership rights.
Honorary patron of the Heritage Foundation[92]
In 1999 Thatcher was among 18 included in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, from a poll conducted of Americans.
In a 2006 list compiled by New Statesman, she was voted 5th in the list of 'Heroes of our time'.[93]
She was also named a 'Hero of Freedom' by the libertarian magazine Reason.[94]
Lady Thatcher is expected to be granted the rare honour of a state funeral when she dies.[95]

Foreign honours
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom
Patron of the Heritage Foundation
Ronald Reagan Freedom Award

Chancellorships
Buckingham University (1992–1998)
College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA (1993–2000)

Commemorations
Falkland Islands
Margaret Thatcher Day (public holiday), 10 January
Thatcher Drive, Stanley
South Georgia
Thatcher Peninsula

















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UK miners' strike (1984–1985)
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The miners' strike of 1984 – 1985 was a major industrial action affecting the British coal industry. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and its defeat significantly weakened the British trades union movement.

Coal was a nationalised industry and, as in most of Europe, was heavily subsidised. A number of mines in the United Kingdom were profitable and remained open after the strike, including some operating as of 2007[1], but there were also a number of mines that were unprofitable and the government wanted to close. In addition, many mines required efficiency improvements in order to attain or increase their profitability, which was to be done by means of increased mechanisation. Many unions resisted this as it would necessarily result in job cuts.

The strike became a symbolic struggle, since the miners' union was one of the strongest in the country. The strike ended with the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) by the Conservative government, which then proceeded to consolidate its free market programme. The political power of the NUM was broken permanently, and some years later the Labour Party moved away from its traditional socialist agenda. The dispute exposed deep divisions in British society and caused considerable bitterness, especially in Northern England and in South Wales where several mining communities were destroyed. Ten deaths resulted from events around the strike, which is exceptional in the history of British industrial relations.

Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 Pit closures announced
1.2 Action begins
1.3 The question of a pre-strike ballot
1.4 NACODS
1.5 'Scabs and blacklegs'
1.6 Government action
1.7 Observation of the strike
1.8 Orgreave and other confrontations
1.9 The strike fades
1.10 The formal end
1.11 Consequences
1.12 MI5 'counter-subversion'
1.13 Public opinion and the Media
2 Variation in observing the strike
3 After the strike
4 The strike in films and books
5 Popular songs about the strike
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 See also
10 External links



[edit] History
A strike nearly occurred in 1981, when the government had a similar plan to close twenty-three pits, though the threat of a strike was then enough to force the government to back down.[2] It was widely believed that a confrontation had only been averted in the short-run and the Yorkshire miners passed a resolution that a strike should take place if any pit was threatened with closure for reasons other than exhaustion or geological difficulties. In 1982 the members accepted a Government offer of a 9.3 percent raise, rejecting their leaders' call for a strike authorization. [3] In 1983, the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor as head of the National Coal Board (the UK statutory corporation that controlled coal mining). He had previously been head of the British Steel Corporation, which, according to one of Thatcher's biographers, he had turned from one of the least efficient steel-makers in Europe to one of the most efficient, nearly bringing the company into profit.[4] However, this was achieved at the expense of a halving of the workforce in the space of two years. This reputation raised the expectation that jobs would be cut on a similar scale in mining, and confrontations between MacGregor and the leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill, seemed inevitable.


[edit] Pit closures announced
In 1984, the National Coal Board announced that an agreement reached after the 1974 miners' strike had become obsolete, and that in order to rationalise government subsidisation of industry they intended to close 20 coal mines. Twenty thousand jobs would be lost, and many communities in the north of England and in Wales would lose their primary source of employment. Although not widely known at the time, the Thatcher government had prepared against a repeat of the effective '74 industrial action by stock-piling coal.


[edit] Action begins
Sensitive to the impact of the proposed closures in their own areas, miners in various coal fields began strike action. In the Yorkshire coal field strike action began when workers at the Manvers complex walked out over the lack of consultation. Over 6,000 miners were already on strike when a local ballot led to strike action from 5 March at Cortonwood Colliery at Brampton Bierlow, and at Bullcliffe Wood colliery, near Ossett. What had prompted the 5 March action was the further announcement by the Coal Board that five pits were to be subject to 'accelerated closure' within just five weeks; the other three were at Herrington in County Durham, Snowdown in Kent and Polmaise in Scotland. On the next day pickets from the Yorkshire area appeared at pits in the Nottinghamshire coal field (one of those least threatened by pit closures). On 12 March 1984 Arthur Scargill, president of the NUM, declared that the strikes in the various coal fields were to be a national strike and called for strike action from NUM members in all coal fields.


[edit] The question of a pre-strike ballot
The issue of whether a ballot was needed for a national strike was very complicated after the actions of previous NUM leader Joe Gormley. When wage reforms were rejected by two national ballots, Gormley declared that each region could decide on these reforms on their own accord; his decisions had been upheld by courts on appeal. Scargill did not call a ballot for national strike action, perhaps due to uncertainty over the outcome. Instead, he attempted to start the strike through allowing each region to call its own strikes, imitating Gormley's strategy over wage reforms; it was argued that 'safe' regions should not be allowed to ballot other regions out of jobs. This decision was upheld by another vote five weeks into the strike.[5] Many miners, especially at the threatened pits, were also opposed to a ballot as they take some time to organise and campaign for, and there was some urgency due to the programme of accelerated closure within five weeks. There was a fear that strike supporters would refuse to take part in a ballot. Critics point out that his policy of letting each region decide seemed inconsistent with the threatened expulsion of the Nottinghamshire branch after 20,000 out of 27,000 miners in the county voted against the strike.

The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher enforced a recent law that required unions to ballot members on strike action. On 19 July 1984, Thatcher said in Parliament that giving in to the miners would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob; she referred to the striking miners as 'the enemy within' who did not share the values of the British people. 'We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty'. On the day after the Orgreave pickets of 29 May, which saw 5000 pickets engaged in violent clashes with the police, Thatcher said in a speech:

'I must tell you that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed. It must not succeed. There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it...The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.'[6]
Arthur Scargill's response to the incident was:

'We've had riot shields, we've had riot gear, we've had police on horseback charging into our people, we've had people hit with truncheons and people kicked to the ground... The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state.'[7]
In August, two miners from Manton colliery who protested that the strike was not 'official' without a ballot took the NUM to court. In September the High Court ruled that the NUM had breached its own constitution by calling a strike without first holding a ballot. Scargill was fined £1,000 (which was paid for him by an anonymous donor) and the NUM was fined £200,000. When the union refused to pay its fine, its assets were ordered to be sequestrated but they had been transferred abroad.[8] By the end of January 1985 around £5 million of NUM assets had been recovered.[9]

As a result of this decision, miners were not entitled to state benefits, thus forcing the majority of miners and their families to survive the strike on handouts, donations from the European 'food mountain' and other charities. Being without benefits had more serious consequences for the miners and their families. Their children were not entitled to free school meals or social security help with school uniforms. Poverty and hunger became rife in the mining heartlands. This forced many miners into a dilemma: return to work, and be viewed as a 'scab'; or maintain support and live primarily on donations, which is what the majority did.

A wide network of several hundred miners' support groups were set up, often led by miners' 'wives and girlfriends groups'. These support groups organised thousands of collections outside supermarkets, communal kitchens, benefit concerts etc. in an attempt to help the miners to win the strike.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) did not support the NUM, seeming to support Thatcher's call for a secret ballot. Solidarity action was taken, however, by railworkers and by dockers, who were both threatened with dismissal if they refused to handle coal. The Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU), an electricians' union, actively opposed the strike; Ian MacGregor's autobiography detailed how its leaders supplied the government with valuable information that allowed the strike to be defeated. Steelworkers' unions did not support the strike, which was widely resented by the miners, after the support that they had given the steel strike in 1980 and after concessions were made by the NUM on deliveries of coke to steel works during the strike. The National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS) nearly went on strike in September; this was one point where the balance seemed to be tipping in favour of the miners, but Scargill's subsequent contempt of court orders caused the union to be fined and lost wider support. MacGregor later admitted that, had NACODS gone ahead with their strike, a compromise would probably have been forced on the Coal Board. Files later made public showed that the Government had an informant inside NACODS, passing them information about the negotiations.[10]


[edit] NACODS
The fact that NACODS did not strike, created an even worse situation in the mines themselves — with NACODS deputies being labelled as 'scabs' by union hardliners. On 23 October, 1,000 pickets attempted to prevent a sole bath attendant from entering the threatened Emley Moor colliery.[11] Some of the engineers felt that going on strike would actually work against the cause, as geological problems could develop that would prevent the pit from reopening and defeat the whole goal of opposing closures; however, hardline strikers were not always sympathetic to this line of argument. The first two pits to close in 1985 were Barrow colliery at Worsborough Bridge and Acton Hall colliery at Featherstone, and they were both closed not due to being 'uneconomic' but due to being unsafe for the miners to return to work.


[edit] 'Scabs and blacklegs'
The refusal of some miners to support the strike was seen as a betrayal by those who did go on strike. As Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire share a boundary, and as the former was generally observing the strike and the latter generally opposing it, the scene was set for many bitter confrontations in the area. Instances of violence directed against working miners by striking miners were reported. In some cases, this extended to attacks on the property, the families and the pets of working miners.[12] Many miners were also very hostile to any journalists or reporters who came near pitheads. The Sun newspaper took a very anti-strike position during the strike, as did the Daily Mail, and even the Daily Mirror became hostile as the strike went on. Only left-wing newspapers such as the Morning Star, Class War, Workers Power, Militant, Socialist Organiser and Socialist Worker were constantly supportive of the striking miners.


[edit] Government action
The Government mobilised the police (including Metropolitan Police squads from London) to attempt to stop further attempts by the pickets to stop miners who wanted to work (some claim this involved intimidation and violence). Police attempted to stop pickets travelling between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, an action which led to many protests.[1] The government claimed these were to safeguard individual civil rights, many miners have seen this as class warfare, with the police as the 'special bodies of armed men' that Friedrich Engels described. During the industrial action 11,291 people were arrested and 8,392 charged with offences such as breach of the peace and obstructing the highway. Former striking miners have alleged that soldiers were used as police on the picket lines. While no evidence of this has been produced, it remains a point of contention today, and in many former mining areas antipathy towards the police remains strong. The Government was criticised[13] for abusing its power when it ruled that local police might be too sympathetic to the miners to take action against the strike, and instead brought in forces from distant counties. The MPs for Doncaster North and Castleford and Pontefract both raised concerns in Parliament over suggestions that the police had asked miners held in custody about their political allegiances.


[edit] Observation of the strike
At the beginning, the strike was almost universally observed in the coalfields of Yorkshire, Scotland, the North-East and Kent. Lancashire had originally been lukewarm on the strike, but, ignoring the wishes of the working members, its leaders announced on 22 March that the strike was official.[14] South Wales contained many miners resentful over how their previous attempts to launch strikes in support of the steel workers and health workers had been largely unsupported, but there were enough pits in the region under threat of closure to gain momentum for the strike in the area. Support was less strong in the Midlands and North Wales. In Nottinghamshire most of the pits had modern equipment and had large coal reserves; most of the Nottinghamshire miners remained at work and the Nottinghamshire NUM disagreed with the decision to launch a national strike without a ballot. The 1977 industry reforms had given Nottinghamshire miners larger salaries than workers in any of the other counties and they were unwilling to give up their daily pay. Many within the NUM condemned them as strikebreakers, and the Nottinghamshire branch, heavily aided by the Thatcher government, eventually broke away to form the core of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Since the end of the strike the UDM and the NUM have been involved in numerous court cases concerning financial irregularities.


[edit] Orgreave and other confrontations
A widely reported clash during the Miners' Strike took place at the Orgreave Colliery near Rotherham on 18 June 1984. This confrontation between striking miners and police, dubbed by some 'The Battle of Orgreave', was the subject of a TV re-enactment in 2001, conceived and organised by artist Jeremy Deller and recorded by Mike Figgis for Channel 4. Violence flared after police on horse-back charged the miners with truncheons drawn and inflicted serious injuries upon several individuals. In 1991, the South Yorkshire Police were forced to pay out £425,000 to thirty-nine miners who were arrested in the events at the incident.[15]

Other less well known, but equally bloody riots also took place, for example, in Maltby, South Yorkshire.[16]

These confrontations contained organised police lines including charges by police and police mounted on horseback. In some cases miners organised themselves against this. Others argued that violent acts by the workers would be 'twisted' by the media and used as a reason to revoke workers rights; the BBC did just that as they edited footage of confrontations between police and workers.


[edit] The strike fades
Events that prompted the end of the strike included a brutal assault on a working miner in Castleford in November, the manslaughter of a taxi driver escorting a working miner to work in South Wales in December, and the distraction of attention to the famine in Ethiopia. The strike failed to have the widespread impact of earlier stoppages which had led to blackouts and power cuts in the 1970s; electricity companies were able to maintain supplies throughout the winter, the time of biggest demand.[17]

As the strike went on, a series of media reports cast doubt on the integrity of senior NUM officials. There were allegations that Scargill had met with Libyan agents in Paris,[18] and the Daily Mirror and TV programme 'The Cook Report' claimed that Scargill and the NUM had received money from the Libyan government; this was particularly damaging coming soon after the murder of policewoman Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London. Roy Greenslade, the Mirror's editor at the time, later said he believes his paper's allegations were false even though Scargill never sued over any of the stories.[19]

It was also claimed that Arthur Scargill stole money donated by Russian miners during the strike. The NUM received payments from the trade unions of Afghanistan (which was Soviet-occupied at the time). Soviet miners who sent money to the NUM would not have been able to attain convertible currency without the support of the Government of the Soviet Union and Thatcher claims she has seen documentary evidence that suggests that Soviet-leader Mikhail Gorbachev authorised these payments.[20]

The hint of a link obviously tarred Scargill and yet trust in him amongst striking miners never seemed to wane. Scargill was perceived as a militant hero to the unions,[21] and as a Marxist thug by some of the mainstream press. Scargill always denied these accusations and accused the government of fuelling this smear campaign. However, the ex-head of MI5 Dame Stella Rimington said in her autobiography, 'We in MI5 limited our investigations to those who were using the strike for subversive purposes.'[22] The union's funds had also run too low to pay for pickets' transportation and many miners had been unable to pay for heating over the winter. Some mining families resorted to scavenging for coal on slag heaps, a futile task as most of the 'slag' was fool's gold and mining effluence. Many found themselves arrested for trespass and theft at times.


[edit] The formal end
The strike ended on March 3, 1985, nearly a year after it had begun. Some workers had returned to work of their own accord, a symbolic victory for the Government, although ministers later admitted that the figures of returnees were inflated. In order to save the union, the NUM voted, by a tiny margin, to return to work without a new agreement with management. In the special conference that ended the strike, only Kent voted to carry on. Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and South Derbyshire did not send any delegates to the conference.

The end of the strike was felt as a terrible blow to loyal NUM members, though many understood that the extreme poverty being suffered after a year without wages was difficult to hold. Indeed, in many areas striking miners made a distinction between those who had returned to work after only a couple of months strike, and those who felt forced to return to work for the sake of their children, many months later.

In several pits, miners' wives groups organised the distribution of carnations at the gates on the day the miners went back, the flower that symbolises the hero. Many pits marched back to work heads high behind brass bands.


[edit] Consequences
David Wilkie was a British taxi driver killed on 30 November 1984. He had been taking a non-striking miner to work in the Merthyr Vale Colliery in Merthyr, South Wales when two striking miners dropped a concrete post onto his car from a road bridge above. He died at the scene. The two miners served a prison sentence for manslaughter.

Six pickets died during the strike and three young men, all less than 16, died from picking coal in the winter. The deaths of pickets David Jones and Joe Green continue to this day to be viewed with suspicion. Jones was killed in Ollerton, Nottinghamshire, by a flying brick during fighting between police, pickets, and non-striking miners,[23] while Green was hit by a truck while picketing at Ferrybridge power station in Yorkshire.[14] The NUM names its memorial lectures after the two.[24]

The impact of the strike was nowhere near as hard-hitting as previous strikes such as those of the early 1970s. With most homes equipped with oil or gas central heating and the railways long since converted to diesel and electricity, the only remaining significant sector of Britain's national infrastructure that was still reliant upon coal was the National Grid. The problem of potential power-shortages as a result of a coal strike had been recognised by the Thatcher government which insisted that Britain's coal-fired power stations create their own stockpiles of coal which would keep them running throughout any industrial action. This policy turned out to be incredibly successful during the miner's strike as the power stations were able to keep production going even through the winter of 1984-85. As a result of this it is arguable that the only people who suffered or lost out as a result of the strike were the miners themselves.

During the strike many pits permanently lost their customers. Much of the immediate problem facing the industry was due to the economic recession in the early 1980s. However, there was also extensive competition within the world coal market as well as a concerted move towards oil and gas for power production. The Government's own policy, known as the Ridley Plan was to reduce Britain's reliance on coal; they also claimed that coal could be imported from Australia, America and Colombia more cheaply than it could be extracted from beneath Britain.[25] The strike subsequently emboldened the NCB to accelerate the closure of many pits on economic grounds.

Football hooliganism, another big social issue of the mid-1980s in England, saw several vitriolic rivalries between supporters of clubs on either side of the strike. As most Nottinghamshire miners did not strike, the county's football teams often became the bitter enemies of Yorkshire and Derbyshire sides[original research?]; the local derby between Chesterfield and Mansfield Town often saw running battles between the supporters, with Mansfield nicknamed the 'scabs' by many Chesterfield fans, there was also big rivarys in the divide of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, as Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United and Nottingham Forest having the biggest rivalrys after the strike as they were all the biggest and most well supported clubs in the area, Sheffield football fans of today still call the people of Nottingham 'Scabs'.[citation needed]


[edit] MI5 'counter-subversion'
Dame Stella Rimington (Director-General of MI5, 1992 – 1996) published an autobiography in 2001 in which she revealed MI5 'counter-subversion' exercises against the NUM and the striking miners, which included the tapping of union leaders' phones. However, she denied that the agency had informers in the NUM, specifically denying that then chief executive Roger Windsor had been an agent.[26]


[edit] Public opinion and the Media
Public opinion during the strike was divided and varied greatly in different regions. Overall, the government generally had more support than the miners.

When asked in a Gallup poll in July 1984 whether their sympathies lay mainly with the employers or the miners, 40% said employers; 33% were for the miners; 19% were for neither and 8% did not know. When asked the same question in December 5 – 10 1984, 51% had most sympathy for the employers; 26% for the miners; 18% for neither and 5% did not know.[27] When asked in July 1984 whether they approved or disapproved of the methods used by the miners, 15% approved; 79% disapproved and 6% did not know. When asked the same question in December 5 – 10 1984, 7% approved; 88% disapproved and 5% did not know.[27] In July 1984, when asked whether they thought the miners were using responsible or irresponsible methods, 12% said responsible; 78% said irresponsible and 10% did not know. When asked the same question in August 1984, 9% said responsible; 84% said irresponsible and 7% did not know.[27]

The media at the time however made no serious attempt to cover the NUMs economic arguments until after the strike had ended.[28] The government's public relations machine and the NCB worked closely with the establishment and had access to effectively unlimited resources which had the effect of suppressing these economic arguments. Towers, writing in the Industrial Relations Journal immediately after the strike in 1985, gives several explanations as to why this occurred. 'One explanation ... was the obsessive reporting of the 'violence' of generally relatively unarmed men and some women who, in the end, offered no serious challenge to the truncheons, shields and horses of a well-organised, optimally deployed police force.'[28]

Socialist groups also claimed that the mainstream media deliberately misrepresented the miners' strike, saying of The Sun's reporting of the strike: 'The day-to-day reporting involved more subtle attacks, or a biased selection of facts and a lack of alternative points of view. These things arguably had a far bigger negative effect on the miners' cause'.[29][30]


[edit] Variation in observing the strike
Levels of Solidarity in the 1984-85 strike by area From Miners on Strike, Andrew J. Richards, 1996. Area Manpower % on strike 19/11/84 % on strike 14/2/85 % on strike 1/3/85
Cokeworks 4,500 95.6 73 65
Kent 3,000 95.9 95 93
Lancashire 6,500 61.5 49 38
Leicestershire 1,900 10.5 10 10
Midlands 19,000 32.3 15 23
North Derbyshire 10,500 66.7 44 40
North-East 23,000 95.5 70 60
North Wales 1,000 35 10 10
Nottinghamshire 30,000 20 14 22
Scotland 13,100 93.9 75 69
South Derbyshire 3,000 11 11 11
South Wales 21,500 99.6 98 93
Workshops 9,000 55.6 - 50
Yorkshire 56,000 97.3 90 83
NATIONAL 196,000 73.7 64 60

No figures available for the 1000 N.C.B. staff employees.


[edit] After the strike
The coal industry was finally privatised in December 1994 to create a firm named 'R.J.B. Mining', now known as UK Coal. Between the end of the strike and privatisation, pit closures continued with a particularly intense group of closures in the early '90s. There were 15 former British Coal deep mines left in production at the time of privatisation,[31] however by March 2005 there were only 8 major deep mines left.[32] Since then, the last pit in Northumberland, Ellington Colliery at Ellington, has closed whilst pits at Rossington and Harworth have been mothballed. During the strike, Scargill had constantly claimed that the government had a long-term plan to reduce the industry in this way. The miners' will to resist deteriorated rapidly and there was a very apathetic response to the intensive period of closures in the early 1990s, despite evidence that there was much more sympathy for the miners then than in 1984.[citation needed]

Nottinghamshire miners had hoped that their pits were safe, but they too were mostly closed in the 1985-1994 period. This was widely resented as a betrayal of the promises that had been made to working miners in the strike; they had been told that their jobs were safe and their industry had a future. The subsequent behaviour of the Conservative government was seen by most on the left and in the 'heavy' industries to confirm fears about how they had been used to divide the miners' union.

The effect of the strike has been long and bitter for many areas that depended on coal. Enduring a year without strike pay (as the NUM would only provide money to picketing strikers) and their being denied social security benefits as a result of a new law that made such benefits unavailable to illegal strikers (whilst at the same time new laws passed by the Thatcher government in preparation for a confrontation with the NUM assumed that any benefits that were available to strikers' dependents would take into consideration strike payments paid to strikers by the union) forced many miners into debt. The closure of pits also affected engineering, railways, electricity and steel production, which were all interlinked with the coal industry. Unemployment reached as high as 50% in some villages over the next decade. Suicides rose significantly. Migration out of old mining areas left many villages full of derelict houses and earning the reputation as ghost towns or pit villages. The tensions between those who had supported the strike and those who had not, lasted for many years afterwards (and sometimes continue today, having been passed down the generations); 'scab' was a word passed down generations, eroding the strong sense of unity that had previously existed in such communities.

The 1994 European Union enquiry into poverty classified Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country and one of the poorest in the E.U. The county of South Yorkshire was made into an Objective 1 development zone and every single ward in the City of Wakefield district in West Yorkshire was classified as in need of special assistance. In, Merseyside, the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley, which had contained the 'Cronton' pit (although Cronton had been closed just prior to the onset of the strike and was undergoing salvaging operations during the early months of the strike, at the end of which operations Cronton miners, having been transferred to neighbouring collieries, mostly joined the strike), has constantly been named amongst the most deprived areas of both Britain and Europe, as has the neighbouring Metropolitan Borough of St Helens in which Sutton Manor, Bold and Parkside collieries were situated.

Other areas have recovered and now boast a good standard of living. Recovery was quickest in areas where the economy was more diverse, such as in Kent or the West Midlands. Brodsworth boasted the largest mine in the country and is also enjoying relative affluence. Old colliery sites have often been turned into new industrial parks or retail parks. Xscape is built on the former site of Castleford's Glasshoughton colliery. The Miners strike continues to divide former miner communities, resentment and bitterness often running very deep and even across generations. A murder in the former mining town of Annesley, Nottinghamshire in 2004 was a result of an argument between former members of the NUM and the UDM, an indication of how high feelings still run.

While the strike was on, public opinion in the Home Counties (except Kent) was mixed, whereas in the Welsh valleys, Yorkshire and other areas actually affected by the strike, support was high. It has become a symbol of the perceived indifference that the Tory Party under Thatcher had to problems of unemployment and poverty. The Daily Mirror, which had been hostile towards the strike at the time, began a campaign to raise awareness of the social deprivation in the coalfields. The film Brassed Off has been much more successful than was expected, having even gained recognition in America. The Coalfields Regeneration Trust[33] is an organisation that donates money to investment within the old mining areas.

Although mining is now only a very small industry in Britain, it is more productive than in France, Germany or in the United States[34][35][clarify]

Andrew J. Richard's book, Miners on Strike, dedicated a chapter to how unusual it was in 1984 for a large-scale strike to be launched in protest at job cuts. In Britain, trade unions had traditionally launched strikes for claims on wage rises and rights at work, but strikes in defence of jobs had been very rare. Since the example of the 1984-5 miners' strike, union leaders have been much more likely to call for action in defence of jobs. Coincidentally, 1984 was the year when Harvard economists Richard B. Freeman and James Medoff published the book 'What do Unions do?', where such a strategy was seen as good for productivity and less of a pressure on inflation.


[edit] The strike in films and books
The UK miners' strike was the background for the critically acclaimed 2000 film Billy Elliot. Several scenes depict the chaos at the picket lines, clashes between armies of police and striking miners, and the shame associated with crossing the picket line. It has since been made into a successful West End musical.

It is also involved in the background to the plot in Brassed Off, which is set ten years after the strike when all the miners have the lost the will to resist and accept the closure of their pit with resignation. Brassed Off was set in the fictional 'Grimley', a thinly disguised version of the hard-hit ex-mining village of Grimethorpe, where some of it was filmed.

The satirical Comic Strip Presents episode The Strike (1988) depicts an idealistic Welsh screenwriter's growing dismay as his hard-hitting and grittily realistic script about the strike is mutilated by a Hollywood producer into an all-action thriller starring Al Pacino (played by Peter Richardson) and Meryl Streep (played by Jennifer Saunders). The 1984 episode of the 1996 BBC television drama serial Our Friends in the North revolves around the events of the strike, and the scenes of clashes between the police and striking miners were re-created using many of those who had taken part in the actual real-life events on the miners' side. In 2005 BBC One broadcast the one-off drama Faith, written by William Ivory and starring Jamie Draven and Maxine Peake. It viewed the strike from the perspective of both the police and the miners.

A 2005 book called 'GB84' by David Peace combines fictional accounts of pickets, union officials and strike-breakers. Graphic details are provided of many of the strike's major events. It also suggests that the British Intelligence services were involved in undermining the strike, including in the alleged suggestion of a link between Scargill and Gaddafi.

As mentioned above, in 2001, British visual artist Jeremy Deller worked with historical societies, battle re-enactors, and dozens of the people who participated in the violent 1984 clashes of picketers and police to reconstruct and re-enact the Battle of Orgreave. A documentary about the re-enactment was produced by Deller and director Mike Figgis and was broadcast on British television; and Deller also published a book called The English Civil War Part II documenting both the project and the historical events it investigates (Artangel Press, 2002). Involving the re-enactors, who would normally recreate Viking battles or medieval wars, was a way for Deller to situate the recent and controversial Battle of Orgreave (and labour politics themselves) as part of mainstream history.[36]

G. Mckie's poem, Ode to Heseltine, was written after the announcement to close 31 collieries in 1992, which betrayed previous promises to miners who had worked on during the strike.[37]


[edit] Popular songs about the strike
The strike has been the subject of songs by many music groups. Of the more well known; Manic Street Preachers Design for life, the band Pulp recorded a song 'Last day of the miners' strike', Funeral for a Friend wrote a song called 'History', and Ewan MacColl wrote the song 'Daddy, What did you do in the strike?'. Newcastle native Sting recorded a song about the strike called 'We Work the Black Seam' for his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, in 1985.Billy Bragg's ' Which Side Are You On?,' neatly encapsulated the strikers' feeling of betrayal by the perceived indifference of wider elements within British society.

The folk song 'The Ballad of '84' contains the view that David Jones and Joe Green died as a result of the police's handling of events. U2's song 'Red Hill Mining Town' from their Joshua Tree album is about the strike, according to lead singer Bono. On 7 July 1984 the anarcho-punk band Crass played their final show in Aberdare, Wales at a benefit for striking miners.

Chumbawamba recorded several pieces in support of the miners. These include the cassette only 'Common Ground', recorded as a benefit for the miners. They also recorded a song called 'Fitzwilliam', which described the Yorkshire village of that name after the strike. Fitzwilliam eventually saw around a third of its housing stock demolished due to the dominance of derelict properties. They also made a song called 'Frickley' about the football club Frickley Athletic, which referenced the continued distrust of the police by those in mining areas after the strike.

The strike also inspired two entire albums. Freq, recorded in 1984 by ex-Hawkwind singer and lyricist Robert Calvert. Alternating with songs such as 'All the machines are quiet' and 'Work song' are five short tracks taken from speeches and demonstrations recorded amongst the miners themselves. The industrial group Test Department recorded the 1984 album Shoulder to Shoulder, in collaboration with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir. The album combined harsh industrial rhythms with the traditional songs sung by the male choir, and also included poetry and speeches from the strike.

Soul/punk/pop/rockabilly band The Redskins, who were notable for their left-wing views and lyrics, supported the struggle of the miners and the union. Their song 'Keep on Keepin' On' was a rallying support for the strike, and the band played benefits in support of the strike. The punk/Oi! band Angelic Upstarts recorded a song supportive of the miners called 'One More Day'.