As a trip to any London newsstand this week will tell you, Margaret Thatcher's political mission was an inherently polarizing one. To her fans she remains the very embodiment of self-assured conservatism, the woman who unapologetically celebrated the values of patriotism and free enterprise. To her foes she remains Thatcher the Milk Snatcher, the sneering prima donna who slashed away at the British welfare state, spared little time for the poor, and opened the way to an era of excess and greed.
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Both of these images are caricatures. Yes, the late Thatcher was a leader of extraordinary single-mindedness -- she had to be, given her status as a woman who aimed to have her way in the overwhelmingly male world of British postwar politics. She won election as British prime minister in 1979 and held onto the office for 11 years -- longer than any of her democratic counterparts during the twentieth century. Her calculated flintiness cemented her popular image as the "Iron Lady" (a nickname originally bestowed her by a Soviet newspaper that was attempting to mock her, but which she characteristically embraced instead). In reality, however, she was also a practical political operator with a sharp sense of the limits imposed by public opinion. Indeed, not all of her policies were as radical as her myth suggests. Here are a few misconceptions:
"She Hated Big Government."
Up to a point. One of Thatcher's signature achievements was her privatization program, which took some of the key industries that had been nationalized by the Labour Party in 1945 and restored them to private ownership. British Gas, the telephone company, and industrial firms were removed from state control, their shares sold off to investors. The idea was to get government out of the direct day-to-day management of companies that were better off exposed to the bracing discipline of the markets. A similar logic motivated her policy of selling off hundreds of thousands of public housing units to the people who lived in them -- transforming them from tenants to homeowners. Bureaucratic regulation of any kind of economic activity was a red flag to her, and she slashed away at red tape wherever she found it. One of her most important moves after becaming prime minister in 1979 was the abolition of exchange controls, an important precondition for the later "Big Bang" (her late 1980s deregulation push that almost instantly transformed London into a major European financial center.)
All of this was dramatic enough, and certainly reduced the extent to which the government intervened in the lives of ordinary people. And yet she pointedly shied away from any radical restructuring of the core institutions of the "cradle-to-grave" welfare state that the Labourites had established three decades before her. She was especially reluctant to take on the National Health Service, the all-encompassing health-care system that remains a mainstay of British society today. Though she attempted a few piecemeal reforms of the NHS, she notably refused to expose it fully to market discipline, all too aware that the British public would never stand for that. Nor did she attempt any substantial changes in the system of old-age pensions or unemployment insurance.
Free-market economist Milton Friedman once described Thatcher's economic philosophy as that of a "19th-century liberal," but he couldn't have been more wrong. She was a thoroughly 20th-century reformer who understood that some functions of big government defied political remedies. And there was another problem: Thatcher's hatred of socialism sometimes clashed with her urge to reduce government involvement in the lives of citizens. Many city councils in Britain at the time were dominated by far-left Labour politicians, and Thatcher often found herself persuaded to use the powers of the national government to counter them -- thus sometimes drawing London into realms where it had previously remained aloof. Critics such as journalist Simon Jenkins note that, in this respect, she often proved more closely wedded to the "nanny state" than she was often willing to admit.
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