HOW many of today’s politicians will be provoking fierce arguments more than 30 years after leaving office and a decade after their death?
Love her or hate her, Margaret Thatcher had a bigger impact on the last 50 years than anyone else in politics.
One of the reasons I joined the Labour Party as a teenager in the 1980s was the impact her policies had on manufacturing jobs in the Black Country – but even I’ll admit what she got right.
Who today would disagree with her campaign for freedom that brought the Iron Curtain down and democracy to Eastern Europe?
She was right too, as Labour eventually accepted, about the need for Britain’s nuclear weapons.
People told her it couldn’t be done, but there was no way she wasn’t going to send the Task Force to reclaim the Falklands.
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That brought an end to Argentina’s dictatorship too.
Imagine the damage to Britain’s standing and influence without that determination.
No one can deny she believed in Britain, fought for our country’s values and refused to accept its best days were behind us.
And she was right to say the economy needed to change.
Back in the 70s, Britain was beset by high inflation, weak managers and intransigent unions.
But brutal deindustrialisation, the “Big Bang” boom in financial services and wholesale deregulation of the City laid the foundations of today’s unbalanced economy.
Towns in the Midlands and the North have never really recovered.
That’s one of the causes of the generations of unemployment and benefit culture we’re paying for now.
The miners had brought down Ted Heath’s government and she was determined to confront the unions and prevent it happening again.
After the 1978 Winter of Discontent left the dead unburied and rubbish piling up in the streets, most people thought the unions were too powerful. But dealing with miners’ leader Arthur Scargill was one thing – closing down the pits, putting so many miners out of work was quite another.
Without new jobs, communities centred around the pits have struggled ever since.
It has never been more important for us all to have the courage and determination to stand up for Britain and fight for its values.
Ian Austin
She privatised the utilities and said she was giving millions the chance to own shares, but energy bills soared and investment collapsed.
Even her favourite businessman, Employment Secretary Lord Young, said controls should have been enforced on prices and pay.
Council tenants wanted to own their homes, but failing to replace the housing she sold off with new ones for rent is one of the causes of the housing shortage today.
In all these she went too far — in some cases the medicine killed the patient. But it’s no use moaning about it now.
Important lesson
Instead, today’s politicians should think about how she won three elections in a row.
Labour lost time and again because they failed to understand the public, address their concerns and show they could be trusted to run the country.
And that’s one of the lessons she still teaches the two traditional parties today – listen to the public and answer the questions they’re asking.
As the Tories learned at the last election, if the public don’t trust you to run the economy and create jobs, or think you can’t defend our country’s borders, they won’t vote for you – it is as simple as that.
But the most important lesson is one she teaches us all . . .
With massive levels of immigration, hate marches on the streets, the woke Left who hate everything about our country, and Islamist extremists who hate the West, it has never been more important for us all to have the courage and determination to stand up for Britain and fight for its values.
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