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Whether you are a true blue fan of the Iron Lady or will be
opening the bubbly at the celebratory party at Trafalgar Square on Saturday, it is worth getting your facts straight. So here are 7 thought-provoking myths which both sides ought to appreciate being punctured.
1) She killed manufacturing
British factories increased output by 7.5% during her premiership
. Output grew a further 4.9% by 1997. Curiously, it was under Labour that the decline hit. By the end of Brown’s tenure at Number 10, manufacturing output was lower than the day Thatcher left office. The manufacturing share of GDP fell almost continuously –
as it did in pretty much every Western nation.
2) “Everybody hates Thatcher”
A Guardian ICM
poll gives the Iron Lady a 16-point net-approval rating, with half of Brits saying she was “good for Britain”. And it’s not a
de mortuis bounce. In September
a YouGov poll revealed only two politicians in the nation were in net positive approval territory: Boris Johnson and Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron polled at minus 18, Ed Miliband at minus 29, and George Osborne at minus 53.
3) Scargill wished to negotiate
Thatcher went to war with the mining unions. But her adversary’s role is often overlooked. Arthur Scargill was the boss of the National Union of Mineworkers, and what sort of a man was he?
In an extraordinary interview with BBC 5Live in 2000, Scargill reminded us that he was a Stalinist who adamantly supported the USSR, and suggested the Russian gulags - in which millions perished - might not have existed (prompting the listener who’d asked him about it to draw a parallel with
David Irving’s holocaust denials). Famously, when asked how much losses a pit could make before being considered for closure, Scargill replied “the loss is without limits”.
On the eve of the strikes in 1984 energy minister Peter Walker put together a deal offering miners another job or a voluntary redundancy package, plus £800m investment in mining. He told Thatcher: “I think this meets every emotional issue the miners have. And it’s expensive, but not as expensive as a coal strike”. Thatcher replied “You know, I agree with you”.
Scargill turned down the offer, vetoed the expected ballot of miners to decide whether to strike, and, called a strike (Scargill
later wrote about his decision in the Guardian).
Scargill’s politics eventually
proved too extreme for his erstwhile political allies on the left, and he ended his career isolated and mocked by his fellow socialists. These days he declines to give interviews.
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4) The Belgrano should not have been sunk
Even the Argentine military don’t buy this myth. The misunderstanding comes from the nature of the 200-mile area Exclusion Zone. But the zone was a warning to neutral vessels, not an attempt to confine the conflict exclusively to the zone. Rear Admiral Allara, in charge of the Malvinas task force which included the Belgrano, said: “the entire South Atlantic was an operational theatre for both sides. We, as professionals, said it was just too bad that we lost the
Belgrano”. The Belgrano’s captain Hector Bonzo
confirmed: “‘It was an act of war, lamentably legal.”
Bonus tip: The Belgrano had been a US navy ship in a former life, and survived the attack on Pearl Harbor.
5) Thatcher started the end of the coal industry
Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who served from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976
closed 290 pits to Thatcher’s 160. In 1967
alone there were 12,900 forced redundancies.
Between 1957 and 1963, 264 pits also closed.
Source:
BBC
Closure of the pits
6) “There is no such thing as society”
Read the full quote and it is clear Thatcher meant the reverse. Here is the
full quote from an interview given to Women’s Own in 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… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”
7) She chose inflation over jobs
The Philips Curve plots unemployment against inflation. It illustrates the trade-off: as one falls the other rises, and vice versa. In healthy economies the curve is tight to the X and Y axes meaning both are low. In dysfunctional economies the trade-off exists, but both are high. Thatcher’s goal was to reduce inflation at the expense of unemployment, so that part is true. But her goal was to drag the UK’s Philips Curve back towards the X and Y axis. In plain English: she pursued low long-term unemployment and inflation at the cost of short-term unemployment. A more complicated trade-off than is commonly appreciated.
BONUS MYTH: She called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist”
One more myth: that Thatcher dismissed Nelson Mandela as a “terrorist”. We can find no evidence of this. What is usually quoted is her statement in 1987 when she described the ANC as a “terrorist organisation”.
