'Turning Her Mind to 2000' : 10 Years at 10 Downing: Thatcher Still a Reformer

By DAN FISHER

May 1, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

LONDON —

Asked the other day if any special celebration was planned for the 10th anniversary this week of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s coming to power, one of her closest aides responded haughtily, “We’re not going to make a terrible song and dance about it.”

Other than a special dinner with her Cabinet, the aide said, it will be “a very workaday day.” In fact, he volunteered, rather than reflecting on her decade at 10 Downing St., “she is increasingly turning her mind to the kind of country she would like to see in the year 2000.”

It is a measure of her self-assurance--some would say arrogance--that Thatcher, who is already the longest-serving British prime minister in 160 years, is looking beyond the anniversary to the millennium.

Someday, the 63-year-old, third-term prime minister told Times of London columnist Robin Oakley, “there will come along a person who can do it better than I can . . . but I expect myself to do it for the fourth term.”

Given the badly divided state of Thatcher’s political opposition and the remarkable turnaround in Britain’s economic fortunes since she took the helm on May 4, 1979, even some of her bitterest critics would balk at betting against another term, which could keep her at No. 10 until 1997.

But despite a consensus that she is the most dominant British political personality since Winston Churchill, there are complaints that after a decade in power, some of the very traits that made her so successful are putting her out of step with the nation’s core values and its changing needs.

“Sometimes,” a prominent British banker said, speaking on condition of anonymity, “a person is right for a period of time.” In Thatcher’s case, he said, “we may have moved beyond that time.”

The prime minister is a revolutionary, intent on uprooting what she sees as the last socialist vestiges of Britain’s post-World War II welfare state, said the banker, who has met with Thatcher several times. And as with most revolutionaries, her forte is singleness of purpose rather than sweeping social vision. But now, the banker said, Britain has reached the point “where we need a vision of a new society once wealth has been achieved.”

Critics, including some in her Conservative Party, worry that what was an admirable determination to make unpopular but necessary changes in Thatcher’s early years has now run amok.

A recent editorial in the Independent likened her to “someone who is given charge of a house and decides to spring clean it from top to bottom, including many rooms which already look quite clean enough to their inhabitants.” Even the conservative Telegraph has suggested that she could do with a vacation.

Visceral Brand of Patriotism

In foreign affairs, a field in which she is credited with almost single-handedly restoring Britain’s badly damaged prestige, her visceral brand of patriotism is seen by some as being awkwardly out of step with the liberalism propelling the rest of Western Europe toward becoming a single market in 1992.

Her nationalist stand may be politically popular at home, in this view, but it threatens to leave Britain again on the outside looking in, with dangerously little influence in a process of European unification that will affect it deeply.

Lately, suggestions have even been raised that the vaunted Thatcher “economic miracle” is largely a mirage and that a recent spurt in the rate of inflation and Britain’s trade deficit are forerunners of worse to come.

In a rare public display of government disunity, Thatcher’s secretary of state for Wales, Peter Walker, took a pointed swipe at her policies the other day, arguing that it was a mistake to rely on “one simplistic economic dogma.”

And most of the so-called quality press has questioned whether the prime minister was losing her grip last month when, after the birth of her first grandchild, she proclaimed regally, “We have become a grandmother.”

Frustrated Backbiting

To the prime minister and her supporters, the criticism is just so much frustrated backbiting by people who are unwilling to face the fact that, as one aide put it, “the provincial shopkeeper’s daughter can do things a damn sight better than they could.”

Certainly, this is a country that has been transformed during the Thatcher decade.

The Britain for which she took responsibility in 1979 was derided as the “sick man of Europe.” Such was its economic malaise that “the British disease” had become a synonym for industrial inefficiency. Just three years earlier, in order to get an International Monetary Fund loan, the country had been forced into a form of economic probation usually reserved for countries of the Third World.

“Our position (in the late 1970s) was humiliating,” Nicholas Henderson, who at the time was Britain’s ambassador to France, said in an interview with Independent Television News. “We seemed an unproud nation, content with an inferior status. It wasn’t a country or government that I felt happy to represent. . . .”

Last month Thatcher told a leadership meeting of her Conservative party that a decade ago: “We were a country in decline. Poor in spirit, we suffered from that most demoralizing form of poverty--poverty of conviction. Britain was a country without a cause.”

Rise of ‘Thatcherism’

The cause she championed was a unique blend of thrift, individual initiative, patriotism, competition and union-busting that became known to the world as “Thatcherism.”

It was painful at first. In her drive to cut inflation and make Britain competitive, Thatcher presided over a recession that saw 20% of the country’s manufacturing capacity disappear. Unemployment skyrocketed.

Less than two years into her first term she had acquired the distinction of being the least popular prime minister in British history, with only 25% of the electorate satisfied with the job she was doing.

But she has also been a lucky leader. And at that early low point, her primary political rival was the even more unpopular Labor leader, Michael Foote, with a public satisfaction rating of only 18%.

The weakness of her opposition, coupled with the peculiar workings of Britain’s electoral system, is the key to Thatcher’s political longevity, ensuring her solid parliamentary majorities in three national elections in which her party has won a progressively smaller share of the vote.

She last won in 1987, with a plurality of 43%, and according to the latest public opinion polls, she is holding at about that level.

The social and economic changes Thatcher has brought about through about 600 pieces of legislation are reflected in statistics compiled by pollster Robert Worcester, director of Market & Opinion Research International Ltd.

The portion of adults who own their own homes has increased from 52% to 68% under a program of selling off government housing at discount prices. The massive “privatization” of government-owned enterprises has seen the number of shareholders rise from 6% of the adult population to more than 20% in a decade, even as trade union membership dropped by a third.

The portion of Britons classified as middle class, rather than working class, is also up sharply, from 33% to 40%, and “that is the biggest change in social class structure in a decade of any in the history of the country,” Worcester said.

Still, biographer Hugo Young noted, Thatcher is essentially a personally unpopular populist.

‘Odd State of Affairs’

“For a leader who lasted so long,” he wrote, “this was an odd state of affairs. She was one of us. . . . And yet, after 10 years, she remained different. In an important sense, she wasn’t one of us at all. She was altogether too superior.”

According to Worcester, “the three prime factors of Thatcher’s image are that she doesn’t listen to people, she talks down to ordinary people and she is capable.”

Exhibiting none of the equivocation of the British public at large, Thatcher is forging ahead with perhaps her most controversial reforms yet.

One of Britain’s leading social commentators, Anthony Sampson, observed: “I think she feels that like the proverbial man on the bicycle, once she stops, she falls off.” The problem, Sampson said in an interview, is that “there’s a limit to how much change any people can take at any one time.”

On her agenda are the privatization of Britain’s water and power utilities, introduction of a regressive “poll tax” to replace conventional property levies, reform of the legal and national health services and overhaul of the broadcasting industry and even the taxicab business.

Hallowed Elements

They all fit into a program of breaking up virtually all concentrations of government and economic power, with the possible exception of her own. But in these latest measures, she is tampering with some of the most hallowed elements of national life.

“She just applies to everything this sort of consumer choice ideology,” complained author and playwright John Mortimer, creator of the popular “Rumpole of the Bailey” television series. The result, he said, is that “in the name of consumer choice, you give the consumer a bad deal.”

By tampering with the British Broadcasting Corp., Mortimer said, the government risks giving the consumer “every sort of television except good television.” And infringing on the monopoly of London’s famed black cabs, he said, may yield “25 different types of taxis, none of whom know where to go.”

Reaction to her latest proposals underlines a dichotomy of the Thatcher decade. Studies conducted by Market & Opinion Research and other organizations show that for all that she has changed the surface of life in Britain, she has had considerably less impact on the society’s core values.

‘Still Fundamentally Socialist’

“The country is still fundamentally a socialist rather than a Thatcherist one in terms of its values,” pollster Worcester said.

In his Thatcher biography, entitled “One of Us,” author Young marvels that “one of the most fearlessly ideological governments of modern times” seems still to have failed in winning over the British public to “its injunctions about the good and proper life. . . . It was a startling measure of Thatcherism’s failure in its didactic task.”

But while some of her less assured fellow Conservatives see in this ideological dissonance evidence of the need for compromise and some new national consensus, Thatcher shows no such inclination.

After nearly 10 years, Thatcher recently boasted, “It’s still we Conservatives who set the pace, generate the ideas and have the vision.

“We are accused,” she said, “not of doing too little but of tackling too much. Other parties deal in a daily diet of trivia, while we get on and tackle the real issues fearlessly and positively.

“Challenges? We relish them. We’ve had 10 years of them.”

FROM GRANTHAM TO 10 DOWNING Important dates in the life and career of Margaret Thatcher: Oct. 13, 1925--Born Margaret Hilda Roberts at Grantham in central England, second daughter of grocer Alfred Roberts.

June, 1947--Graduates from Oxford with chemistry degree.

Dec. 13, 1951--Marries Denis Thatcher, wealthy oil executive.

Aug. 15, 1953--Gives birth to twins, Mark and Carol.

June 1, 1954--Qualifies as lawyer.

Oct. 8, 1959--Elected to Parliament.

June 20, 1970--Appointed education secretary.

Feb. 11, 1975--Elected leader of Conservative Party, then in opposition.

May 3, 1979--Runs in first general election as opposition leader.

May 4, 1979--Conservative Party wins, Thatcher becomes prime minister.

May 15, 1980--Inflation hits record 21.9%.

Jan. 26, 1982--Unemployment hits post-1930s record of 3 million.

April 2, 1982--Dispatches naval task force to recover Falkland Islands from Argentina in 74-day war.