ANALYSIS : Thatcher Pulled Britain Up by Its Bootstraps

Love her or hate her, few Britons would deny that Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter from central England, has been the most dominant British political personality since her idol, the late Winston Churchill.

The second-longest-serving British prime minister ever and the most durable in more than 160 years (since Robert Banks Jenkinson Liverpool), she profoundly transformed her country by what sometimes seemed sheer force of will.

The Britain for which she took responsibility in 1979 was derided as “the sick man of Europe,” a country whose economic malaise was such that “the British disease” became a synonym for industrial inefficiency. It was “a country in decline,” Thatcher has said. “Poor in spirit, we suffered from that most demoralizing form of poverty--poverty of conviction. Britain was a country without a cause.”

She gave it a cause that came to be called Thatcherism--a unique blend of thrift, individual initiative, patriotism, competition and union-bashing. Her attack on the vestiges of the nation’s post-World War II welfare state was so devastating that it finally forced the opposition Labor Party to abandon virtually all of its socialist dogma.

Indeed, a key element of her legacy is that she may have indirectly made the Labor Party electable again.

But later, Thatcher came to be seen as the general always fighting the last war, ever issuing new calls to arms against an enemy already vanquished instead of adapting her mission to the fast-changing world she had played so significant a role in bringing about. She particularly stood accused of failing to shape a vision that would give Britain a pivotal role in the new Europe rather than languishing on its fringe.

And in the end, Thatcher fell victim to that most indefensible of charges: that she had simply been around too long.

In a sense, Britain’s 65-year-old “Iron Lady” leaves behind a country suffering from the same malady she found 11 1/2 years ago: a nation without a cause.

While she maintains that there are still socialist dragons to be slain at home, the majority of Britons seem to have lost whatever enthusiasm they once had for the fight.

Thatcher’s uncompromising, almost schoolmarmish style of leadership, so effective in rallying a demoralized people a decade ago, seems unsuited to the more subtle, consensus-building challenges of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Abroad, many see their neighbors across the English Channel racing into a new, more unified era while Thatcher sounds like an increasingly irrelevant voice from the past, preaching the dangers of joining the European fray.

As a prominent British banker, speaking on condition of anonymity, once put it: “Sometimes a person is right for a period of time.” But in Thatcher’s case, “we may have moved beyond that time.”

Despite winning three national elections, she never enjoyed an electoral majority. It was the weakness of her opposition and the peculiar workings of Britain’s electoral system that were key to her political longevity. She last won in 1987 with a plurality of just 43%.

She is the “Iron Lady,” Britain’s “Warrior Queen” who, as political commentator Anthony Bevins put it during that 1987 campaign, “has never seen an institution she doesn’t want to bash with her handbag.” Indeed, the Thatcher years brought the word handbagging into the British vocabulary as a particularly brutal form of political assault.

She can be a hectoring nanny, not only to her nation but to anything or anyone whom she feels compelled to defend. Outside her official residence at 10 Downing St., she once physically intervened and admonished a television journalist who had asked the visiting Soviet ambassador a polite, but challenging question.

Those who see her as arrogant gleefully point to the day her last grandchild was born, when she emerged from No. 10 to announce before another television crew, “We are a grandmother!”

Pollster and political analyst Robert Worcester, director of London’s Market & Opinion Research International Ltd., said his research shows three primary elements in Thatcher’s image at home: “She doesn’t listen to people, she talks down to ordinary people and she is capable.”

She certainly was capable in transforming a humiliated Britain, which, in order to get an International Monetary Fund loan just three years before she took office, had been forced into a form of economic probation usually reserved for Third World countries.

In her administration’s first budget, Britain’s income tax rates were slashed to a range of 30%-60% from the previous 33%-83%. Later, they came down again to the current dual rate system, under which citizens pay either 25% or 40%.

Still, less than two years into her first term she had become the least popular prime minister in British history, thanks to inflation and union-busting measures which drove the country into a recession and saw 20% of the nation’s manufacturing capacity disappear. Unemployment skyrocketed.

But Thatcher didn’t flinch. “The lady’s not for turning,” she’s fond of saying.

“She is the only person I know who I don’t think I’ve ever heard say: ‘I wonder whether. . . ‘,” recalled William Pile, who worked with Thatcher when she was education secretary in the early 1970s.

She finally faced down the unions during a crippling, 15-monthlong coal strike in 1984-85, ending their stranglehold on the British economy.

The social and economic changes Thatcher brought about, through some 600 pieces of legislation over the years, are reflected in a few startling statistics which are also a key part of her legacy:

The proportion of adults who own their own homes leaped from 52% to nearly 70% under a government program to sell off state housing at discount prices.

A massive “privatization” of government-owned enterprises helped slash the bureaucracy and boosted the number of Britons who own stock from 6% of the adult population to nearly 25%.

The portion of Britons classified as middle- rather than working-class jumped from 33% to 40%--”the biggest change in social class structure in a decade of any in the history of the country,” according to Worcester.

Under Thatcher’s leadership, Britons regained a sense of national pride they had not had since the country’s humiliating withdrawal from Egypt in the 1956 Suez Crisis. She went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982 against the advice of some of her most senior military advisers who believed that the odds were too heavily stacked against them.

She won the war and a second term.

“Once she was invaluable to Britain,” the Economist magazine editorialized about Thatcher this week. “Only she could have seen off the Argentines and then, two years later, the mineworkers. Less uniquely, but just as significantly, she called a halt to the remorseless growth of the state’s share of the economy and therefore to higher and higher taxes. Where five generations of political leaders had watched Britain’s economic decline, she was ready to say no, enough--and to do something about it.

“These were all massive achievements,” the magazine continued, “and they give her a stature that time will not erode.”

These successes, plus her close relationship with President Reagan and steadfast commitment to the Atlantic Alliance, also gave Britain a new importance in international affairs.

While perhaps not so central a player as she sometimes claimed to be, Thatcher was clearly a force in bringing about the end of the Cold War.

“In 1979, we knew that we were starting a British revolution,” she told her Conservative Party convention last year. “In fact, we were the pioneers of a world revolution.”

If that overstates the case, it is true that she was the first Western leader, in 1984, to see in Mikhail S. Gorbachev a future Soviet leader with whom the Free World “can do business.”

During those crucial years when Washington and other capitals were still debating whether Gorbachev was for real, she provided a stabilizing link, establishing with the Soviet leader one of the more remarkable dialogues in the history of statecraft.

While on opposite sides of what was still an awesome ideological divide, Thatcher and Gorbachev were both “conviction politicians,” who relished the candor and spirit of their exchanges.

Now, however, the political center of a New Europe has moved east, toward a reunified Germany. And Mikhail Gorbachev, among others, is focusing his attention there.

Meanwhile, Thatcher balks at key elements of the new European vision shared by most of her peers on the other side of the English Channel, fearing that this will erode British sovereignty.

Her immobility regarding Britain’s future in Europe finally drove her last ally from that original 1979 Cabinet, Geoffrey Howe, into an open break last week--a break that ultimately helped bring on her downfall. Thatcher, said Howe, “seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people scheming--in her words--to extinguish democracy, to dissolve our national identity, to lead us through the back door into Europe. What kind of vision is that?”

Thatcher was like the cricket captain who sent his lead-off man up with a broken bat, the normally understated Howe said in a stinging House of Commons rebuke that left fellow lawmakers slack-jawed.

“Mrs. Thatcher, truly a world figure, no longer commands respect where it matters most for Britain: in the European Community,” wrote The Economist. “To her fellow EC leaders, she has become a bore, a ranter, nothing more. This loss of influence is, for the Community, a pity; for Britain, it is a tragedy. The idea that she is defending British interests in Europe is now a pathetic delusion. British interests are not even being heard.”

It is ironic that Thatcherism has nurtured a new breed of better-off yuppies whose views are far more cosmopolitan than those of their parochial predecessors, who saw Britain’s island geography as a God-given protection against the Continent. Thatcher argues the case of the “little Englander,” but a significant percentage of her constituency thinks of itself increasingly as European.

Still, it’s doubtful whether the issue of Europe alone would have been enough to bring her down. Her countrymen find much to criticize in her domestic policy, as well.

While their prime minister kept up her frontal attack on “intervention, corporatism, everything that pulled us down,” more and more Britons were complaining that their nation was becoming a much harsher, nastier place after more than 11 years of Thatcherism; a land increasingly--if not entirely fairly--symbolized by the soccer hooligan, the lager lout, and the bigot.

The domestic achievements of her earlier years became clouded by the conviction that she had failed to deal adequately with some of the country’s most crucial problems, such as urban and industrial renewal, health delivery and education.

According to one recent report, only 30% of Britain’s 17-year-old boys and 40% of its girls remain in school, compared to 80% and 90%, respectively, in France.

Inflation, which appeared under control in the early 1980s, albeit at the cost of record unemployment, is now back at nearly 11%, among the highest in Western Europe. The much-heralded “British Economic Miracle” of the mid-1980s was by mid-1990 looking faded.

Racial discrimination has grown along with Britain’s immigrant population, fueling ethnic tensions that have exploded sporadically during Thatcher’s tenure and which continue to simmer deep in the inner cities.

Her effort to bring rebellious, Labor-run local governments under control through a regressive “community charge” which replaced property taxes, brought an angry nationwide backlash that remains a major Conservative Party liability.

However history judges Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, it is clear that it will continue for the foreseeable future to be a major force in British social and political life, if only because it has so fundamentally changed both the country’s major political parties.

Even if Labor wins the next general election over a split and weakened Tory party, it no longer talks about renationalizing industries or giving the unions an effective veto power over government policy. No politician would dare even think about restoring income tax rates to their former levels.

Fisher is a former chief of The Times’ London Bureau. Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Bonn also contributed to this report.

THATCHER STEPS DOWN

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, changed the nation’s course and rekindled its prestige. Here are career highlights:

1958--Elected to the House of Commons from north London suburb of Finchley.

1970--Appointed education secretary under Prime Minister Edward Heath.

Feb. 11, 1975--Defeats Heath for leadership of opposition Conservative Party.

May 4, 1979--Becomes prime minister.

April 2, 1982--Argentina invades Falkland Islands. Britain defeats Argentina, regains South Atlantic colony June 14-15.

July 9, 1982--Begins second term as prime minister.

March 12, 1984--Miners strike over closing of unprofitable mines.

March 3, 1985--Miners vote to return to work without a settlement, a milestone in Thatcher’s curbing of union power.

Jan. 6, 1986--Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine leaves Cabinet in dispute over American-led takeover of helicopter firm.

June 11, 1987--Thatcher leads Conservatives to victory, only prime minister of 20th Century to win three consecutive elections.

Nov. 1, 1990--Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe resigns over her stance toward European union.

Nov. 13, 1990--Howe tells House of Commons that Thatcher is jeopardizing vital British interests and dividing the government.

Nov. 14, 1990--Heseltine challenges her for party leadership.

Nov. 20, 1990--Thatcher fails to defeat Heseltine outright in a party leadership election, forcing a second round.

Nov. 22, 1990--Thatcher announces her resignation.