# Margaret Thatcher **Margaret Thatcher** (1925–2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990 — the first woman to hold either post and the longest-serving British PM of the twentieth century. Together with [[Ronald Reagan]], she is the central political figure of the neoliberal turn (see [[Neoliberalism]]): her government privatized state-owned industries and council housing, deregulated finance (the 1986 "Big Bang"), cut top marginal tax rates, confronted and broke the power of the trade unions (most decisively in the 1984–85 miners' strike), and reoriented British economic policy around monetarism and market discipline. An admirer of [[Friedrich Hayek]] — she is said to have slammed a copy of *The Constitution of Liberty* on a table and declared "this is what we believe" — Thatcher made the once-marginal ideas of the [[Mont Pelerin Society]] into governing orthodoxy. Her famous dictum "there is no alternative" (TINA) captured the project's ambition to place market economics beyond political debate, and her claim that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families" became a shorthand for the individualist ethic critics attribute to the era. "Thatcherism" remains the British name for the broader neoliberal program. ## The arc Thatcher took the Conservative leadership in February 1975 from Edward Heath as the candidate of the party's free-market wing — Keith Joseph's Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs had supplied the program, [[Friedrich Hayek]] the authority (she is said to have slapped *The Constitution of Liberty* on a table: "This is what we believe") — and won three general elections (1979, 1983, 1987). The first term nearly failed: the 1981 budget's deflation at the bottom of a recession drew a letter from 364 economists, and she was the most unpopular prime minister on record until the Falklands War of April–June 1982 remade her as a war leader and delivered the 1983 landslide. The second term broke the National Union of Mineworkers (1984–85) and sold British Telecom, British Gas and the council houses; the third produced the poll tax — a flat per-head local charge, introduced in Scotland in 1989 and England in 1990 — the riots of March 1990, and the cabinet revolt that removed her in November 1990 after she failed to win outright on the first ballot of a leadership challenge. She sat in the Lords from 1992 and died in April 2013. ## The inheritance Thatcherism outlived her on both sides: Tony Blair's Labour kept the privatizations and the union laws, and the Conservative Party's civil war over Europe, which began with her Bruges speech of 1988, ended in Brexit. For the American right she is the proof that the program could be done at once and by a woman; for the vault she is the other half of the [[Neoliberalism]] page — the case in which the state was not shrunk but re-aimed, at the unions and the councils and away from the City. Her "no such thing as society" line, read in context (she was arguing that people should not expect the state to solve their problems), and her Bruges warning against a "European super-state" are the two quotations the movement uses; the Falklands is the precedent it reaches for when war changes the polls. ## See Also - [[Neoliberalism]] · [[Ronald Reagan]] · [[Friedrich Hayek]] · [[Milton Friedman]] · [[Mont Pelerin Society]] · [[Brexit]]