Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty

"Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope." Prayer of St. Francis

THE CENTRE FOR POLICY STUDIES Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty has got under way. As the last Conservative leader of her party, Margaret Thatcher  rejuvenated the UK economy, and made it functional once more after the crippling abuse it suffered under both Labour and Tories from the late 1960s, and throughout the 1970s - that dark decade when this once great economic power was nearly reduced to the status of an economic basket case; which, if it had continued, would have seen this country reduced in economic status to that a southern European state, but without the warm climate to attract tourism.

            

            Margaret Thatcher's obdurate single mindedness and bullish behaviour toward the skittish politicians on her party's Left; as well as her insistence on trade union reform, deregulation of the city, and the numerous privatisations; helped resurrect our place in the world. She, and her chancellor Nigel Lawson created for us a last chance to bloom once more.

            

            She also gave ordinary people the chance to own their own homes by allowing them to purchase their council houses - a house owned is always better respected by the occupier than one rented. She took on and defeated the megalomaniacal Arthur Scargill during the miners' strike; a trap she set which the buffoon walked into and took his men with him. It was not Margaret Thatcher that destroyed the NUM, but the NUM itself.

            

            First of all coal could be purchased much cheaper abroad than it could mined at home. The miners were regarded as the working class aristocracy who enjoyed great public sentiment because of the historical dangers associated with working underground. As a result they had also enjoyed generous wages compared to the millions of their comrades working in other industries.

            

             The 1970's had been good for NUM. They struck and government after government met their demands for unaffordable wage hikes, until, by the 1980s, they had priced themselves out of the market. Thatcher knew that such union power; power that crippled our economy could not continue in the way it had. She built up coal supplies and waited for the exuberant demagogue to make his move which he did…in the summer of all times. During a Labour Party conference, one trade unionists from the rightwing Electricians Union described the miners' strike as lions being lead by donkeys; with Scargill being the chief heehaw.

THATCHER TO THIS day is seen as the devil incarnate, not only by the Left generally; but also by the Left within her own party, whose Machiavellian instincts would eventually bring her down. She had been challenged to seek a compromise over the Falkland Islands by her so-called 'wets', two years earlier, and displayed great belligerence in confronting the traitors  within the Foreign Office including her Foreign Secretary at the time of the Falklands conflict, Francis Pym. The following victory over Argentina won her a second term, and temporarily silenced her liberal critics, and gave her the confidence to tame Scargill when he gave her the opportunity.

            

              Margaret Thatcher can face comparison to Winston Churchill, in this one respect at least. She represented something this island nation throughout its history has singularly been blessed with. We have always managed to produce an extraordinary individual at a time when we most need them; and Margaret Thatcher was such an individual. And given the current state of our and the West's national decline, we are in dire need of another.

MARGARET THATCHER did this nation a great service. She reinvigorated entrepreneurialship. She and Nigel Lawson changed a dessert into a landscape receptive to re-seeding. The UK became once more a flourishing and fertile environment for enterprise and inward investment. It recaptured a functioning capitalism that the Left almost brought to its knees in the years leading up Margaret Thatcher's premiership - and when I say the Left, I refer as much to Ted Heath as being culpable as any Labour leader was at the time, for what was to unfold in the 1970s.

           

            Margaret Thatcher was great prime minister.  A fact the feminist sisterhood refuses to acknowledge; believing only the likes of Hattie Harperson can rise to the status of greatness.

            

            The great lady is despised (among many others) by modern feminists; but they are an insignificant entity, left ignored, at the very least, by the great body of the female population. Thatcher showed what could be done (not as a feminist) by a women with the skills to govern. When it comes to great leaders it is not about gender; but ability, character and frame of mind as well as persistence in achieving what they believe to be right.

            

            Thatcher shared Churchill's  qualities. They are unique qualities moulded; in Winston's case by ancestry; and in Thatcher's case by character, and character alone. Never unhinged by feminism, but believing herself equal to all, and superior to many men in the political arena. She was a breath of fresh air on the political landscape. 

            

             She gave the nation a second chance to re-create its past economic success. She believed thoroughly in the continuance of nations within Europe; which many on the Left of her party were not prepared to countenance. The virus of Europhillia passed down from Heath and Jenkins, to the wider political class; which now threatens the survival of the English nation, represents a far greater danger to this island than anything the Left believed  in their worst nightmares what Margaret Thatcher could do.

            

            Probably Margaret Thatcher was the last great presence after Churchill to come to this nation's aid: I see no sign of any other on the political horizon. The political landscape is dire indeed. No one on the contemporary political horizon rises above pygmy status. We are ruled by the professional politicians; speech-writers, spin-doctors, and the special advisers (Spads).

            

             Policy is created by think tanks, and accepted by politicians on the basis of what such policies, good or bad, have on their chances of re-election - not on the benefits they bring to the people who elect them.

MARGARET THATCHER was a conviction politician, which usually means being loathed and loved in equal measure by the population - something our present leaders could never countenance. Yet she managed to win three general elections despite her unpopularity, and had to be driven from power by knife wielding inferior politicians like her foreign Secretary the Eurofanatic  Geoffrey Howe, who, being pussy- whipped, had to have his spine stiffened by his wife Elspeth in order to deliver his valedictory speech to parliament, with its humorous yet toxic cricket metaphor .

            

             I hated Margaret Thatcher. When she came to power, I was still a Labour voting Marxist, and remained one until my weaning process began after 1983. The one I call "the longest suicide note in history election." The title given to the Labour Party's manifesto of that year by Gerald Kaufman. Although I continued to vote Labour and loath Margaret Thatcher. I first of all turned to the tragically comical figure that was Neil Kinnock; whose only true victory was a parochial one when he attacked the Liverpool Militant Tendency at the 1985 Labour Party. From then on it was downhill all the way in terms of his effectiveness for anything more than as an unelected position in Brussels, which he was duly given.

            

             By the time Blair emerged as leader, both my head and heart had no longer any space or feeling for socialism - and Blair was not socialist; so I continued with New Labour.

            

             I had a catharsis. I cannot pick a specific moment of purgation. But I had been moving away from socialism since the humiliation of the election and defeat of Michael Foot as Party leader; and if Blair had not emerged, I would never have voted again for any party. Socialism, I began to realise, stifled enterprise. Enterprise was the driving force of a successful economy; and a successful economy was brought about by innovation and ambition - and its greatest enemy was the over mighty state. In other words, I was becoming a Thatcherite (was I moving to another extreme?).

            

            I am not a modern Tory voter of a modern Tory Party; but I am a Conservative, with conservative values and beliefs, that had been diluted to the point of all recognition after Margaret Thatcher's Ides of March defeat. The true Conservative beliefs that Margaret Thatcher had running through her veins, were now to be considered as embarrassing to the likes of Cameron, as socialism became to Blair.

           

            I wish the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty the greatest of success: and may such gatherings long keep at bay the overweening power of the state.