Tag: Margaret Thatcher

What do you do with a lady who heads a cabinet supposedly run on the collegial principle, but who ain’t for stirring, much less for turning?

Members of the ruling Conservative Party in the British House of Commons answered that question a fortnight ago.

Their answer was: If the lady ain’t for turning, then she must be for dumping.

And they dumped Dame Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to head the Conservative Party, the first to serve as prime minister, and in this century the person who has held that office longest.

When she attained this last distinction, she seemed set to continue to rule, not merely to the end of the century but well into the next, if not forever. She had crushed the labour unions. She had won a resounding victory over Argentina in the Malvinas. She had cut Africans, Asians and Caribbean leaders of the Commonwealth to size and made it plain to them that they possessed no wealth in common with Britain. She had humiliated, and then dismissed from her cabinet, all those who helped plot her way to the leadership of the Conservative Party and sustained her during her first term.

She had changed the face of Britain forever, and made socialism come across as something more frightful than bubonic plague – or so she claimed. Unemployment was up, but inflation was down, and so was productivity. Too bad for the millions thrown out of work; the important thing was that the economy was improving.

Bereft of a sociological imagination, she brought to bear on the governance of the British Isles a book-keeper’s imagination and sought to reduce the human person to a slave of the market. The worth of everything was to be measured in terms of profit and loss. Forget about equity and justice. The only thing that counts is the bottom line – a phrase which, by the way, the British consider an unfortunate vulgarism.

For her, greed was the motive force in human affairs, and to encourage it in every conceivable way was the highest principle of statecraft. Compassion was an unpardonable weakness. Where others had waged a war on poverty, Thatcher waged a war against the poor, ripping apart the social safety net that had insured the disadvantaged against the worst manifestations of poverty.

She privatised everything in sight, and when she could not find anything else to put under the grinding wheels of market forces, she turned to water. Were it possible for her to privatise the air we breathe, she would have done so without a moment’s thought.

Race relations in Britain steadily grew worse in the Thatcher years. She tightened the rules of eligibility for British passports in a bid to repudiate the obligation arising from centuries of British imperial conquest and pillage. Asian women seeking to join their husbands in Britain were subjected to degrading virginity tests.

When Britons finally saw through the phantom prosperity that her policies had wrought, they blamed all their woes on the foreigners in their midst, especially those of Black descent. Race riots, unheard of in recent British history, erupted in several parts of the country on a scale and with a fury that was almost beyond belief.

An Englishman’s word, it is said, is his bond – and an English woman’s too. With a few notorious exceptions in public life, this is still largely true. But one remembers how, at last year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Thatcher put her signature on a communiqué advocating tougher sanctions against apartheid South Africa, only to renounce the agreement well before the ink had dried on it.

It would be hard to improve on President Robert Mugabe’s comment on Thatcher’s conduct on that occasion: “Despicable.”

In no sphere of Britain’s foreign relations were her chicanery and duplicity more evident than in the question of sanctions against South Africa. No, the sanctions she had supported so enthusiastically against Poland would never work in South Africa.

Poland’s crime was that it had suppressed the trade union Solidarity. As far as Thatcher was concerned, that was a far greater crime than apartheid, which the United Nations had in resolution after resolution denounced as a crime against humanity. But then, the only humanity she recognises is white humanity.

From claiming that sanctions would not work in South Africa, she went on to proclaim, without recognising her own absurd logic, that sanctions would hurt only the Black majority that needed protection most.

Suddenly, this woman who as education minister had not scrupled to snatch milk away from British school children to save costs was brimming with the milk of human kindness for Black people in far-away South Africa.

She even resorted to blaming the victim, employing the language of the oppressor. The ANC was a terroristic organisation. But for the dirty tricks of the non-white Commonwealth nations, South Africa would have remained within the family.

When the pressure for sanctions reached a crescendo at the 1985 Commonwealth Summit in Nassau, Bahamas, and threatened to disrupt the organisation, she hit upon a ploy to sidestep the issue: the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group (EPG). Well before the EPG’s report was published, Thatcher launched a campaign of denigration against its members severally and collectively. She would allow no person and no principle to stand in the way of her giving aid and comfort to apartheid.

That is now why she fell, of course. Her fall was rooted in her domestic and European policy. And she crashed with the same gracelessness that had animated her for 11 years, a stunning lesson in the instability of human greatness.

Some self-hating Blacks may continue to adore her as the greatest person that ever drew breath. In this corner, the most charitable thing that can be said about the ghastly woman is: Good riddance.

*This article, originally titled “And so, the lady was for dumping,” is republished from the December 10, 1990, issue of the newsweekly, The African Guardian, now defunct. The writer was a contributing editor for the magazine.