420 Thatcher, Margaret British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led an uncompromising conservative government in the United Kingdom during the 1980s school- children The Labour Party attacked her as the heartless “Thatcher, the milk snatcher.” Heath’s failure to stand up to the trade unions successfully and his defeat in two 1974 general elections cost him the support of many Conservatives Despite his weakness, his principal colleagues were reluctant to challenge him Thatcher, a midlevel figure in the Conservative Party with limited ministerial experience, dared in 1975 After the first ballot Heath withdrew, and on the second ballot Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party Four years later, the Conservatives won the general election, and Thatcher became prime minister She also led her party to victory in the next two general elections Her policies during her more than a decade as prime minister came to be called “Thatcherism.” She acknowledged that many of her ideas came from an older Conservative politician, Sir Keith Joseph He argued that Britain needed to revive its entrepreneurial spirit Thatcher became prime minister during a two-sided economic crisis: a depression accompanied by rising prices She made her first priority fighting double-digit inflation She cut government spending, with higher education suffering particularly hard She increased interest rates and sales taxes and eventually income taxes too Manufacturing shrank, and several million workers lost their jobs It took years for this bitter medicine to cure runaway inflation, but it did Some members of Thatcher’s own party thought that the human cost of her policies was unacceptable Convinced that the welfare state had ruined Britain, Thatcher wanted to encourage individualism and discourage reliance on the state Consequently, she made it easy for tenants in council houses (public housing) to buy their homes Pressured by an increase in rent, hundreds of thousands did As property owners, they were more inclined to vote Conservative Committed to competition and capitalism, Thatcher regarded the nationalized industries as a deadweight handicapping the British economy In the early 1980s she sold off minor parts of the state’s array of industries, such as the railroad hotels, but it was not until the mid-1980s that privatization became dramatic At this time Thatcher sold the telephone system, the gas industry, the principal automobile and truck manufacturers, the steel industry, and water companies Thatcher worried that the power of Britain’s militant trade unions crippled the economy She decided to tame them In 1984 Parliament enacted legislation that required a majority vote by secret ballot for a legal strike In the same year, the leader of the coal miners challenged the management of one of the last nationalized industries He hoped to block the closing of unprofitable mines He used outside militants to intimidate working miners These tactics offended public opinion Worried about their own jobs, few other unions supported the miners After nearly a year, the strike collapsed As a result of competition from oil and natural gas, the coal mining industry soon shrank to almost nothing Priding herself on her decisiveness and rarely conciliatory toward opponents, Thatcher did not care how many people she alienated She rejected compromise as weakness Victory over Argentina in the falklands war was perhaps her only success that nearly everybody applauded She refused any compromise when members of the irish republican army, imprisoned in Ulster, started a hunger strike to be recognized as political prisoners Ten IRA men died of starvation Labour controlled many local councils, including that of greater London Thatcher considered their spending profligate, and so she had Parliament abolish the troublesome councils She regarded the European Community without enthusiasm Protective of British sovereignty, she was suspicious of the trend toward economic and political centralization within the European Union In contrast to her ambivalence toward Europe, she was a staunch ally of the United States She was particularly close to President ronald reagan Although they were much alike in their economic and foreign policies and their insistence upon law and order, Thatcher did not share Reagan’s concern for moral issues in politics She voted to decriminalize homosexuality and to legalize abortion Thatcher’s relationship with the United States was, in part, the result of political realism The world’s