Why do labour hate thatcher

Joe Bennett can recall the mood of people in Kirkby as they heard the Bird's Eye factory was closing with the loss of 1, jobs in March Eight miles away from the doomed factory, Lady Thatcher was surveying a site on Liverpool's waterfront - earmarked for redevelopment - trumpeting the virtues of the enterprise culture.

Mr Bennett said people in Kirkby were unlikely to mourn Lady Thatcher's death. Like other trade unionists and opponents of Lady Thatcher's government, the Conservative Party was seen as being indifferent to the industrial decline in Merseyside.

The image of Liverpool in the s was of industrial unrest, rioting on the streets of Toxteth and the showdown between Mrs Thatcher and the Militant-led Labour Council. Lady Thatcher's political opponents on Merseyside depicted the Tory government as heartlessly presiding over the region's decline and rising unemployment, and cutting its public services without compunction. But according to Prof Jon Tonge, of the University of Liverpool Politics Department, the city was no different to any other northern city that depended on heavy industry.

The family house lacked a yard, hot water, and an indoor lavatory. At Oxford, she was one of only five women in her year studying chemistry. She chose tax law, because, as a young mother, she needed a regular schedule—a year earlier, she had given birth to twins, Mark and Carol.

She evidently went into the law because it was the familiar male path to a career in politics. Her deep understanding of middle- and working-class social aspiration, revolutionary in the placidly entitled world of Conservative Party politics, is what kept her in power for so long, and is also her greatest legacy.

Almost two decades earlier, Mrs. Thatcher, then a young M. It was perilous and unhealthy: in , three miners were killed a week. Thatcher pioneered in the early nineteen-eighties. There is an unavoidable sense of strategic efficiency about her domestic life. As one would expect he is a perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive creature—very reserved but quite nice. Friends said that it was a solid marriage but no great love affair.

Not that Denis compensated with any wild enthusiasm for fatherhood. He was watching cricket at the Oval when they were born. Mark and Carol were dispatched to boarding schools at the ages of eight and nine, respectively, and Margaret Thatcher entered Parliament, in , as a Conservative M. Her steady rise to power had begun. Yet one can only marvel at the determination and the fortitude needed to surmount the slights and obstacles of that time.

Nearly every normal habit of life—engaged parenthood, sibling loyalty, marital intimacy, deep friendship, ordinary social intercourse—gave way to the achievement of that one thing. The English idea of the nonchalant gentleman-amateur—Harold Macmillan calmly reading Jane Austen, and so on—had always presupposed such hinterlands.

You had one foot in Downing Street and the other in your country-house library. Or perhaps she just had no hinterland. What Margaret Thatcher felt privately about God, or death, or a beautiful phrase of music, or love, or sex, or a sad movie, or the great blessings of having children, or the beauties of foreign cities, or the anguish of suffering, is not recorded.

Her soul was shuttered. But how hard she worked at that one thing, and with what steely ministration! Moore provides an example from the beginning of her career. The young Thatcher found a subject—she devised a bill that would force Labour councils to open up their proceedings to the public including newspapers involved in labor disputes.

But she identified an impediment to its passage. On Fridays, when such bills were debated, M. When Heath lost the general election of , she made a bid for leader of the Conservative Party, and won, in February, Colleagues were astounded at how thoroughly she could master briefing material.

She needed little sleep, and worked late into the night. In , when the I. On a twenty-four-hour flight from Hong Kong to Washington, D. Indeed, what emerges from these impeccably researched, coolly absorbing volumes are two Margaret Thatchers, whom we might call the scientist and the atavist. For the scientist Thatcher, the chemist who had studied with Dorothy Hodgkin at university, knowledge existed to be mastered, made use of, leveraged.

Their first lasted six hours. Britain was teetering: the figures still astonish. Interest rates in reached seventeen per cent and inflation a staggering eighteen per cent. Nationalized industries were sluggish and fabulously costly to the taxpayer.

British Leyland, the automotive conglomerate that included Jaguar, Triumph, and Austin Rover, was producing comically dreadful cars and had consumed about two hundred million pounds a year in government subsidies. Since many of the major industries including railways, coal, telecommunications, and a good chunk of automobile production were nationalized, the government was effectively acting as a giant employer.

She never wanted to join the euro. After losing her long-term chancellor Nigel Lawson over this, and with her authority ebbing away in her final months, she was effectively forced into joining by his successor, Major. Just two years later — as she had warned him, we now know — Britain humiliatingly crashed out of the ERM on Black Wednesday, proving her right all along.

And look at what she did do. She guided Britain into the single market because she realised that, no matter how frustrating other European nations may be, close cooperation with them brings jobs and economic growth. She stood up to the US. She was no poodle, nor did she hold hands with the US president. Even though she and Ronald Reagan had an excellent working relationship, she ripped into him when his US troops invaded the Commonwealth island of Grenada in , forcing him into a grovelling apology.

When she went to war, she planned for the aftermath. Many people, myself included, opposed the Falkland Islands war, given the huge loss of life relative to the number of islanders.

They stayed to give the islanders a secure future. And all this she achieved having fought against the unadulterated sexism of Britain in the 50s, 60s and 70s on her way to the top. In fact, Thatcher singlehandedly changed the way Britain, and much of the world, viewed women as professionals and leaders.