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Margaret Thatcher's Next Stage
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14536 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1988 |
1,551 Words |
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Stephen Haseler
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Margaret Thatcher continues to make the record books. In June 1987, she became the first British prime minister since the introduction of universal suffrage to win three successive general elections. In January 1988, she overtook Herbert Asquith as the longest continuously serving prime minister of this century.
Yet, much more important is the fact that this remarkable prime minister has now presided over at least three domestic revolutions in Britain's erstwhile staid and tradition-bound national life. She has engineered a new British party political settlement in which her radical-right Conservative Party is now unquestionably preeminent. No serious political analyst expects that her landslide victory of 1987 can, given Britain's electoral system, be overturned by either of the opposition parties in 1991 or 1992. In effect, the result of 1987 ensured her party a clear run for another 10 years.
She has also wrought what amounts to a minor economic revolution in an economy that only five or so years ago was considered to the "sick man of Europe." Britain's economic growth rate is one of the highest in Europe, its unemployment is falling, the pound is firm, and its balance of payments is, by postwar standards, exceedingly healthy. Conservative treasury ministry Nigel Lawson will now have the room to pursue what was--to the British--the unthinkable: real and substantial reductions in income tax rates.
Socially, Britain is becoming a more mobile society, and it is witnessing for the first time since the war the rise of a sizable and confident middle class, which at last includes millions of blue-collar workers who have achieved a stake in the system by the mechanisms of wider share participation and ownership of their erstwhile municipally owned homes. The creation of what Thatcher calls an "enterprises society" is all the more impressive given the obstacles that had to be overcome in achieving it. As a visiting American Republican senator recently proclaimed on a visit to London: "It was easy for her friend Ronnie to popularize capitalism on its home ground; but to turn round a socialist system, and make people's capitalism popular in Britain, is no mean feat."
What next?
Yet, a question remains: What, in view of all that has been achieved so far, does she do now?
The answer lies very much with Thatcher herself. One of the consequences of Britain's recent very unusual politics is that the country is increasingly governed in a personal manner from No. 10 Downing Street. The prime minister has achieved an accrued personal political power approaching that enjoyed by Gen. Charles de Gaulle in France at the very height of his political triumphs. The cabinet's power has been reduced, and the civil service--one of the last bastions of collectivist traditionalism--no longer holds very much sway. She rules, as she should under Britain's unwritten constitution, by virtue of her support in the House of Commons. There are no serious competitors for her job. Her male Tory colleagues still seem gray men; the politically center parties are in disarray; and the Labor Party, although struggling to modernize itself, is still locked as effectively into an electoral laager as are the Communist parties of southern Europe.
Her most recent
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