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Margaret Thatcher: Edward Heath
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John Campbell-author of Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer's Daughter, the first volume of what is generally considered the best biography of the Prime Minister. The second and final volume is due out this year. Also the author of biographies on Edward Heath, Lord Birkenhead, Roy Jenkins, and Aneurin Bevin.
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Thatcher began by increasing interest rates to drive down inflation. This move hit businesses, especially in the manufacturing sector, and unemployment rose sharply. However her early tax policy reforms were based on supply-side economics. There was a severe recession in the early 1980s, and the Government's economic policy was widely blamed. Political commentators harked back to the Heath Government's "U-turn" and speculated that Mrs Thatcher would follow suit, but she repudiated this approach at the 1980 Conservative Party conference, telling the party "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning". That she meant what she said was confirmed in the 1981 budget, when despite an open letter from 364 economists, taxes were increased in the middle of a recession.
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Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trade unions but, unlike the Heath government, adopted a strategy of incremental change rather than a single Act. Several unions launched strikes in defence of their rights to represent workers, but all the actions eventually collapsed without successfully effecting any real change to the policy. Gradually, Thatcher's reforms reduced the power and influence of workers' unions, the successive pieces of legislation restricting the permitted mandates of union representation ever further. The changes were chiefly focused upon preventing the recurrence of the large-scale industrial actions of the past, but were ... intended to assure that the consequences for the participants would be severe if any future action was taken. The reforms were also aimed,Thatcher claimed, to democratise the unions, and return power to the members. The most significant measures were to make secondary industrial action illegal, to make it illegal for a union leadership to call strike action without first winning a ballot of the union membership, and to make the closed shop illegal.
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Thatcher served as Education Secretary in the government of Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974, and successfully challenged Heath for the Conservative leadership in 1975. She was undefeated at the polls, winning the 1979, 1983 and 1987 general elections, and became the longest serving Prime Minister of the 20th century. Public opinion divided sharply over many of Thatcher's policies, such as her efforts to break the power of the trade unions in the miners' strike of 1984-1985. In foreign relations, Thatcher maintained the special relationship with the United States, and formed a close bond with Ronald Reagan. When Argentina invaded Falkland Islands in 1982, Thatcher dispatched a Royal Navy task force to retake the islands in the Falklands War, a policy that proved hugely popular in the United Kingdom.
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The immediate issue that brought about Thatcher's resignation as prime minister was her unyielding opposition to European integration. Britain had joined the European Community in 1973 when Edward Heath was prime minister. Although Thatcher supported integration at the time, in subsequent years she turned down every proposal that seemed to bring the concept of a federal Europe closer to reality. She aligned her foreign policy with Washington rather than Europe in the belief that a special relationship existed with the United States. In economic matters, she firmly rejected proposals for a single European currency.
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Thatcher appointed many of Heath's supporters to the Shadow Cabinet, for she had won the leadership as an outsider and had little power base of her own within the party. One, James Prior got the important brief of shadow Employment Secretary. Thatcher had to act cautiously to convert the Conservative Party to her monetarist beliefs. She reversed Heath's support for devolved government for Scotland. In an interview for Granada Television's
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Edward Heath