Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher ruled Great Britain as prime minister from 1979 to 1990, a period
in which she defined a generation.
On the world stage, she was renowned, but if you look a little closer, you'll see that
her career was filled with many disastrous choices.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Labour government had a minor crisis on its hands.
Huge portions of the British population were growing up undernourished, a fact that ongoing
rationing really wasn't helping.
So a solution was devised.
From then on, every school age child would receive a free glass of milk every weekday.
It was a cheap, popular policy.
So popular, in fact, that when Margaret Thatcher canceled it in 1971, it caused an outcry.
At the time, she was the education secretary in Ted Heath's Conservative government, which
was trying to make huge savings to the budget.
To trim back spending in her department, Thatcher ended the milk subsidies for all children
over the age of seven.
It made minor savings at best.
Ending the subsidy was so unpopular that people would shout "Thatcher, milk snatcher!" when
they saw her in the streets.
Along with other cuts to the education budget, it so angered the sector that Oxford University
refused to give Thatcher an honorary degree in 1985 while she was prime minister.
The topic of milk also came up when Meryl Streep played the prime minister
in the 2011 film The Iron Lady.
"Milk's gone up."
"Hm?"
"49p a pint."
"Good grief!
We'll have to economize."]
Even today, mentioning the dreaded poll tax can send a shiver down Conservative MPs' spines.
A 1989 change to local council tax rates swapped taxation on a property's rental value for
taxation on the number of adults living there.
But what really matters is that it generally drove down taxes for the rich, while hiking
them up for everyone else.
New taxes are an easy way to get your voters to turn on you.
In Thatcher's case, they didn't just turn on her.
They rioted.
There were ominous rumblings even in the planning stages.
Cabinet memos exist from the year before the tax was rolled out, advising that resistance
was growing.
Yet Thatcher not only plowed on, she publicly owned the policy.
She forced it onto Scotland first in 1989, triggering mass civil disobedience.
But rather than be deterred, she then imposed the new tax on England and Wales the following year.
The results speak for themselves.
In London, a mass protest devolved into the largest riot the capital had seen in 100 years.
Across the country, people refused to pay.
The tax was so destabilizing that Thatcher was begged to withdraw it.
But she refused, so her party instead deposed her in a leadership contest, ending her premiership.
The hated tax wasn't ended until John Major became prime minister in 1991.
There are some sentences so absurd that it's impossible to parody them.
Margaret Thatcher's comment to Augusto Pinochet in 1998 is one
such example.
In front of news cameras, the retired prime minister firmly told the former Chilean dictator,
"It was you who brought democracy to Chile."
Based on that statement, Thatcher's definition of the word "democracy" seemed to involve
overthrowing the elected government in a coup, ruling as a military strongman for
18 years, and murdering over 3,000 dissidents while torturing 40,000 more.
But then again, everything about Thatcher's relationship with Pinochet was unusual.
Britain had previously suspended arms sales to Chile following Pinochet's 1973 coup, which
saw thousands arrested and herded into makeshift torture centers.
The moment that Thatcher came to power, she restarted the arms sales, apparently more
impressed with Pinochet's anti-Communist credentials than his killing of civilians.
When the ex-dictator was held in London on an international arrest warrant in 1998, she
not only made speeches in support of freeing him, she also visited him to share glasses
of scotch.
The official line from Thatcher supporters is that she was grateful for Chile's clandestine
help during the Falklands War.
But that's hardly the most valid excuse, since that war took place years after arms sales
were restarted.
We all know the stereotype of the doting mother who refuses to see how awful her child is,
and Thatcher embodied that stereotype to a T. Her son Mark Thatcher was once described
by the London Review of Books as, quote, "without talent but filled with self-belief and utterly
brazen."
He's regarded as a prime example of an upper class twit, and yet his mother not only refused
to believe he could do no wrong, she actively helped him do some very wrong things.
For example, in the 1980s, Mark traveled to Saudi Arabia to secure
an arms contract for his mom's government.
He reportedly used his position to net himself a cool $12 million from the deal.
Then there was his shady construction deal, in which his mother is said to have pressured
the Sultan of Oman to award a lucrative contract to her son's business.
Essentially, there was a pattern of Mark doing whatever he pelased while his mother facilitated
everything, often bailing him out of trouble by paying outrageous sums, such as when he
was arrested for illegal arms dealing in South Africa.
While all this was happening, she treated her daughter Carol with a coldness so hostile
that Carol later said she effectively grew up without a mother.
Thatcher famously once remarked,
"I hate feminism.
It is poison."
Although Britain's first female prime minister is regarded as a trailblazer and, for that
reason, considered a feminist hero in some quarters, the reality is that she didn't just
pull the ladder to equality up after her.
Instead, she chopped it up with an ax and set fire to it.
Thatcher had a noted aversion to promoting other women into positions of power.
During her 11 years as premier, she promoted only a single woman into the cabinet.
Her anti-feminist legacy was on display outside Number 10 Downing Street as well.
She claimed the battle for women's rights had been largely won, and then spearheaded
policies which disproportionately affected millions of working mothers across Britain.
It's one thing to smash the glass ceiling, but it was another to replace it with reinforced steel.
In 1983, a British publisher put out the first English language edition of the Danish children's
book Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, which proposed that gay men could not just live
together, but actually be happy and form a successful family unit.
This idea sparked a moral panic in Britain that culminated in 1988 with something called
Section 28.
This piece of legislation prohibited, quote, "the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities."
Suddenly, any teacher who spoke about LGBT people in a non-negative light could lose
their jobs.
Thatcher said at the time,
"Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught
that they have an inalienable right to be gay."
"All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life.
Yes, cheated."
That sentiment helped unleash a wave of homophobic bullying.
Kids who grew up LGBT in the United Kingdom between 1988 and 2003, when the Labour government
scrapped the law, were vulnerable to abuse, and received zero help from authority figures.
In the end, Thatcher's policy cheated far more children of a sound start than any number
of books could've ever hoped to.
The Khmer Rouge are the one of the most notorious perpetrators of genocide
in human history.
Under their leader Pol Pot, they instituted Year Zero in Cambodia,
a series of mass killings that wiped out around 2.2 million people, nearly a quarter of the
country's population.
The only reason the genocide stopped was because Communist Vietnam invaded and occupied the
country, removing Pol Pot from power.
"But the first thing, you know,
is to get the Vietnamese out.
We hope they will go out, but it's going to take a time yet."
Whatever you think of Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge were clearly the bad guys here.
But not for those who'd grown up with a Cold War mentality.
After Pol Pot's fall, Cambodia's United Nations seat was meant to go to the new government.
But Thatcher, along with the United States and China, insisted on keeping the seat for
the Khmer Rouge.
Not only that, but London provided military training to the remnants of the Khmer Rouge
still fighting an insurgency in Cambodia's jungles.
During South Africa's years of white supremacist rule under its system of apartheid [uh-PAR-tide],
the country was a pariah on the international stage.
This included in London, where Margaret Thatcher was famously appalled by South Africa's racist
policies and destabilization of other African nations.
But even though she was against racism, and pressured South African leader P.W.
Botha to change his regime, she also made some very controversial decisions
and comments on apartheid that haunt her legacy to this day.
The most notorious came when she accused Nelson Mandela's African National Congress
party of being terrorists.
But it was her actions that were even more troubling.
At a time when South Africa was being isolated globally, Thatcher refused to implement sanctions
against the regime.
Her allies say this was so that Britain would continue to have leverage over Botha.
Her critics, however, note that her husband Denis had business interests in the country
that would've been damaged by sanctions.
When David Cameron became Conservative leader in 2006, he apologized for the way his party
had treated the issue of apartheid under Thatcher, no matter what the Iron Lady's personal convictions
had been.
"I've always disliked apartheid
intensely."
In the 1980s, Northern Ireland was in the grip of a conflict known as the Troubles,
a 30-year guerrilla war between Protestant loyalists and Catholic republicans
that killed around 4,000 people.
While those living in other nations tended to see the conflict as a political war, Thatcher's
government refused to classify captured Irish Republican Army members as anything but common criminals.
This seemingly minor distinction came to an ugly head in 1981.
That year, IRA members interned in the Maze prison began a hunger strike after having
their special status revoked.
Thatcher refused to listen to their protest, and the fallout from that refusal would last
years.
Thanks to the quirks of UK politics, one of the hunger strikers, Bobby Sands, was elected
as an MP while starving himself.
This put the Thatcher government in the position of allowing a member of Parliament to die
in a British prison.
There was a huge push to recognize Sands' political status, but Thatcher refused and
on May 7th, Sands died in prison.
The deaths of the hunger strikers had a galvanizing effect across Ireland.
The Troubles immediately intensified.
While it's not hard to understand Thatcher's point of view, her inflexibility likely killed
any chance at negotiating an end to the Troubles for years to come.
"People who always fought shy of
political demonstration were so angry at what the English government did."
In the 1970s, the United Kingdom was suffering from a shortage of blood for transfusions.
So the government began buying it in from abroad, notably from the United States.
Unfortunately, they opted for the cheapest stuff, from the likes of prisons and high-risk
people.
As a result, Britain received blood contaminated by both hepatitis and HIV.
Although Thatcher's government wasn't in power when the blood was first bought, they were
in power when the first alarming evidence emerged that this imported blood was killing
thousands of vulnerable Britons.
Their response was to refuse to believe the evidence and then cover it up.
The contaminated blood scandal went all the way from individual doctors up to those in
the highest levels of power.
Some doctors gave potentially infected blood to patients without telling them of the risks,
while Thatcher's cabinet scrambled to limit any compensation the government might be forced
to pay out.
Ultimately, the contaminated blood infected over 4,000 Brits, and killed 2,600.
While the blame lies mostly with Thatcher's health secretary, it's clear that most of
the cabinet knew about the problem and did nothing.
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