EDITORIAL - Take Thatcher's grit

Whatever your view, good or bad, of Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister (PM) who died on Monday, there is no gainsaying that she was a transformative figure whose influence transcended the United Kingdom (UK).

Further, in our current circumstance, Baroness Thatcher, her politics, and the way she forced Britain to confront its economic demons have relevance for Jamaica. Indeed, there is more than a lesson or two that another female prime minister, our own Portia Simpson Miller, might learn from Mrs Thatcher, even though they are cut of different ideological cloth.

By the time James Callaghan was defeated in a Commons confidence vote and Labour lost the election of March 1979, Britain was the sick man of Europe, with an economy dominated by state enterprises, shored up by subsidies, and with powerful trade unions that crimped labour market efficiency.

UNION POWER REDUCED

The right-wing Mrs Thatcher, the first woman to lead the Conservatives and Britain's first female PM, started with zeal to reform the economy. Corporate and personal income taxes were lowered and the value-added tax increased. State companies were told that they would have to pay their way and the laws changed to reduce the power of trade unions. Unions now needed to poll their members before going on strike.

The staunchly anti-communist Mrs Thatcher, who found ideological congruency in her leadership contemporary, America's Ronald Reagan, had domestic resistance to her programme as Britain's unemployment levels reached their highest levels since the Great Depression. But Mrs Thatcher never doubted the correctness of her path. As she famously told Tories at their conference in 1980: "The lady is not for turning."

Indeed, Mrs Thatcher might have been booted after a single term, rather than becoming Britain's longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century, but for Argentina's invasion of the Falklands, which she sent a task force to repel. That, however, was not a signal for her to slow the Thatcherite reforms. By the mid-1980s, she had spearheaded the privatisation of gas, electricity, telecommunications, airlines, and the coal industry and signalled her full victory over the trade union movement with the crushing defeat of a yearlong strike by Arthur Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers.

DIVISIVE FIGURE

Surely, Mrs Thatcher was a divisive figure. Some of the wounds of her policies remain raw in Britain today. She was characterised, in many quarters, as Peter Mandelson, the Labour Party strategist, put it, as being "too indifferent to the social consequences of the economic changes she was undertaking".

Many in Jamaica will recall that she branded the African National Congress, led by the then jailed Nelson Mandela, as a "terrorist organisation", and her resistance to sanctions against apartheid South Africa and how, until it no longer suited the United States-UK alliance, she cosied up to dictators.

But you had to admire her stubborn pursuit of what she believed to be the right course, especially as Lord Mandelson put it, "a timely and necessary overhaul of the UK economy".

Jamaica finds itself in a similar place as Britain 34 years ago, having, for a long time, nibbled at the edges of reform. The current programme with the International Monetary Fund offers an opportunity to go all the way - if PM Simpson Miller can co-opt the best attributes of Margaret Thatcher.

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