Preserve us from an Aussie Iron Lady

It didn’t take long. Julia Gillard has hardly warmed the seat in the Prime Minister’s Office before some breathless commentators are setting her up as an Australian equivalent to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

This has been greeted by derision among her opponents for whom Thatcher has been transformed into an icon of fundamental conservative values, a symbol of a golden age of prosperity and wellbeing when the dark forces of socialism were sent packing, British pride was restored and capitalism reigned.

Typical of the attacks was a column by that old warrior of the right, John Stone, in the Australian edition of The Spectator. To be fair Stone, in his usual diatribe against anything that might be remotely regarded as (small “l”) liberal, made only a fleeting (and of course disparaging) reference to her as “Australia’s Margaret Thatcher”, but the magazine’s editors gleefully jumped on the line.

The front page featured a cartoon of Gillard peeping from inside the over-sized blue dress, pearls and handbag that were Thatcher’s trademarks, with the headline “You’re No Iron Lady, Ms Gillard”.

To which Ms Gillard, now in the throes of the 2010 election campaign, might quite rightly answer “thank God for that”.

Thatcher was a less than average Prime Minister who got very lucky, but who had enough political cunning to ride that luck in order to remain in office for far longer than her abilities deserved.

By April 1982 the Conservative Government she led had been in office for almost three years. Thatcher’s dogged attachment to monetarism and free market economics had reduced inflation but plunged the country into full-scale recession; unemployment had reached three million, criticism was mounting from within her own ranks and commentators were predicting that even a Labour Party led by the left wing Michael Foot would defeat her at the next election.

Then on April 2, Argentina invaded the British colony of the Falkland Islands. Thatcher had received the stroke of luck which would keep her in Downing Street for the next eight years.

The Falklands War was something that Thatcher understood - in her mind good versus evil, flag-waving jingoism with British forces sailing off to preserve the honour of the nation and deliver its subjects from tyranny.

Her speeches at the time were full of righteous indignation, designed to call the nation to the flag. The Argentines were “robbers who could not be allowed to get away with their swag”.

In an address to Conservative women at the height of the war she justified her stand: “When territory which has been British for almost 150 years is seized and occupied; when not only British land but British citizens are in the power of an aggressor - then we have to restore our rights and the rights of the Falkland Islanders.”

The 10-minute standing ovation she received at the conclusion summed up the mood of the nation. Her approval ratings had more than doubled to an unprecedented 80 per cent.

It was right that the Falklands should be liberated. The self-determination of its inhabitants overrode any considerations of geography and territorial expansion - and the overwhelming if not unanimous desire of the Falklanders was to remain with Britain.

However, Thatcher’s determination to squeeze every bit of patriotic fervour out of the war resulted in the pointless sinking of the Argentine cruiser the General Belgrano - the biggest single loss of life in the conflict - and an unnecessary set-to at Goose Green, when the Argentines could simply have been by-passed and isolated. Finally, the decision of the British commander to ignore the Prime Minister’s orders to impose a humiliating unconditional surrender on the Port Stanley defenders, avoided a bloody house-to-house battle for the capital.

In the election of the following year the Conservatives routed a Labour Party hopelessly split over its attitude to the Falklands conflict. Thatcher was emboldened to take on her next target, the National Union of Mineworkers.

Once again there were some good reasons for doing this. After bringing down the moderate and progressive Heath Government a decade earlier and getting almost what it liked from the Labour administration that followed, the NUM executive, led by Arthur Scargill, was acting as if it was above the law.

But once again the methods Thatcher used were wrong: she deliberately provoked a confrontation in the spring of 1984 when demands on the coal-fuelled power stations were falling and stockpiles were high, then refused to negotiate, leaving the increasingly desperate strikers to face CS-gas wielding riot police.

Two miners died and hundreds of others were injured or arrested before the NUM finally gave in, one day under a year after Scargill led it into battle.

The victory marked the apex of Thatcher’s political career. From then on it was steadily downhill as she struggled with the day-to-day problems of government. Without a crisis, external or internal, to distract the electorate, her lack of ability was apparent, her dogmatic inflexibility exposed. The introduction of the Community Charge for local government - the infamous Poll Tax - sounded the death knell for her time in office.

The legacy of her mismanagement lives on in a country where unemployment has become endemic in many areas. Britain’s manufacturing industries, many dating back to the Industrial Revolution, were already in decline in the face of rising competition from China and the Third World, but her refusal to ease their passing resulted in tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs without hope of reemployment.

She attacked what she saw as unnecessary regulation of financial institutions and set them free. A generation of old hands who headed many of the major companies could see the inherent dangers and kept things in check for a generation, but were eventually replaced by the corporate spivs whose dodgy dealings laid the ground for the worst financial crisis the country had faced since the Great Depression.

Her simplistic way of thinking could not embrace the concept of Britain as an active participant in the European Union. By taking the nation to the sidelines, jeering at every regulation out of Brussels and railing against “bloated bureaucracies” she robbed her country of the opportunity to play a positive and influential role in an institution that, for all its faults, has been a force for peace and stability in a continent that previously had rarely known either.

And finally, there is the culture she created, summed up by one of her chief lieutenants, Norman Tebbit, in his defence of the Thatcher record:

“She [Thatcher] is blamed for creating three million unemployed. Of course she didn’t. She exposed the fact that three million people were on the payroll who were not doing a job.”

The brutalisation of Britain manifested in soaring crime rates, engrained racism, corporate greed, indifference to the plight of those less fortunate, increasing class divisions.

This is the legacy of the Iron Lady. This is the mould that Julia Gillard should do everything in her power to avoid.