Preserve us from an Aussie Iron Lady

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.