3rd May, 1979

Forty years ago today the Conservative Party won a sizeable majority in the General Election and the next day Margaret Thatcher became the UK’s first female Prime Minister, ushering in a new era in British politics. A huge amount will no doubt be written about her legacy and much of it will be revisionist tripe. The left have, of course, had a pretty uncontested grip on the pen writing recent history and many folk who never experienced the Thatcher years are convinced it was a time of nothing but conflict and misery. They have no idea how much they owe to her, their prosperity certainly, perhaps even their lives.

I’m not going to exhaustively explore her legacy, but I will share a couple of reflections on the late, and much missed, Margaret Thatcher’s early years in office, from the perspective of the young lad I was at the time.  

1979

At the time of the election I was nine. I have vivid memories of standing in the school playground with my friends on the morning after the election, we were scared, genuinely scared. I grew up in a place called Southall, a very mixed part of west London. According to the 2011 Census it is less than 10% white British (the particular area I grew up in being around 4%) and even in 1979 less than one in five kids at my school were English, the majority were British born kids of Indian and Pakistani parents with a smattering of West Indians. Why were we scared? Because we were convinced that busses were coming to take all the black and brown kids away. Mrs Thatcher had won the election and was now in power. Immigration and race relations were a hot topic at the time (there had been a riot in Southall only weeks before the election), and she had indeed campaigned on reducing immigration. Labour Party activists and some of our teachers (an overlapping group), had convinced the Asian community that they would all be deported if Mrs Thatcher got in.

Of course, the busses never came. Thatcher did tighten the law on immigration, and the law was enforced, but there were no mass deportations of settled immigrant families. Importantly the mood music changed and the rate of immigration was slowed but did not stop. The left resisted this and there were race riots across the country (including Southall again) in 1981. However, gradually relations grew better as the heat was drawn from the situation, and by the time the nasty crew of toxic pygmies brought her down in 1990 immigration and race were no longer anything like the fraught issues they were when she took office.

When he gained power in 1997 one of Tony B Liar’s first acts was to reverse Thatcher’s measures on immigration. Now, more than two decades later, immigration is a hot topic again, this time twinned with culture rather than race, again the left is telling lies about the right and policing the language and terms of debate, smearing anyone who dares to challenge their assumptions as racists. Looking back on those scared school kids in 1979, I will never forget, or forgive, the leftist lies, then and now.

1982

In April 1982 something happened that not only changed our country but had an impact far beyond the UK. With his regime wobbling General Galtieri, President of Argentina, took a gamble and launched an invasion of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, small British possessions hundreds of miles from their coast, but passionately claimed by the Argentinians. “Retaking” what they refer to as las Malvinas would unite the country behind him and ensure his grip on power.

With the uncomplicated clarity of a twelve-year-old I saw the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in black and white terms. They should leave unconditionally, or we should fight them and beat them. I saw any negotiated settlement, any concession at all, as vindicating their invasion to some degree.

It would seem Margaret Thatcher was of a broadly similar view. I can sympathise with US diplomats, trying hard to prevent further conflict between two of their closest allies. The fact that, in the end, Ronald Reagan’s USA came down decidedly on our side and gave essential aid to our forces was a massive factor in counteracting the anti-American rhetoric we were drip fed by many of our teachers and popular culture. As it was the campaign, although successful, was a damned close-run thing, the American assistance was vital.

The reaction of most of the British left disgusted me. Marches were organised up and down the country against the war and, of course, Maggie Thatcher was denounced as a war monger. I was dumbfounded, these people actually loathed their own country so much that they would leave a fascist regime in possession of British land and British people. The scales fell from my eyes and soon I’d pretty much completed the traditional transition from left to right. By the time of the 1987 election I’d become an active member of the Conservative Party.

The Falklands War really did give the British a new lease of life. Decades of “the orderly management of decline” were swept away. There were, and still are, plenty of Wormtongues dripping defeatist, self loathing, poison into Britain’s ear, but those of us who remember the Falklands know what courage, strength and resolve can do, especially with help from good friends.

The Falklands were of much more than purely British significance. In the early 1990s I was at dinner with a friend and a wonderful lady called Judith Hatton. A formidable campaigner on the libertarian right, Judith had been an active member of the Committee for a Free Russia and had connections in Russia and the intelligence community. My friend and I were talking about how the Falklands had been a formative experience for us when Judith piped up in her clipped, incisive voice.

“You boys do know the real significance of the Falklands, don’t you?”

She went on to explain that by the early 1980s, like General Galtieri, the Soviet establishment knew that their system was failing and needed drastic action to save it from collapse. The Red Army had convinced the Politburo that the West would not seriously oppose an invasion of West Germany and the other non-nuclear countries of western Europe. They argued that Britain lacked the ability or the will to project power while the US had the power, but not the will, and would not go all the way to protect Europe if not attacked directly themselves. With the exception of France they did not see the western Europeans as a serious part of the equation. The “Seven Days to the River Rhine” campaign was being considered for some time in the mid-1980s. For the cost of few hundreds of thousands of dead they could capture valuable resources, give their people a victorious war to distract them from domestic trouble and keep the USSR going into the 21^st century.                                                                                   

Then came the Falklands.

Under Thatcher’s leadership he UK successfully projected power more than eight thousand miles in order to liberate less than two thousand of its people. The US stood by the UK and gave substantial assistance, abandoning its main ally in South America to do so. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the US was actively backing Israel against aggressors armed by the Soviets. Together Reagan and Thatcher amply demonstrated that they were willing and able to use force to defend liberty. It was no longer possible to credibly claim that an invasion of the West would be opposed by anything other than a resolute and well-armed response. The plans were shelved, and the dead Red knight continued to stagger on in his rusty armour. Instead of invasion and Armageddon we got Glasnost, Perestroika and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union.

It’s terrifying to think just how lucky we were to have two leaders like Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan at just the right time. Just imagine how things might have gone if Jim Callaghan and Jimmy Carter had won in 1979 and 1980.

Today we can see that while the military and economic threat of Marxism was being confronted and beaten the cultural disease of Marxism was eating its way through our educational and media establishments. Nevertheless, forty years ago Margaret Thatcher’s election saw the start of the fight back. The military and economic battle was won, it is up to us now to continue and win the cultural fight. To quote Thatcher:

“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”

Tonight, I hope you will join me in raising a glass to the memory of Maggie Thatcher and to Ronnie Reagan, two people that we owe so much to.