Thatcher Files remind us what real political leadership looks like

Leader: Margaret Thatcher

Last Friday, a number of previously Top Secret UK Government files were released by the National Archives. They had been held in secret since 1982 under the 30-year rule.

As if it was necessary, the files accentuate Margaret Thatcher’s leadership qualities and her complete grasp of the UK Government machine. In May 1982, the UK was at war with Argentina over their occupation of the Falkland Islands, a British Crown Dependency. Late one night during the preparations for the Battle of Stanley Mrs Thatcher received a telephone call from the US President, Ronald Reagan. He was trying to persuade our Prime Minister to give diplomacy one more go and not to completely humiliate the Argentines. Many in the President’s administration were against Britain using force to reclaim our territory and some senior US figures never wanted the UK to fight back in the first place and instead wanted us to leave the Falklands Islands and her people to their fate, taken into a brutal Argentina dictatorship.

Mrs Thatcher was not having any of it. She faced down the US President reminding him he did not back the UK when Argentina occupied the Falklands and therefore she would call the shots. Two weeks later the Argentina junta surrendered and the Falklands Islands and her people were free.

Margaret Thatcher went on to win the 1983 General Election by a landslide.

It seems quite fitting to share this clip from The Iron Lady:

Happy Birthday Margaret Thatcher

Leadership: Margaret Thatcher

The greatest peacetime Prime Minister this country has ever seen turns 87 today. Even socialists respected her during her eleven years in office from 1979 to 1990, with the Soviet Union dubbing her The Iron Lady. Why? Not because they liked her. But out of respect.

Margaret Thatcher achieved more during her time in power than any other leader in modern times, except for Winston Churchill. In the 1970s, our European friends sniggered that Great Britain was the “sick man of Europe” with union strikes on a weekly basis, rubbish piling up in the street and even the dead left unburied during the Winter of Discontent in 1978. The country that helped free our European cousins from Nazism was now being written off as a hopeless case with no economic prospects: an island of decline off the north continental coast.

Then Margaret Thatcher won the General Election for the Conservative Party in 1979 and she started the fightback against the forces of ruin. She reigned in the unions, making flying pickets illegal, she privatised whole swathes of decrepit public services, she put the humble striving family at the centre of her policies, she empowered the police, she told the Argentines where to go after they invaded our islands in the South Atlantic, she enabled London to become the greatest financial centre in the world.

Did I forget something? Oh yes, on top of her economic revolution in the UK, she worked with President Reagan to end communism in Eastern Europe through sheer leadership, a quality almost unheard of now in the western world.

When Lady Thatcher dies, I for one will be travelling to London for her funeral. We and the world owe so much to her.

Here’s a video synopsis of her achievements:

Today’s capitalism is a like a child which never grew up

It may come as a surprise to some of my Left-wing critics, but I am becoming more concerned by the day about the state of capitalism. We certainly don’t want to go back to the economy of the 1970s, where mass nationalised industry and crippling union behaviour brought this great country to its knees, forced us to run to the IMF and we were labelled “the sick man of Europe” by our sniggering European cousins. Thatcher rescued us from this great shame and allowed capitalism to flourish during her tenure when she introduced the free market to almost every sector with privatisations of our utilities and the deregulation of The City. Many ordinary people like my mother and father benefited enormously from Margaret Thatcher’s policies and the middle class expanded greatly under her rule to the point where hardly anyone calls themselves working class any more. Any that do seem to miss the point as they are likely to be on benefits.

But capitalism has not matured over the last 30 years. It still behaves in an infantile manner and certain immoral people have taken advantage. Bankers, CEOs, non-executive directors have spent the last 20 years lining their pockets off the backs of the low to middle income earners like my mother and father and now my working generation. Frankly, it is immoral and wrong for ANY CEO to earn £1million whilst the next high earner in the company outside of the boardroom will never go above £100,000.  Now, don’t get me wrong, £100,000 is still a huge amount of money but a) very few senior mangers outside of the boardroom will earn this and b) it is TEN times less than the CEO. And of course, the vast majority of people in a company, myself included, are earning nothing like that kind of money.

So, what makes a CEO so special? Why is he worth £1million basic salary? The answer is he is patently not. In the boom years FTSE 100 CEOs were earning £1million+ whilst their company, for example, was sitting on £20bn worth of debt. The CEO in this instance was certainly not worth a basic salary of £1million.  Bankers were trading products they did not understand, merging with companies stacked with toxic assets and yet still they were giving themselves £millions in pay and bonuses. Directors of Remuneration Committees were and still are ensuring their mate in one company is trousering a few £million a year as long as their mate ensures he will get a few £million from the company he runs. There is a word for that: corruption.

And still the vast majority of ordinary workers in companies up and down the land did not benefit from capitalism in the boom years between 1997 and 2008. In fact most hardly received above inflation pay rises during this time. The money, instead, was given to a few thousand at the top our publicly-listed companies. They then proceeded to live high on the hog and, in the case of the bankers, they had so much money they bought up properties in London every year they did not need and have effectively priced any ordinary worker out of the London housing market as a result.

We have since had an economic crash on a par with the 1930s depression. And nothing has changed on executive pay. The elite in the boardroom still take home most of the money whilst the other employees do the real work.

However, before any of my left-wing friends get too excited, let me emphasise I am still an ardent supporter of capitalism, privatisation and free-markets. In shorthand, I am a Thatcherite. But Thatcher, if she was still Prime Minister today, would be revising capitalism, modifying capitalism, maturing capitalism. She would be ensuring the great benefits of capitalism, which saw millions of families like mine become part of the burgeoning middle class, were continued to be received by us in the 21st century. As a grocers’s daughter she understood ordinary workers and saw it as her moral duty to ensure the wealth of capitalism flowed down the workforce line. Thatcher certainly did this during the 1980s but successive Governments failed to continue with this policy.

At the present time, I and millions of other workers up and down this land are patently not benefiting from capitalism. This does not mean we are going to vote for the pygmy that is Ed Miliband. No, we don’t want a something for nothing society and one that sees a free economy enslaved by nationalisation and socialism. We want to see more fruits of capitalism in our purses and wallets: the complete opposite of socialism.

How can ordinary people benefit more from capitalism in the 21st century? A very difficult question to answer. The Liberal Democrat Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has started to address the issue but only in words not deeds. I think we need to do these two things first:

1. A ratio cap. That is CEOs can only be paid a maximum multiple of a average middle manager’s salary. This multiple will be difficult to calculate but it is not beyond the wit of man to derive.

2. Employee representation on a company’s remuneration committee (which I commend Labour for proposing). In many companies, there is very much a rule for the workers in terms of performance management and reward and another for the board members. By having employees on remuneration committees a CEO will start to be treated like any other employee is when it comes to their pay – because they are like any other employee.

The above won’t be enough, however, until the big institutional shareholders such as the pension fund managers also develop some morality and ethics and start to walk the talk regarding obscene CEO and banker pay.

The Right are starting to wake up to the misbehaviour of the capitalism child. David Davis MP – not exactly a left-wing stooge – has expressed his concern about high executive pay. YouGov has also found that Tory voters want a Mansion Tax introduced on properties worth £2million or more. I’m not in favour of this. I would prefer to cut obscene pay at source by bringing some morality into the boardroom and see the additional money pushed down the line. First and foremost we need a strategy from Number 10 on how to develop capitalism for everyone again: I fear David Cameron and George Osborne don’t know how to.

Thatcher hatred displays great ignorance

This Friday a film biopic on the political career of Baroness Thatcher is released at cinemas nationwide.
I have deliberately not listened, watched or read any reviews on The Iron Lady as I find doing so spoils the enjoyment when I get round to seeing the film but I see the usual suspects haven’t missed an opportunity to peddle their abuse towards an 85 year old woman.

More websites have been set up to count down the days until the former Prime Minister dies, including isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are peppered with grotesque insults about her. Labour controlled Sunderland Council have officially condoned the revolting comments of their Deputy Council Leader who said she hopes Margaret Thatcher “burns in hell”.

And yet I feel more pity than anger towards these ignorant Socialists. They harp on about how Thatcher destroyed communities by winding down inefficient state controlled coal mining but in fact many miners and their families who had two brain cells to rub together and the nouse to move to find work took the opportunity to enter the burgeoning wealth creating private sector industries which helped take Britain from the basket case of an economy in 1979, and labelled as the “sick man of Europe” by our sneering European cousins, to the fourth largest economy on Earth by the time her legacy had been cemented in 1997. I personally know people who worked in the mines in Yorkshire who moved into the IT sector and saw their income rocket with a nice detached house to match. They aren’t weeping for the good ol’ days because they weren’t.

Socialists seem to forget what a mess this country was in before Margaret Thatcher came to power: three-day weeks, nightly power cuts, the dead laying unburied. Before Brown almost bankrupted the country again the UK was a transformed, rich country.  People became two or more car families, they had yearly holidays abroad, enjoyed lower taxes and bought affordable electronic goods – do the loony Left think this happened by accident? No, it happened because a brave, shrewd, tough, intelligent woman fought to the top of the Conservative Party and became our Prime Minister, implemented the policies of free markets and monetarism, which were rewarded by her winning three elections in a row.  The likes of Cllr Florence Anderson should stop and think why it is she has a standard of living only dreamt of by ordinary people in the 1970s, despite the economic mess her party has today got us into.

Margaret Thatcher was so successful that her second greatest legacy after the economic is the Left had to become more like her to get elected. Isn’t that right Tony?

There has also been premature talk of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, which I hope is many years away. But when the great lady does pass away I would strongly support a State Funeral. This would be the only way of reflecting the incalculable positive impact of Thatcher’s economic policies on millions of lives in this country and the impact her foreign policies, along with President Reagan, had in freeing millions of Europeans from tyranny.

Quite frankly, Baroness Thatcher is our greatest living Briton – and long may that continue.