Margaret Thatcher is like Marmite - love her or hate her. There seems to be no middle ground. She brought to the British Government more than a leadership, she brought her experience and background as a grocer's daughter, a housewife and homemaker and someone who had not taken the road for women of the day marrying and giving up any personal hopes and dreams. She was educated at Oxford University and went on to obtain a legal degree. Denis Thatcher was her encourager and advisor for many years. Having served in the military he was able to explain and advise her throughout the Falklands War.
Her concern was to focus on abuse of the system on bureaucracy and union militancy and the growth which later became to be called the dependency culture. She disliked too many government controls.
"Let me give you my vision: a man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master - these are the British inheritance. . . We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery, not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped. We are coming, I think, to yet another turning point in our long history. We can go on as we have been going and continue down or we can stop with a decisive act of will we can say 'Enough' "
She pointed out the division of the country in the 1980s:
"Let Labour's Orwellian nightmare of the left be the spur for us to dedicate with a new urgency our every ounce of energy and moral strength to rebuilt the fortunes of this free nation."
In her quest to allow people to own their own houses she offered sale, at a reduction of the market value, council houses that people currently occupied and other schemes to prompt home ownership.
She limited the hold unions had on Britain and returned many companies, that government held a majority share in, to the private sector. Many business such as British Leyland, because of Union contracts, were selling vehicles at a 600 pound loss per car!
Regardless of how she was viewed, she nevertheless put her all into each project she took on, mastering policy and trying to offer people more freedom rather than government restrictions.
