A pivotal statesman who transformed domestic politics and helped to win the Cold War emerged on the global stage 50 years ago. Both the first female and longest-serving British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher earned her legendary nickname—the “Iron Lady”—before she even took office in 1979. The iconic sobriquet came courtesy of the official newspaper of the Soviet Ministry of Defense.
Great Britain experienced its greatest push for socialism during Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s post-World War II Labour government (1945-1951), which nationalized key industries in banking, power and light, transportation, medicine, and iron and steel; created a welfare state, including the National Health Service (NHS); and exercised central planning through a vast network of controls and regulations over the remainder of industry as well as agriculture. With the partial exception of steel, subsequent national governments—whether Conservative or Labour—maintained a postwar consensus of nationalization, heavy regulations and controls, high taxes, strong trade unions, and a far-reaching welfare state. Years after proclaiming in 1945 that it was “a socialist party and proud of it,” the Labour Party still featured a robust faction that pledged in Labour’s Programme 1973 to achieve a “fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.”
Enter Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013). In 1976, she was starting her second year as the opposition leader of the Conservative (Tory) Party. The ruling Labour government was divided between non-socialists and socialists—the latter set upon state ownership of additional industries, expanded central planning, and radical redistribution of wealth—at the same time it faced crises in the domestic and global economies to which it responded with austerity measures. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union bid to outproduce the West in military (sea, land, and air) power and to install or reinforce communist regimes in Angola and elsewhere. Deeply concerned, Thatcher warned against the combined threat from communism abroad and socialism at home.
On January 19, 1976, Thatcher gave a speech before Tory supporters at London’s Kensington Town Hall that made a splash because of the Soviet reaction; she followed up with remarks on January 31, to her Conservative Party Finchley constituency. The second speech attracted worldwide attention due to Thatcher’s response—both for its substance and clever style—to the Kremlin and other critics. A Soviet propagandist for the newspaper Red Star intended “Iron Lady” as an insult; so did TASS (official Soviet state media) and other press. Thatcher astutely embraced “Iron Lady” at Finchley, “I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my hair gently waived, the Iron Lady of the Western world.” Then she strategically drove home the point: “Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke, yes if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.”
At a time of detente when Western diplomats wanted to settle and communists wanted to win, when America was in decline after defeat in Vietnam and the scandal of Watergate, and when the Soviets were on the march on several continents, Thatcher said no. She said no clearly, and she explained why. She also channeled her inner Churchill and was willing to stand alone. The start of the political partnership between Prime Minister Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan was five years ahead in a future that was neither known nor determined.
By dint of her family upbringing, Christian faith, and education, Thatcher lived by and championed individual liberty, personal responsibility and hard work, community rather than collectivism, free markets, and a limited state. She believed that Karl Marx and his heirs regarded socialism as a transitional stage on the way to full communism and thus meant the end of the West; she took on the most destructive political ideology yet created by man from the start of her career. “We believe in the freedom of the democratic way of life,” she wrote in her 1950 New Year’s Eve message as a first-time, prospective candidate for Parliament. “Communism seizes power by force, not by free choice of the people….We must firstly believe in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly. Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force.”
Thatcher developed her core understanding about big-brother communism and little-sister socialism, as she honed her communication skills to educate supporters and counter opponents. Politics and economics were morally and consistently intertwined in her position. In a 1968 speech entitled “What’s Wrong with Politics,” Thatcher, while Conservative shadow minister for fuel and power, maintained that “[m]oney is not an end in itself,” and that “even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.” In her view, communism and socialism—in their varying degrees—suffered from the same source problem of “too much,” too big, and too centralized government, which robbed the people of their right and ability to practice self-government.
Lessons for today’s America abound from Thatcher’s “Britain Awake” and “Iron Lady” speeches. Central among them, Thatcher conveyed that a free people must clearly see, understand, and answer its enemies. In “Britain Awake,” she emphasized that “Socialists never listen” and that socialist policies were weakening Britain’s economic and military strength and jeopardizing both the “survival of our way of life” and the country’s strength in foreign affairs. A major theme of the speech was that Britain’s main external enemy, the USSR, was exploiting détente and the Helsinki Accords, and that the Labour government—whether willfully or not—was blind to threats. It was time for the British public to wake up “out of a long sleep,” she added, for the advance of communist power “is not irreversible, providing we take the necessary measures now. But the longer that we go on running down our means of survival, the harder it will be to catch up.”
As important, Thatcher knew that words matter and that ideological opponents at home and abroad manipulated them. Words express ideas, principles, and policies. The press release for what was quickly called the “Iron Lady” speech was even titled “War of Words.” Referring to the Cold War battle on many fronts and “the guns and missiles aimed at us,” Thatcher said, “equally we must not let them blind us to the insidious war on words which is going on.” She then elaborated, “The war is a true war of words, where meanings get lost in a mist of revolutionary fantasy; where accuracy is slipped quietly under the carpet; and where truth is twisted and bent to suit the latest propagandist line.” All of this, she underscored, is “totally alien to our notions of freedom and truth.” In a tour de force, Thatcher dissected that communists—Marxists, socialists, and everyone in-between—had corrupted and co-opted key words such as “freedom” and “public.” Looking at her main U.S. ally and her many American friends, she would advise us to identify the cancer—in New York City, for instance—using clear, factual language. Only then can we stop its spread and rid it from the body politic.
The end of the Cold War does not make the rise of socialism less but more dangerous because, as absurd as it is to anyone who knows the history of that ideology, it is now seen by some in liberal democracies as a legitimate form of governing city, state, and even nation. In 1976, in language that resonates at this moment, the newly dubbed “Iron Lady” concluded, “Socialists believe people are not to be trusted with choice…Socialism is the denial of choice, the denial of choice for ordinary people in their everyday lives. There is a will in Britain to work and build up the future for our children. But Socialists don’t trust the people. Churchill did. We do.”
In 2026, on the 250th anniversary of America’s birth, we as a self-governing people will recur to the republican principle of popular rule. Publius notes in Federalist 1 that it has been left to Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” We must once again choose to reject the rule of force—this time, ideological—in our country. It is time for America to wake up and listen to Margaret Thatcher.
