Authority 8

I want a capital earning democracy—every man a capitalist. (…) If you’re a man or woman of some independent means, if you’ve got a pride and independence, and so I want the money to go back in their own pockets. Some will spend it (…) on making their home exquisitely beautiful, their garden, their education for their children or giving their children that chance they didn’t have or enable them to learn languages, some looking after their own health, (…) But every man a capitalist, every man a man of property. It induces responsibility in society if you have some of your own.

Interview in The Observer, 1. May 1983, p. 37.

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) was British Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She was nicknamed the Iron Lady because she pushed through her policies to “reform” England against stiff opposition.

Thatcher is seen as a symbol of Europe's turn away from the welfare state and towards the ideologies of individual responsibility and neoliberalism (privatisation, deregulation and the breaking of unions). While Thatcher was Prime Minister in Great Britain, Ronald Reagan was President of the USA (1981-1989). The two are thought of as pioneers of the neoliberalisation of democracy, and in this, they helped forge a global change in politics during the 1980s. Thatcher enforced the logic of necessity with her TINA principle (There is No Alternative), with which severe cuts in social spending etc. continue to be justified to this day. Under Thatcher, the unions were barred from consulting with the government on its labour market policies, many public companies were privatised, and protests against these were crushed. In regards to this, the miners' strike of 1984/85 is a particularly well known example. She described the disputes surrounding this strike as a prolongation of the Falklands War: ‘We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands and now we have to fight the enemy within, which is much more difficult but just as dangerous to liberty.’ (quoted in Naomi Klein 2007: 138).

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

1983