The Iron Lady's Afterlife Controversy: A Historical Study and Press Analysis of Margaret Thatcher's

31 Pages·2016·0.54 MB·English

This is the published version of the bachelor thesis:
Moreno i Lorente, Ariadna; Edwards, Nicholas John, dir. The Iron Lady’s
Afterlife Controversy : A Historical Study and Press Analysis of Margaret
Thatcher’s Death. 2016. 31 pag. (838 Grau en Estudis d’Anglès i de Clàssiques)
This version is available at https://ddd.uab.cat/record/164107
under the terms of the license
The Iron Lady’s Afterlife Controversy:
A Historical Study and Press Analysis of Margaret
Thatcher’s Death

Treball de Fi de Grau
Grau Combinat en Estudis d’Anglès i Clàssiques
Supervisor: Nicholas John Edwards

Ariadna Moreno i Lorente
June 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 1
1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 2
2. Context ..................................................................................................................... 4
2.1 Historical Context ................................................................................................... 4
2.1.1 Thatcher’s Political Life and 1979 General Elections ..................................... 4
2.1.2 Monetarism ...................................................................................................... 6
2.1.3 1983 General Elections .................................................................................... 7
2.1.4 The Falklands .................................................................................................. 8
2.1.5 Trade Union Reforms and the Miner’s Strike ................................................. 8
2.1.6 Dealing with Terrorism ................................................................................. 10
2.1.7 1987 General Elections and Burges Speech .................................................. 11
2.1.8 The Community Charge and Thatcher’s Downfall ....................................... 12
2.1.9 Thatcher’s Lehacy ......................................................................................... 13
2.2 The UK press ........................................................................................................ 14
3. Press and Twitter Analysis ......................................................................................... 15
4. Conclusions ................................................................................................................ 22
5. Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 24
5.1 Primary Sources .................................................................................................... 24
5.2 Further Reading .................................................................................................... 25
Appendices ..................................................................................................................... 27
Appendix A: Labour Isn’t Working ........................................................................... 27
Appendix B: Tramp the Dirt Down – Elvis Costello Lyrics ...................................... 27

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ABSTRACT

Margaret Thatcher’s election as a Prime Minister had a marked impact on the history
of the British Isles, not only for the fact that she was the first woman to lead a major political
party in the UK but also for her radical politics. However, not only did her election as PM cause
controversy but so did her death. The 8th of April, 2013, Baroness Thatcher died at the age of 87
because of a stroke. The same day of her death, many news sources in the British Isles
mobilised and brought to light the breaking piece of news. This paper aims to show the
positions that many newspapers adopted towards the ex-PM Margaret Thatcher’s demise, 23
years after she left office, having their roots in the actions that the Baroness carried out during
her premiership. By stating this, this paper also corroborates that Thatcherism and its
consequences prevail and are current in the UK. Besides that, through the analysis of British
newspapers, this paper also endeavors to prove that the general feeling of sadness and respect
for the so-called Iron Lady was the mood that most of the articles adopted and predominated,
but there also were other reactions.

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1. INTRODUCTION

An over life-size bronze statue of Margaret Thatcher stands impressively in the
Member’s Lobby inside the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Margaret Thatcher has
been the only PM to whom a statue has been raised in her honour within her lifetime.
The statue, in front of Winston Churchill’s statue, was erected in the year 2007, six
years before she deceased. The raising of this statue, as well as the raising of many
others in her honour, sparks controversy among UK citizens. “Controversy” is a word
that like a ghost continuously followed Margaret Thatcher’s political life and even, her
death. The 8th of April of 2013 Margaret Thatcher died following a stroke and the same
day, Margaret Thatcher’s face was in each newspaper around the UK. Although many
articles were written, as may seem obvious, not all of them were written by the same
author, hence, different articles with different opinions took place.

“Sometimes the reality presented by the media matches the world as you know it,
and sometimes it is very different. Sometimes two media present similar versions of
the same event, and sometimes the result is very different” (J. Shoemaker, D.
Reese, 2009)

As Shoemaker and Reese state, the mass media does not simply mirror one unique
reality, but it reflects different positions. This variety of ideas the article writers in
newspapers and magazines show let us glimpse what the different views of a society
are. However, there is always one outlook that prevails, and usually it is the one that
goes down in history. The event that is studied in this paper may fall back into the same
patterns, so through the post-modern1 attempt to give voice to the marginal, this paper
aims to study not only the position of the predominant social class of the moment, but
also the others that, as time goes by, usually sink into oblivion. In order to do so, this

1 In Consciousness and the Novel, David Lodge asserts that postmodernism rejects the duality central-
marginal and gives importance to the “plurality of the ‘different’.
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paper analyses articles from newspapers and magazines with different political
orientations. By analysing these articles in relation to the Iron Lady’s death and using
the mass media as a representation of diverse ways of thinking, this paper also aims to
show through historical events why her death was such a controversial occurrence. The
main hypothesis is that Margaret Thatcher’s death not only caused sadness in society, as
the majority of the journalists stated, but that there were other reactions that were also
depicted in the press. Although the main sources used in this study are journalistic
articles, some other mass media and social media sources are employed. In the 21st
century, some social networks, such as Twitter, have become a subsidiary tool for the
press and this paper makes use of them.
The effect of Margaret Thatcher’s politics in the British society has been
extensively studied in recent years, especially after her death. However, none of the
existing studies have centred their topic on how her politics were reflected in the
behaviour of the citizens on the day of her death. Although the topic of this paper has
been academically neglected, through a journalistic study of the Iron Lady’s death, this
paper will try to help us to understand the social division that her politics caused. It
would be seen, however, that further investigations are needed in order to expand and
complete the study. In this paper, only British articles are studied and just opinions from
UK citizens are taken into account. Therefore, the international repercussions that the
death of a well-considered international governor had are not covered in this study.
Eventually, the paper is organized in four main sections; Firstly, the introduction,
in which the research space is created and the main objectives of the study are
presented. Secondly, the second section provides contexts and is subdivided in two
sections; the first one consists of an explanation of the most polemic events of Margaret
Thatcher’s government, which need to be explained in order to better understand why
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her death caused such controversy. The second subsection is a brief explanation of the
story of the newspapers from which the articles are analysed in the third section. This
explanation is provided in order to place the newspapers which are later analysed
according to their political orientation and, by doing so, the subsequent analysis of the
articles becomes more manageable and straightforward. The third section consists of the
analysis of the articles, where, as mentioned before, the different opinions about
Margaret Thatcher’s death are compared and examined from a historical point of view.
Finally, in the last section some conclusions that this study suggests are drawn.

2. CONTEXT
2.1 Historical Context
1.1.1 Margaret Thatcher’s Political Life and 1979 General Elections

Many scholars consider Margaret Thatcher’s political career as one of the most
remarkable of the 20th century. Evans (1996) refers to her as an “extraordinary
phenomenon” and not vainly. Whether you are for or against her politics, her
perseverance in all aspects of life cannot be questioned. She was the first woman who
got to be prime minister in the UK, and since then any other woman has been elected
PM again in Britain. Nonetheless, she did not only become an “extraordinary
phenomenon” for being the first woman PM in the British history; Margaret started her
political career in 1950, in her mid-twenties, but she would not become Member of the
Parliament until 1959. Sixteen more years would have to pass for her to be elected
Conservative Leader and only three more years to become PM. Thatcher was the PM
who stayed the longest in office in the 20th century. She was PM for almost 12 years,
from May 1979 to November 1990; she won three successive general elections, two of
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them with absolute majorities, thus also becoming the only party leader who won more
than two in the 20th century.
Thatcher’s politics had such an impact on the British society that Thatcher’s name
became eponymous.
"You know you've made it in life when you've got an ism. Marx, Buddha, Darwin.
They're all ism'ed up to the gills. And then there's Thatcherism, an equally hardy
ism that still looms over us all, like a shadow blocking out the sun. Small state, free
markets, deregulation, privatisation, tax cuts, union-breaking: that's Thatcherism
told simply, an 11-year premiership condensed into a concept. (Elmhirst, 2010)

As Elmhirst sarcastically summarizes, Thatcherism is a term that represents the hard
economic and political policies that Margaret Thatcher supported. These policies
attempted to lower inflation and were mainly based on the rejection and privatisation of
state ownerships of industries and business together with an economic policy of
monetarism and income tax cuts.
Even before becoming PM, when Thatcher became Secretary of State for
Education and Science with Edward Heath as the leader of the party, she agitated part of
the population when she removed free school milk from children aged seven to eleven.
In September 1971, at the Labour Party Conference, a floor speaker came up with the
phrase “Mrs. Thatcher Milk Snatcher”. (Moore, 2013) This phrase quickly spread
among the press and it became a nickname that would follow Thatcher for the rest of
her political career.
Although as Secretary of Education, the Iron Lady started to divide the nation,
when Baroness Thatcher really turned Britain upside down was when she became Prime
Minister on the 1st of June of 1979. The elections of Margaret Thatcher were preceded
by a winter which was known as the “Winter of Discontent”. During the winter of
1978-1979 there was a considerable union strike movement that was mainly provoked
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by the Labour party of James Callaghan that attempted to control inflation by
preventing pay increases. With her message “Labour isn’t working”2, Margaret
Thatcher gained the premiership in a delicate economic situation. When she came to
power, Britain was often described as “the sick man of Europe”; State-owned industries
had poor productivity, there was high inflation and the British economy had come to a
standstill. In this situation of economic decline, Lady Thatcher refloated the British
economy by putting into practice the right-wing economic ideas of the so-called
Chicago School of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman3.
2.1.2 Monetarism
These economic ideas received the name of “monetarism”; “The newfangled word
monetarism means, of course, no more than the good old name "quantity theory of
money"” (Hayek, 1980). As Hayek indicated, monetarism is rooted in the concept of
Quantity Theory of Money (QTM), an economic theory that states that the amount of
money in the economy determines the rise in the prices of products and services. The
monetarist economists believe that the economy cannot thrive unless a financial
condition of low inflation is given and, in order to control inflation, keeping tabs on
money supply plays a key role. According to monetarists, the government should only
guarantee the fundamental state necessities and relinquish the rest to the enterprises and
the customers.
“To monetarists, the best thing for the economy is to keep an eye on the money
supply and let the market take care of itself. In the end, the theory goes, markets
are more efficient at dealing with inflation and unemployment.” (Radcliffe, 2008)

3 Both Friedman and Hayek were economists involved in the monetarist movement. Friedman
was a scholar of the Chicago School of economics, one of the most recognized economy
schools.
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