Margaret Thatcher Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham Lincolnshire, England, to a working-class family. She was elected as Member of Parliament for Finchley, London, in 1959 and held the posts of British Secretary of State for Education and Science, in the Ted Heath government (1970-74); Leader of the United Kingdom (UK) Conservative Party (1975-90); Leader of the Government’s Opposition (1975-79) and British Prime Minister (1979-90). She was the winner of three successive general elections in 1979, 1983, 1987 and is the longest-serving Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool. She is significant to British history because her policies represented a radical shift from the consensus politics that had characterized the previous postwar British political era.

Margaret Thatcher was a figurehead of a “new right” political philosophy and doctrine that became known as Thatcherism. Built on a belief in the free market and the private sector, this involved a range of actions including: Reductions in public/state spending, lower direct taxation, a tight monetarist policy, a program of privatization of governmentowned industries, local and national deregulation of markets, and the curtailing of union powers and other perceived restrictions on the economy.

Thatcher’s policies and style polarized public opinion of her, often along class lines. Her policies perpetuated the income gap between rich and poor, which were reflected geographically in a north/south divide. She resigned as Prime Minister in 1990 following an unconvincing victory in the first round ballot of a party leadership contest. In 1992, she was awarded the title Baroness Thatcher and became a member of The House of Lords. She was heavily engaged in public speaking, an activity that she was forced to curtail in 2002 due to ill health. Her legacy is that the new right has effectively become the current political center ground.

In terms of environmental policy, Thatcherism follows the broad outlines of free market environmentalism, which favors volunteerism, green consumption, and the trading of externalities over any form of regulation or imposition of systems or standards. As such, Thatcher was a reliable opponent of most forms of environmental regulation, which she viewed as extensions of socialist and left-leaning “big government” legacies.

Thatcher was throughout her career an opponent of multilateral and global governance systems, moreover, including in the realm of environmental issues. In her book Statecraft, she went so far as to say that global warming “provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.”

While she was an early leader in raising and discussing the problem of global warming and the ultimate necessity of dealing with it, to the degree that such environmental issues might be addressed, Thatcher remained skeptical of international regulation and treaties or anything that might hinder economic development. The legacy of her approach to the environment in the UK remains somewhat unclear in the era of the Kyoto Protocol, to which the UK is a signatory, though there has yet to be a legislative framework to promote greenhouse gas reductions.

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