When someone like former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dies, we should remember the maxim “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum.” However, this Latin phrase, which is widely believed to mean “of the dead, nothing spoken unless good,” is probably incorrectly interpreted.
It’s far more important that we not speak anything untrue.
Unfortunately, crowds took to the streets, not mourning, but celebrating Lady Thatcher’s death in London and other major British cities. According to Daily Mail, left wing crowds — swigging beer and champagne — gathered to show their delight at the news with offensive chants and banners. As the night went on, the drunken revelries spawned violence in the streets, and six police officers were injured. It appears Britons aren’t as civilized as they used to be.
Ill opinion can be entertained, but we should never celebrate a person’s death in any circumstance — no matter how hated that person was. I believe that Ronald Reagan, Lady Thatcher’s political ally and longtime friend, had no fewer enemies in the U.S. than Thatcher had in Britain. But when Reagan passed away in 2004, few people in America took to the streets to celebrate.
The people who celebrated Thatcher’s death not only hate her, but have also fabricated stories to deride her record as prime minster. Union workers abandoned her because they were told she destroyed the unions’ power. But in fact, her reforms empowered union members rather than union leaders. She saw unions as a powerful force misused by leaders to secure privileges rather than protect workers’ rights.
Previous Conservative and Labour Party governments had tried and failed to bring unions under the law. The U.K.’s strike record, the worst in Europe, weighed heavily on British society, and the Thatcher reforms gave union members the right to vote for leaders in secret postal ballots and the right to be balloted ahead of possible strike action. These changes resulted in more moderate union leadership and greatly reduced industrial unrest.
Another myth that union workers in Northern England fabricated is that Thatcher destroyed Britain’s manufacturing base. But the data show otherwise. When Thatcher left office, U.K. manufacturing output was 7.5 percent higher than when she began. It did decline as a proportion of the total economy, but only because other sectors — especially services and finance — expanded more rapidly as the economy changed.
This trend also happened in other advanced economies. It is true that three major industries — shipbuilding, steel and coal — declined as they became unable to compete with other countries. But other industries, such as advanced manufacturing, expanded.
Lady Thatcher was dubbed the “Iron Lady” for her persistent belief that Britain needed a free market under the rule of law. The public is more likely to misunderstand leaders like Thatcher, portraying them as relentlessly cold-blooded and not caring for the poor at all. But this is not because these leaders didn’t care for the poor personally. Instead, Thatcher and Reagan downplayed the idea of using state power to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. They understood that helping the poor by asking the rich for more doesn’t create wealth.
Thatcher knew she would face strong criticism by pushing her idea to the front, and she expected people to condemn her. Deep down in her heart, she understood that if Britain chose a socialist path, no one would blame her in the end. But the country would have deteriorated down to a state in which everyone was equally poor.
Rest in peace, Lady Thatcher.
