Speeches, etc.

Margaret Thatcher

Article for The Sun ("The Britain I Want")

Document type: Speeches, interviews, etc.
Source: The Sun, 2 May 1979
Editorial comments: Item listed by date of publication. The Prime Minister also contributed an article ("We need to keep this a nation that cares").
Importance ranking: Major
Word count: 976
Themes: Conservatism, General Elections, Taxation, Social security & welfare, Trade unions, Strikes & other union action

THE BRITAIN I WANT

By Margaret Thatcher

Tomorrow, the voters of Britain have a chance to change history, a chance to transform this country from a land sliding into greyness and despair into a nation on the brink of new hope and fresh opportunity.

Yes, this election is about prices. Yes, this election is about jobs—and I have done my share of explaining in these last few weeks why Conservative policies are the only way to restore our lost prosperity.

But I believe this election is about something even more important.

It offers the choice—and that choice may not occur again—between the path of freedom and self-respect and the slow but certain route to national suffocation under a blanket of bureaucracy and State control.

That kind of Britain, a land where men and women are no longer people with ambitions and dreams and ideals, but first numbers in some remote computer is not the kind of Britain I ever want to see.

• The Britain I want is a land which cares for the weak the old and the sick but which says that the able-bodied have the duty and the right to shape their own lives.

• The Britain I want is a land where a man can know that if he works hard and earns money for his family, he will be allowed to hold on to most of what his efforts have brought him, rather than have it seized to build Ministerial empires.

• The Britain I want is a land where people are not ground down in the name of false equality to the point where a man is better off on the dole than at work.

• The Britain I Want is a land where people pay their taxes knowing that they are fair and that they will be prudently spent.

I do not want this country to remain a place where taxation is wielded as a punishment for effort and success, and where envy and spite displace charity and compassion as our national ideals. [end p1]

• The Britain I want is a land where a man can take a job he is capable of doing, and work for whom he chooses. Not a land where there is no employer but The State.

I want this country of ours to be a place where those who obey just laws need not go in fear of their jobs or their safety.

In these last few years. Britain has been transformed, Now, with increasing frequency, neighbour strikes against neighbour, and common humanity is being displaced by action against the most vulnerable of our people in the battle for pay and power.

The dying, the sick, the old, the children and even the bereaved are now regularly not just the victims, but the targets of industrial action.

Have millions of ordinary, decent trade unionists really become heartless mililtants? I refuse to believe it. What has happened is that, under the ethics of a breed of “socialism” which would have appalled Clem Atlee or Hugh Gaitskell, the trade union ideal has been distorted.

The trade unions are a vital and essential part of the British way of life.

They grew up as defenders of the weak against exploitation by ruthless employers.

But for some that crusade is now a vendetta.

Now, thanks to laws passed by the present Government to appease an unrepresentative minority in its own party, the greatest threat to a man's right to-work can be from the union which is supposed to offer him protection.

How many of those involved in the suffering inflicted by this winter's strikes really believed in the fairness of what they did?

And how many just put their heads down and did as they were told, for fear that if they refused they and their families might be victimised?

• In the Britain I want, Cabinet Ministers would not parade on the picket lines and then plead their innocence when the blood flowed.

• In the Britain I want, a man would have the right to appeal to the courts against persecution rather than throw himself upon the mercy of his accusers.

The Britain I want is a place where all men and women, whatever their birth, their background, their colour or their religion, truly have the same chance to succeed.

I do not want a Britain where the only way to the top is by knowing which bureaucrats to butter up, or which politicans to please in order to get one of the growing thousands of jobs which can only be gained by ministerial patronage.

It was right that the old ruling class of the 19th century should give way to a greater democracy where all men—and women, too—should speak with an equal voice.

But those battles were not fought to pave the way for a new “boss class” of politicians and their placemen, or to create an all-powerful State which would bend the law against liberty itself and diminish the authority of the courts.

They were not fought to see the Parliamentary bastions of our democracy undermined to make possible the emergence of a one-party State.

When I was a teenager, this country endured a war against tyranny.

Did the sons, brothers and fathers who gave their tomorrows in that conflict do so to see us, today, throw away without a struggle the freedom they defended?

• The Britain I want will cherish its liberties.

• The Britain I want will also fight its own economic battles.

It will be a country which does not scramble to blame its self-inflicted ills on other nations, friendly or otherwise, even while it cringes at the displeasure of any country large or small which faces it with threat or bluster.

• The Britain I want is a country which once again is known throughout the world for its integrity, its industry, the calibre of its people and its valiant championship of justice and truth.

A country which is not ashamed to work for its living and to teach its children the difference between right and wrong.

• The Britain I want will guard the right of its citizens to live their lives without fear of crime and terrorism and those citizens will not be grudges the means to maintain the law or to protect them and their allies from aggression.

In the Britain I want people will walk with freedom with opportunity and with security.

But most of all, they will walk with pride.