The Legacy of Margaret Thatcher | Albert Mohler

well i greet you and uh welcome you to this event i'm very thrilled to be here with you and nothing excites us like thinking about leadership as we're amongst leaders i thought about what craig said in introducing me and i took office in 1993 at just about the same time that bill clinton did one of us is still here and so i take that as a certain historic achievement i can claim as a word of encouragement every once in a while leadership is so often caught it's observed and we we see in someone perhaps near perhaps afar perhaps someone of the present or someone of the past but we see something in a leader and we recognize that's an essential to leadership whatever that is whether it's courage or conviction or or or vision as we so often call it uh determination or the the gift of uh of leadership that is attractive so that you see people beginning to hear a message and to to to receive a signal and then to begin to follow that leadership the ultimate test of leadership however is whether a leader produces leaders who lead according to the same convictions and so that to me over time is the is the greatest test that's one of the reasons why i've invested my life in this particular work because you could summarize what we do here as producing leaders for the church who will produce yet other leaders for the church and it has been that commission that christ gave us church since the book of acts that continues us in this in this mission but as a boy i was fascinated with the great figures of the 20th century i couldn't help but to be i was born in 1959 and grew up in the midst of the cold war and uh i was fascinated with history and so i read far back beyond the beginnings of the 20th century but the 20th century was this great gigantic continent that i had to continually cross because i was living in it and even in the last half of the 20th century just trying to think about the leaders who emerged in the 20th century some for evil whose names are now uh icons of uh of evil leadership you think of kaiser wilhelm ii vladimir lenin joseph stalin adolf hitler mao zedong just just think of the carnage the genocide the the horrors that came by means of their leadership and and sadly they are reminders of the fact that all of the gifts of leadership all of them can be distorted through a corrupt lens into something horrifying but at the same time the 20th century also reveals to us leaders such as theodore roosevelt and then franklin roosevelt and winston churchill charles de gaulle ronald reagan margaret thatcher now you put them together you have quite a political debate but the fact is that every one of them was decisive each in his or her own way in shaping the 20th century and on the side for good in preventing evil from prevailing and you look back at the 20th century you recognize just how threatening evil was from the beginning all the way to the end so i've always been fascinated with these shapers of world history and one of them arose when i was a teenager and a very politically engaged a very historically minded teenager and someone who was already something of an anglophile i was fascinated by these british folk across the atlantic and and their history and i i knew enough to know that our history was a continuation of that history and began to read enough to know that the vision of the founders in the united states of a of an experiment and ordered liberty was based upon the ordered liberty that had been a part of the british experiment and so you have our declaration of independence and you have to understand that in the context of the magna carta you have our constitution which uh written constitution which you come to understand was the founders effort to perfect what had been the unwritten constitution of great britain a country that right now by the way must wish their constitution were indeed written uh as they find themselves currently in a constitutional crisis it's hard enough to have a constitutional crisis it's much harder when you don't have a written constitution but i dare not digress too far on that today but i will return to that issue because it's looming large and margaret thatcher had a great deal to say about it one of the things we need to recognize is that god has made us in such a way that we emerge in a flow of history now if you do believe in a secular worldview if you operate from you know a perspective that life is simply an accident and everything is a matter of chance then to put it bluntly we're just lucky some people came along when they did however christians operate out of a providential view of history and that means we understand that people emerge in a flow of history and their lives are meaningful because they were intended to be they were not accidental in their birth and their birth itself when it happened was not accidental if you take margaret thatcher the subject of our concern today margaret thatcher was born in the year 1925 had she been born in 1825 we would not know of her because it would have been inconceivable in the 19th century that a woman would have served as prime minister of great britain and i dare say that if she were to be born in 2025 she would probably have no place in british politics because her ideas would be considered so absolutely antiquated that would not offend her because she would argue that the abandonment of those principles is what has led to political chaos today but margaret thatcher of course wasn't born margaret thatcher she was born margaret roberts there in october of 1925 in grantham in england emerged in my consciousness when she was the conservative party leader and that happened as we shall see in 1975 and then when she was elected prime minister in 1979 but we're a long way from that understanding her context is important and her personal context was that she was born in a fairly small town but what's important about this is understanding that as in the united states so in britain the most british places are the small towns in the same sense the most american places are the small towns they're the quintessence of the national identity and so margaret thatcher was not the product of of growing up in london or birmingham or manchester she wasn't born near the corridors of power she was born destined for power she was born to a family that included a long line of methodist preachers and so methodist evangelical preaching was much a part of her life and she and uh and her family were ardent church attenders her father was actually a lay methodist preacher but more than anything else he's remembered as a grocer i identify with that because my father was a grocer but margaret thatcher then margaret roberts her father was what you would call an import grocer and that actually is historically important because that meant that margaret thatcher grew up surrounded by the the goods of the british empire teas coffees spices as she said her childhood was one of exotic smells coming from the far reach of the british empire and it was also entrepreneurial so she grew up literally over the shop of a grocery store and her parents ran that grocery store and ran it quite well it was a thriving business but the whole point was she was able to observe the entire community coming in her father's store and she began to sense the essence of what the british identity really was what it meant to be english it it meant a commitment to community and neighborhood it meant a very clear christian identity with the churches as the very center of the of the community itself it meant uh neighborhoods and it meant strong moral values that defined why there were social obligations of neighbor to neighbor and she grew up with as a very patriotic young woman in britain and remember born in 1925 the horrors of the first world war were the moral context of the memory when she was born and she was born in that that period between the wars when britain is doing everything possible uh to believe that another war was impossible and thus all of british cultivated aristocratic society was living in denial about what was happening during those years we don't know a whole lot about what margaret thatcher was thinking at the time because she kept most of those thoughts to herself but she did speak of it quite a bit later as a young woman she had ambitions that's reflected in the fact that even in that period leading up to and including the first years of the second world war she went to oxford university won a seat to study chemistry so the daughter of a grocer in grantham england went to oxford university somerville college and received a degree in chemistry she was very proud later in life by the way of the fact that she was the first scientist uh to be uh prime minister of england which she said was more dear to her than being the first woman prime minister of england but let's remember the historical context of what it meant for someone like margaret thatcher to emerge in that period graduating just after the end of the second world war she was already politically active by the way she was elected president of the oxford conservative association and for a woman to be elected to that post and as you know uh those associations and the universities such as oxford and cambridge but particularly oxford were mostly about debate and it turned out she was good at it and not just a little bit good at it but her ideas began to come together but i'll speak about that in a moment i want to speak about the context she will later study law of course at ends of court and become a barrister but she was really driven primarily by what we would call political ideas and in order to understand them we have to take ourselves back and we have to remember something that most americans today don't think about but should because the realities in britain were just a more extreme form of the realities here in the united states the crises of the 20th century broke great britain great britain's economy was completely depleted the first world war was absolutely devastating and the economy had not survived to regain its full strength by the time the second world war hit at the same time britain's imperial holdings were failing to deliver the kind of income that empire had delivered for well over a century and britain was facing very hard decisions but the hardest decision of all was one that turned out to be as winston churchill had argued all along unavoidable and that was total war against nazi germany but you'll recall that when england stood alone with the leadership of winston churchill it stood alone without any financial resources it became completely dependent upon others the lynd lease program undertaken by franklin roosevelt which by the way was one of the bravest political acts undertaken by an american president he he basically did that knowing that congress would not vote to approve but he started it anyway because he understood what some in the american political class did not understand and that is that this war that at that point was limited to europe would not stay limited to europe and franklin roosevelt was one of the very first american presidents to determine that it was in the american interest to keep war as far away from the continental united states as possible which by the way we just need to say looking back that was one of the most important political strategic decisions in american history and again many people today seem to have forgotten that it is a key principle of american foreign policy that keeping war as far away from america's continental land is is a national priority but again i dare not digress the big point here is economic and of course you also have in britain the uh the breaking apart of a class structure that never really characterized the united states a far more democratic nation than spirit but you have the fixed class structure so much so that you have to watch your language for example in britain when you mention the middle class the middle class is really a very wealthy class far wealthier than our middle class because in britain you have the royalty then you have the aristocracy that the nobility and and then you have the aristocracy under the nobility and uh the aristocracy have you know massive homes and and all the rest they they're clearly related to the the powers that be the middle class the entrepreneurial class that we know in the united states is they're called the lower middle class and margaret thatcher came out of that lower middle class shopkeepers and and industry managers and all the rest but the fact is that britain's social system was beginning to fall apart huge social unrest so britain was tempted by socialism very early in the 20th century the impoverishment of the nation was confronted with incredible demands on the part of the british people for what we would call a welfare state and again americans often don't look at what was happening in britain at the time and we ought to because that's a great deal to do with what did happen and didn't happen in the united states at the time in the middle of the 20th century even during the war in 1942 the british government released what was called the beverage report and this became probably the most important document in 20th century british history it proposed once the war was over a welfare state offering cradle to grave social insurance full employment and as the document said abolition of want now just imagine a government promising abolition of want and a welfare state to meet all needs from cradle to grave and this was promised to a nation that was broke now this will help you to remember why this incredible appetite for the welfare state led to the toppling of winston churchill in a national election just after he had won the war and it was because churchill was not supportive of the welfare state but we now understand in historical perspective how all this was was really made nearly inevitable by the war because if you'll remember during the war winston churchill about whom i've delivered another one of these addresses the first person to whom i would turn as a an example of leadership in the 20th century winston churchill led the war effort and he was prime minister but he was prime minister not of a conservative government but of a national coalition government which meant it was a coalition of the conservative party headed by churchill with the labor party headed by clement atlee churchill ran the war at lee ran the country so you had winston churchill running the war and the war effort dominated everything but you had a socialist running the domestic policy at the very same time and you also had all of the controls brought on the economy rationing and government control of industry and all the rest made necessary was argued by the war and it was understandable in the context of the total war with britain's very survival at stake the point is that at the end of world war ii there was no return to a normal instead the british people decided to press ahead with a socialist experiment based upon the promises of the beverage report and so if you look at the post-war period in great britain this uh policy of the government control of the economy and uh of of the economics that had been pioneered by john maynard keynes this was so taken for granted that by the time churchill's second premiership came to an end even the conservative party accepted keynesian economics with government control and massive government spending as the norm so margaret thatcher is at oxford when all this is beginning to happen and margaret thatcher reads friedrich hayek's book the road to serfdom and and we tend to think that market economics free market economics as we know it has always existed in the form of the argument we now know that wasn't true it wasn't true the form of the argument which is often referred to as neo-liberal economics and that means liberalism liberty the great classical tradition of liberty um it really goes back to the rediscovery of those principles during and after the second world war and it would eventuate people like milton friedman at the university of chicago but hayek and the austrian economist were very important because they came to the stunning realization that socialism is impossible and it is because socialism depends upon the government ownership and control of the means of production but hayek's insight was that government can't know enough to do this because economics is actually a matter of individual people making thousands of individual decisions in the course of a year recognizing their own individual needs and their consumer preferences and the fact is that embedded thus in the market is a knowledge that doesn't come from the top it comes from the bottom the the most important economic information can't be delivered by government because government can't know and and so what happens is of course those determined to press for socialism have to continue because socialism doesn't produce wealth it kills wealth margaret thatcher can see that by the way margaret roberts at the point it kills wealth it doesn't produce wealth and so margaret roberts saw as she was observing the economic discussion around her in the politics of her age she began to recognize that if even the conservative party was committed to an idea that would kill the economy then maybe the conservative party needed itself to be changed well these ideas came to her it came in social unrest uh a political climate difficult for us to imagine very different than what happened in the united states because the same ideas basically took hold in the united states but in a different way the idea of the welfare state was indeed very much the ideal of franklin roosevelt franklin roosevelt not died early into his fourth term and had he survived to lead the nation after the second world war and had he had the democratic majorities that he had at the time it is very likely that the united states would have followed a similar kind of welfare state model instead the attempt to create the american welfare state other than social security basically came in the 1960s under the administration of of lyndon johnson but republicans need to remember that the welfare state was perpetuated and expanded by richard nixon and it was richard nixon who made the statement and has often been attributed not only to him but to others we're all keynesians now in other words we all accept keynesian economics about government intervention in the economy government strategic planning in the economy and massive government spending and uh and thus you have you have the expansion of government in the united states but in the united states we did not have the kind of economic unrest nor was there the political possibility of openly avowing socialism and again in american history that basically was destroyed with the uh the removal of henry wallace from the roosevelt ticket and thereafter after world war ii you did not have any effective open arguments for socialism but the other thing is is that the american economy began to boom after the war and uh nothing solves economic arguments like prosperity and in the united states the the economy was prospering now there were periodic recessions and setbacks but as you know you just look from the period from say 1948 onward and you're looking at the american economy becoming the most dominant in the world but at the same time britain's economy was so bad that by the time you get to the early 1970s britain is not even listed as a major european economic power that that is britain in its decline beyond what most of us can even imagine now well it's important to recognize that as margaret thatcher is watching all of this the dominant understanding of the political class was this is the way it's going to be forever the only question is how much larger the government will have to be how many other sectors of the economy will come under government control just how much money we can spend but of course that's somewhat answered by reality as margaret thatcher would later say the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of someone else's money to spend and i was uh i was just this sunday preaching at the church of the apostles in in atlanta michael youssef dear friend pastor of that church his father had been a a merchant in egypt he is egyptian himself by birth and his father had just a mid-level business it was just you know on the second floor of a of a place in cairo and when the government began to socialize there they socialized all the big businesses you know energy and uh and other agriculture and other big sectors of the economy but that will never pay enough so the next thing you know they're having to socialize everything and it's just a parable of socialism and so pretty soon having run out of money in that sector they have to socialize another sector they suck all the money out of that sector which no longer produces and the next thing you know the kid on his bicycle is uh is going to be socialized margaret married dennis thatcher in 1951 they eventually had two children twins mark and carol born in 1953. margaret thatcher tried to begin a political career running for a seat in parliament at that time she was unsuccessful her ideas almost assuredly a bit advanced for the time and then she decided it was too early for her that she needed to spend the time at home with her two young children but she ran again for parliament and was elected in 1959 a seat from finchley and she held that seat throughout her parliamentary career and so she emerges in the british government as a member of parliament in 1959 now it's not unprecedented the woman would be in the british parliament at that time but that a woman would be considered a potential leader was absolutely remarkable she herself did not think that she could become prime minister because she did not think that england would have that britain would have a female prime minister in her lifetime sure not to be wrong but it is interesting that even when she first entered parliament people saw that she had tremendous leadership ability and most of them didn't like it you know some of her colleagues said things like she's so opinionated and she's so opinionated about her opinions another one said she's a woman of endless opinions all of them bad well she was a threat to the political class and much like we saw in parallels in the united states with someone like ronald reagan the threat to the political class means that the political class like antibodies in a body they begin to all the white blood cells begin to coagulate and yet they have to do something with margaret thatcher because she won't shut up she she was meant to talk and she was meant to make argument and so she did and eventually they had to do something with her so they put her in the shadow cabinet in 1968 so the shadow cabinet in britain in the parliamentary system so the party in power has the cabinet and in a parliamentary system the party in power by definition on a party vote can't lose anything that's why it's it's often called an elected dictatorship there's no separation of powers so the the party in opposition forms a shadow cabinet so there's a minister of education in the government there's a minister of education the shadow government they don't hold office but they're ready to hold office if after the next election they get uh the authority and they hold the government but in the parliamentary system and if you've seen the house of commons i had the start to say the joy i had the great privilege of being a guest of the house of commons just about a month ago sitting in for some of the brexit debate which was high political theater my wife and i when i was studying at in england in 1986 this was prior to all the security that is now the issue on two different nights we were able just to walk in the house of commons and hear margaret thatcher on in question time which is one of the great political events of my life to see the iron lady at work but she began to make the arguments as a member of the shadow cabinet so what happens in parliament is if the if the minister the actual minister say of the labor party that was then in power gives a speech standing in the house of commons then then the shadow minister speaks for the opposite party in response so that turned out to be high theater when the shadow minister was margaret thatcher the conservatives regained control and in 1970 she was named the education secretary by prime minister edward heath now edward heath was the epitome of the establishment conservative leader he was well regarded by the americans he was he was a bon vivant he was quite cultured and he was a keynesian absolutely committed to the continuation of the keynesian model but by the time this is happening in the early 1970s they run out of everybody's money to spend and britain is actually the first nation to experience in the modern age what became defined as stagflation the great economic enemy of most governments and economies is inflation inflation is the great destroyer of wealth personally and nationally and uh the the theory had been that you could not have high inflation and high unemployment simultaneously but it turned out in britain by the early 1970s you had not only dangerously high inflation but you also had dangerously high unemployment and economic stagnation that meant that nothing was going to be possible there's no growth there's no new money nothing good can happen and by the end of that period britain is basically bankrupt and has to go for rescue to the international monetary fund well as education secretary she in the minister she made her arguments and made quite an impression on the nation and and then in 1974 the conservatives lost again and a labor government was elected under the premiership of james callahan and some of you are probably old enough to remember some of these names british prime minister james callahan callahan was like the poster child socialist uh happy jovial completely disconnected from reality and uh it turned out that james callahan who actually took office in 1976 and the change of labor leadership was the perfect foil for the conservatives to begin to make conservative arguments and the conservative was making the conservative arguments was none other than margaret thatcher then in 1975 margaret did the most audacious uh thing possible she she took the most audacious act of her political career she challenged edward heath for the leadership of the conservative party now this is one of those situations in which politically if you win you win but if you lose you're gone forever she staked her entire political career on what appeared to be the least likely of eventualities that she would topple because if she toppled edward heath as the leader of the conservative party she would be toppling the ideas of edward heath edward heath did not believe that this woman could possibly successfully challenge him for party leadership nor did most of the members of parliament but in a stunning win in 1975 thatcher not only challenged edward heath but she won the leadership of the conservative party becoming the first woman uh head of a political party in great britain and its history but what's more important for us is to understand that she became the first real conservative prime minister in a century committed to what were then revolutionary ideas as she said speaking of herself and ronald reagan we're holding old ideas but we've held them long enough that we're now the revolutionaries well she is now the head of the conservative party but they are out of power her theme was a fresh start that was her campaign against edward heath that was successful she began to to operate in circles that included the institute of economic affairs here's what's something really interesting to us when you think about how some of these things come together on both sides of the atlantic now remember talking about 1975 remember that ronald reagan would challenge gerald ford for the republican nomination in 1976 you understand how closely together these events are actually intertwined and so many of the same people are involved on both sides of the atlantic given the intellectual firepower milton friedman and and the chicago economists and and others then you had the rise of think tanks liberals had think tanks for a long time the conservatives started gaining think tanks i guess you could say the first one was the hoover institution at stanford started by former president herbert hoover but in the modern age the heritage foundation the american enterprise institute and and others uh economic policy councils began to formulate actual policy that could be put in place in a conservative revolution in great britain the institute for economic affairs was one of those margaret thatcher as the conservative leader began to travel internationally meeting heads of state and others the americans for instance began to suspect that she was the coming thing a force of nature and so president gerald ford met with her for example and she met with others including future presidents including george h.w bush at the time and uh yet she was just at that point she was a member of parliament she was not the head of government she was not in power but just about everyone could sense that could happen it did happen in 1979 and margaret thatcher's massive landslide win as the head of the conservative party in 1979 came after one in britain was so horrible it was called the winter of our discontent the economy was just falling apart the the central mistake and misperception or lie at the heart of the welfare state and of of socialism began to become apparent when they were as you often hear writing checks they couldn't cash and no one could cash and the insanity was that the government was still arguing to write bigger checks with money they didn't have britain understood itself to be in a very precarious position in the world it thought of itself as a world power but it was only a world power in 1979 because it had nuclear weapons does that ring a bell economically it was not a world power she had the dream that it would be i love the campaign message of the conservative party against the labor party in the 1979 election it was a stroke of genius the party's campaign theme was labor isn't working may hit some of you after lunch but it's a it was it was a fantastic campaign theme and in 1979 the british people voted and she won with a 44 seat majority in the house of commons that meant that not only the conservatives in power they're in power in a big way and with a 44-seat majority and party-line voting there was no stopping them implementing the policy and margaret thatcher did not have to wonder what she would do if she came into the office of prime minister she just set about doing it and that meant completely realigning the entire british government and the british economy now here's where you need to know that if you are in great britain and you say margaret thatcher it's like in the united states saying ronald reagan it divides the room there are still many in britain especially older britons but now also younger britons who long for the welfare state to be back and and and demand a return to a socialist understanding the fact is that margaret thatcher's economic revolution led to a massive privatization of the british economy uh petroleum and uh well sector after sector there was even talk of the privatization of the british mail at one point it didn't go quite that far but it went so pervasively through the economy that eventually it did bring about a massive massive increase in wealth so much so that the city of london that square mile rivaled new york as a center of finance uh in the period of margaret thatcher's ascendancy and of course it still does uh in so many ways it's still in many ways the most important british european center of finance that gets to another issue we'll discuss in just a moment but the fact is that it was unequal and margaret thatcher as a classical conservative along with ronald reagan in this country is a classical conservative argued for for liberty over equality because the central conservative argument is that people set at liberty will follow their own pursuits and produce more for all than people who are committed to equality because a coerced equality means an equality of want not an equality of wealth and it is very interesting to see if you go to great britain today as i was recently with some of you there uh britain is still divided between those in the south of britain who who believe that margaret thatcher was the economic savior and those in the north of britain the coal territory and the old industrial north that felt that she was an economic terrorist but the fact is she was right that there was no money so in huge social unrest happened in her revolution because she shut down coal mines that were losing money and and they have been promised full employment forever and the same thing for industry i mean the subsidized industries they were making cars nobody bought uh she wanted to unleash the creative energies and of course you do see that you saw the recovery of the british automobile industry to a considerable extent and the the point is that we are still stuck in the same argument and you see it in the 2020 american election between equality and liberty and the central conservative axiom is that liberty will produce wealth and that a coerced government equality it produces only one a coerced equality of poverty it's an ongoing argument margaret thatcher's argument was clear she won the argument at that time she won it again and again she won a second term in 1983 and a third term in 1987. her ideas were privatization cuts to the government's growth and the limits to uh to the growth of the government and confronting the union something that again the leaders of her party in the past had refused to do she also believed in the british people she believed that the british people if they were set loose would prove themselves and they did and she was she was as patriotic about britain as a as winston churchill was believing the same thing that there was a greatness in the heart of the nation that only needed to be set loose she was also a moralist she believed in another central conservative axiom which is there has to be a very clear and unquestioned moral center character to the people if liberty is to be possible and she was often derided as a victorian and she said well look at britain's rise in the victorian era she was quite glad to be called a victorian uh britain rose into an unquestioned world power with massive wealth in the victorian age she wasn't embarrassed about that at all and you'll notice how she you remember how she dressed she was always quite dignified and she was always she was never afraid to be as she said a lady and she expected to be respected as such she was a patriot she believed in good and evil that leads to another issue under her premiership she entered into a partnership with ronald reagan and pope john paul ii that changed the course of the world most of the leaders in the west had accommodated themselves to the permanent reality of soviet communism she would never settle for the permanent reality of soviet communism she believed that it was murderous and oppressive and in its essence it denied human dignity she believed that it would pass and must pass again in the american political class even the republican party was horrified by the rhetoric of ronald reagan you know speaking of uh the evil empire and uh speaking of rearmament and and and contesting the soviet union for world domination and then pope john paul ii the polish pope of all things who arrived on the world scene also ready to declare socialism most importantly communism the ugly reality of the soviet union for what it was for he had felt both the heel of fascism under the nazis and of communism under the soviets the three of them together forged an unofficial and perhaps even by human terms accidental triad of world leaders arriving on the scene in the 1980s to defy the soviet union every one of them saw the soviet union as a lie and they saw the battle of the soviet union as a battle of good versus evil for margaret thatcher is very close in hand as she could see the the crushing of eastern europe but this came at a time when the political class was ready to accommodate the soviet union you remember dayton and all those agreements and the timidity of most american administrations this was very different on both sides of the atlantic when ronald reagan was elected president in 1980 and when margaret thatcher was then the prime minister entering office a year earlier she was brave in her personal leadership in october of 1984 the ira bombed the conservative party conference meeting at the grand brighton hotel and it was a bombing and remember she was prime minister at the time so it was an attack not only on the conservative party but on the british government it nearly killed her had had she been sleeping against a different wall she and dennis would surely have been killed instead five were killed 31 were injured and it was understood in 1984 as a direct attack on the very possibility of a british government she rose to the occasion she refused to go back to england she spent the night in a police office where she could be safe and then went back and gave her speech in the smoldering ruins of the hotel itself and that's just it just shows the kind of indomitable nature that she had and the british people even the people who didn't like her politics like the fact that there was a leader on the scene that they had not seen the likes of since winston churchill brexit is now very much in the news and margaret thatcher's political career most importantly the end of her career had everything to do with a similar set of questions it was mostly about europe not only about europe but it was very much about europe and here's another leadership lesson margaret thatcher's most significant political opponents were not in the opposing party they were in her own party and she called them wets i love that wet conservatives are more dangerous than dry liberals because they're in your party and they just dampen everything and they continued to dampen everything europe at this time was of course its own reality and in the ruins of the second world war there was the idea of a european super state that eventually became what we know as the european union not exactly what some of those had intended in the beginning but generally so and the big question is whether britain would enter what became the european union it was first of all the european economic community the conservative party basically accommodated itself to the idea that britain would have a european identity and and so moved into the european union interestingly they were blocked by charles de gaulle uh vetoed twice by charles de gaulle the president of france do you remember why he vetoed england he says too close to the united states we we found out later in private papers released that britain refused to share american nuclear secrets with france and thus france retaliated by keeping them out of the european union many english people today wish that they had been permanently vetoed out of the european union but nonetheless both parties basically moved into the european union but margaret thatcher refused the idea of a european superstate this is the time when jacques delores as a head of the european union is actually declaring that in the future most laws and the vast majority of regulations will come from the european uh union not from national governments and the key to that was the combining of all of the currencies together in a monetary union now both parties were basically led historically by people who wanted to england to enter that monetary union if they had by the way they would never be able to get out it's hard enough to imagine how they get out of the european union now but if they were in the monetary union operating with the euro it would be technically impossible margaret thatcher's response was three words no no no and she repeated it twice she gave a famous address in bruges in belgium in 1988 it's a brilliant address and by the way she set out the danger of a european super state at the expense of national sovereignty and even people who would read that speech today would recognize that she was hated by the leaders of the 27 other countries for what she said but since then the leaders of every one of those 27 countries has said what she said she was right and questionably right but this led to her toppling as head of the conservative party there were those in her party who felt like she was leading dangerously and that there had to be a greater union especially monetary union with europe and so she was undone by the wets and her party in 1990 even after she had led the party to a third massive election and after having been prime minister for 11 years 209 days the longest tenure of anyone called prime minister in british history the longest continuous premiership since lord melbourne and second in time only to lord melbourne and lord salisbury she was toppled in her own party now she won the first ballot but she did not win the first ballot against an insurgency from uh europhile michael hesseltine she did not win by enough to avoid a second ballot she thought she would win a second ballot and at one point she might have won a second ballot but the reality is that the europhiles won and she withdrew in order to prevent michael heseltine from becoming prime minister she threw her support to john major who was less of a urophile and a wet he was not considered by margaret thatcher to be wet but a few years later she decided he was wetter than she thought so margaret thatcher changed britain and in many ways alone and with others she changed the world she was a convictional leader that's the most important she was driven by ideas in my book the conviction to lead i define the only leadership that i think matters as convictional leadership the ideas precede the opportunity and and that was true ronald reagan used to have uh the speech you know just you could wherever you went you heard the speech because there were the ideas that he was just going to hammer again and again and again margaret thatcher in her own way gave the speech margaret thatcher was a deeper political thinker than ronald reagan about whom i will speak in a subsequent address ronald reagan was a more effective coalition builder than margaret thatcher margaret thatcher had disdain for the people who did not share her ideas and she was probably incapable of hiding that disdain but you have to look at the fact that without the certainty of her convictions she never would have become prime minister she never would have become the first woman prime minister and she never would have been able to revolutionize england revolutions do not emerge from hesitant convictions but from very clear convictions and in the maine her convictions have been demonstrated to be absolutely right including her convictions about europe and her warnings the iron lady where did that come from oh it actually came from the soviet union it was when she was not yet prime minister but she was the conservative leader that red star the communist party newspaper observing her said that she was an iron lady who threatened peace and people thought well that's a horrible thing to say about her she's an iron lady they meant it as a criticism she took it as a new name she was very very proud to be called the iron lady and so she introduced herself as being the ones that the soviet union declared to be the red star declared to be the iron lady and she took advantage of it and she was made of iron and she was very glad recalling the fact that the duke of wellington had been called the iron duke and so the once again you see the effectiveness of soviet propaganda ending up making the opposite point of what it intended to make she gave a famous address to the church of scotland and in that address she spoke of her christian convictions this is something most americans and american christians don't know mary and i had the opportunity to meet her and indeed to to help to host her one night and we there's a picture of us in my study of mary and i sitting with then baroness thatcher and i had the opportunity to really talk to her about probably one thing in the span of 20 minutes or so so i decided to talk to her about her church of scotland address and because as a christian i wanted to know i wanted to hear her talk about her faith in christ it was a remarkable address she said this she said christianity is about spiritual redemption not social reform sometimes she says the debate on these matters has become too polarized and given the impression the two are quite separate but most christians would regard it as their christian duty to help their fellow men and women they would regard the lives of children as a precious trust these duties come not from any secular legislation passed by parliament but from being a christian she then asked what are the distinctive marks of christianity now the important thing here she's speaking to the general assembly the church of scotland and she's speaking what she believes that she's not even sure they believe first that from the beginning man has been endowed by god with the fundamental right to choose between good and evil second that we were made in god's own image and therefore we are expected to use all our own power of thought and judgment and exercising that choice and further if we open our hearts to god he's promised to work within us and third that our lord jesus christ the son of god when faced with the terrible choice his terrible choice and lonely vigil chose to lay down his life that our sins may be forgiven i remember very well a sermon on armistice day in which our preacher said no one took away the life of jesus he chose to lay it down now when have you heard a major political leader in the west speak of such things as these defining christianity in terms of the divine creation of human beings in his image thus grounding human rights and human dignity in the imago dei is created by god and when have you heard a politician speak so clearly about the gospel about jesus christ dying on the cross so that we might be forgiven our sins she went on she said christianity comes down to the supreme sacrifice of christ expressed so well in the hymn when i survey the wondrous cross on which the prince of glory died my richest gain i count but loss and poor contempt on all my pride i haven't heard a politician speak that way in the united states in a very long time can you imagine what the secular press would do i mean they can be vaguely christian but to speak with this kind of clarity she knew exactly what she was doing and again we have not seen the likes of her since she then went on in this address by the way to speak of the essential centrality of the family to society in 1980 at the conservative party conference the press was beginning to speculate that she could not possibly continue forward with her agenda it caused so much disruption she knew it would before the growth could come it had been so unpopular and indeed it was so much so that she was polling in the lowest of figures imaginable for a prime minister and then she largely won the affection of the british people at that point not because she was winning on the economy but because she won the falklands war she stared down argentina when in 1982 they invaded and took possession of the falkland islands and she did what wasn't considered possible and that was that britain and its owned armed forces aided directly by no one would go the furthest that the british navy had ever gone in its history thousands of miles that took weeks to accomplish in a naval maneuver to uh to retake the islands but she did it was the first successful british military action since the second world war and then they knew they had an iron lady but they thought she would have to bend on the national policy and the economy she would have to return to a keynesian welfare state model and so the question asked by the media was when will she do a u-turn the assumption was she would do a u-turn because politicians will do whatever is necessary to stay in office and she wanted to stay in office of course she will reverse her course the question was not if but when in the conservative party conference in 1980 she gave it back to them with these words to those waiting with baited breath for the favorite media catchphrase the u-turn i have only one thing to say you turn if you want to the ladies not for turning and that is probably the statement for which she is best remembered by the british people the ladies not for turning what we learned from margaret thatcher is that if you have the right ideas and she had the right ideas then don't turn the lady's not for turning i could only wish that more leaders of her stature would emerge in our day we need more leaders who have the intellectual firepower of margaret thatcher tested over time in argument and debate we need more leaders with a conviction of margaret thatcher we need more leaders with the dignity of margaret thatcher we need more iron and we desperately need both men and women who aren't for turning it's been fun to think with you about the legacy of margaret thatcher we haven't seen the likes of her since but we hope to thank you very much

Channel: Albert Mohler

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Id: YOm79i6OF0M

Length: 56min 14sec (3374 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020