Tributes to Baroness Thatcher

Simon Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

It is a privilege to be here today to pay tribute to Margaret Thatcher, both personally and on behalf of party colleagues and the many of my constituents who will wish to pass on their condolences, through the Prime Minister, to her family and extended family and to her close friends and all those in the Conservative party who worked with her.

Two themes have emerged today. The first has been a wish to express our condolences and sympathy. The second has been an expression of admiration and respect from across the House, irrespective of party, for someone who was one of the dominant political figures not only in this country but in the democratic politics of the western world in the last century. She was one of the strongest and most determined leaders that our country has ever known.

Like my late mother, Mrs Thatcher was born in the great and productive county of Lincolnshire. Given that she also had the same birthday as my dad—13 October—it was not surprising that we followed her career with greater than usual interest once she entered the Heath Cabinet. As has already been mentioned, she set many examples to follow. She set an example to young people by first standing for Parliament at the age of 24, and to people who do not succeed the first time, in that it took three goes before she got here. She then became her party’s leader before she was 50. I remember hearing the news of her election as leader, and of Ted Heath’s defeat, when I was standing at the railway station in Bruges during my year as a postgraduate student at the College of Europe. It was clear that that was a significant moment in British political history. It also caused a bit of a dispute in our family. My dad was not keen, but my mum was more admiring.

Through her efforts, Margaret Thatcher changed the place of women in British public life and politics. Let us check the figures. Before she was elected, there had been no general election with more than 200 female candidates, or more than 30 elected women MPs. In the general election of 1992, when she stood down, there were 571 female candidates, and 60 women were elected to this place. The numbers have risen significantly since then. She would not have argued that there was a direct cause and effect, but I am sure that there was one, and thank God for that. It was also significant that, through her election, a scientist became a British party leader and Prime Minister. Her forensic skills and scientific interests were evident, and I am sure that her interest in and worries about climate change stemmed from that.

Margaret Thatcher winning the 1979 election was clearly another defining moment in our history. I hope that colleagues on the Opposition Benches will not try to airbrush the fact that, before that, this country had been through a dire few years economically. It had not been a happy time. We had had to go to the international community for financial rescue, the lights had been going out in the early part of the decade, and we had been working only three days a week. So it was not as though the 1970s were halcyon days. She then delivered three election victories, two of which had majorities of more than 100, always with 13 million or more votes, and always with more than 42% of the electorate supporting her. I noticed—I pay tribute to her successor in Finchley, the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer)—that in her last election she received her highest ever vote, which is a testimony to the way she was respected in her north London constituency.

I first came to this House when she was Prime Minister, in a by-election in 1983. I always believed that all Prime Ministers and Governments do many good things, but do not do everything right—some clearly right, some clearly wrong. I came here as a member of the broader Christian church, as she did, and I realised I would have a difficulty from the beginning. Christians and people of other faiths are called to love everybody, but sometimes loving Mrs T was a bit difficult from the Opposition Benches.

She was clearly right in her attitude towards the Falklands—absolutely right to be determined to recapture the Falklands for Britain. She was clearly courageous beyond expectation in her determination not to be blown off course by the despicable IRA bomb in Brighton in 1984, and she was almost unbelievably successful in her work to bring down the iron curtain.

After she died this week, I worked out that I had engaged with her across the House on 19 occasions between 1983 and her final debate in November 1990. I was able to thank her for supporting work on the Rose theatre, which had been excavated—she did have an interest in culture and the arts. On a few occasions, I had to have a strong go at her with regard to London matters. There was a need to reform London government, but abolishing the Greater London council was absolutely not the way to go. There was a need to mobilise the docklands and urban areas for regeneration, but having no democratic participation was not the way to go. Then there were other issues that were good ideas in part, but often left some things worse off than before. Giving people the right to buy their own council homes was popular and in many ways a good idea, but not giving councils the power to decide whether they wanted to use that power was wrong. Not to make the discounts reflect accurately the length of time someone had been in a home was inappropriate. Not guaranteeing that all the moneys went back to councils was extremely unhelpful, and is one cause of the shortage of social and affordable housing today.

Mrs Thatcher was right to take on the trade unions, which had become over-mighty in the 1970s, but she was wrong to do so in a way that decimated much of manufacturing industry, not just in our coal mines but in other places, such as south Wales. She was right to work, as she did successfully, to bring down the inflation rate from 13% in 1979 to 5% or less in five of the next 10 years. However, presiding over unemployment going up from 4% to more than 9% was not a price worth paying and it had serious, adverse consequences. Although pensioners were better off in terms of the amount of money they had in their retirement, many never forgave her for breaking the link with earnings.

In her very last speech I put it to her that, sadly, she had left the gap between the rich and the poor much wider. I have to say that the gap continued under the Labour Government. She accused me of saying that we would rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich. That was never our view. We needed a fairer society and sadly we did not get one.

I referred to Bruges at the beginning of my speech and I want to end with the Bruges speech she made 25 years ago. It bears re-reading, as I am sure the Prime Minister has on more than one occasion. I end with exact quotes from the speech she gave to the college at which I had been privileged to be a student:

“Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community. That is not to say that our future lies only in Europe…The Community is not an end in itself…The European Community is a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people in a world in which there are many other powerful nations and groups of nations…Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose…I want to see us work more closely…Europe is stronger when we do so, whether it be in trade, in defence or in our relations with the rest of the world…But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions…for these have been the source of Europe’s vitality through the centuries.”

We are proud of her patriotism and give thanks for it. She will be respected throughout the whole of the rest of our political lives.