Nearly two decades after leaving office, the former PM is still trumpeting the same futile militarism and failed free market dogmas. The question naturally arises: why does anyone still listen to him, says ANDREW MURRAY
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Thatcher’s Tory leadership victory at 50
KEITH FLETT looks back 50 years to when the Iron Lady was elected Tory leader…
EVEN FURTHER RIGHT: Margaret Thatcher
meets the press outside her Chelsea home
after her leadership victory in 1975
Very modest growth in membership serves to underline the need for a change of recruiting strategies, posits NIGEL FLANAGAN
DIANE ABBOTT debunks claims made politicians drumming up support for an enhanced militarisation of the British economy
The Morning Star’s AGM tour comes at a critical moment for both the British left and the newspaper itself, as it battles political fragmentation and media industry upheaval. Editor BEN CHACKO issues a clarion call to readers to play their part in the coming period
The growing argument that welfare must be sacrificed for ‘security’ is built on nothing but myth, argues MICHAEL BURKE
Esmond Romilly horrified Britain’s Establishment by turning from privileged schoolboy to anti-fascist fighter, writes MAT COWARD
IT’S 50 YEARS since Margaret Thatcher was elected Tory leader. Ted Heath had lost two elections to Labour in February and October 1974 and was eventually forced to call a leadership election in February 1975. He lost in the first round of voting on February 4 to a right-wing outsider — Thatcher. In the second ballot she got a majority of all Tory MPs over four other middle-aged white men in suits and became Tory leader. Just over four years later in May 1979 she became prime minister.
The 50th anniversary has already been marked by a two-part recreation of an interview Brian Walden did with her in 1989. An opera written by social historian Dominic Sandbrook is due later this year.
Thatcher’s victory was unexpected, not least because she represented a rightward shift in Tory politics — even if anyone active in the early 1970s in the labour movement would have thought Heath with his hard line anti-union stance was quite right-wing enough.
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