Unknown photographer. Public domain: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/. Cropped to a 4:5 portrait, resized without upscaling, converted to sRGB and compressed as WebP. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Margaret_Thatcher_1984.jpg. Full credits: /portraits/credits.html#margaret-thatcher

Margaret Thatcher

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Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, led Conservative governments from 1979 to 1990. She sought to widen private ownership through the sale of nationalised industries and the Right to Buy scheme for council tenants, while reducing trade unions’ power. These policies helped reshape the British economy and made her premiership a lasting source of political division. Her defence of enterprise also had a moral vocabulary: individual responsibility, family obligation and the duty to use one’s abilities. In her 1988 address to the Church of Scotland, she explicitly connected these ideas with Christianity and argued that wealth creation could enable generosity. She acknowledged a need for public provision, but resisted allowing the state to displace personal responsibility. Her religious outlook informed her politics without supplying an uncontested Christian endorsement of them.