We suffered a tragedy not one of us could have thought would happen in our country. And we picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out as all good B… - Margaret Thatcher

I was attacked for fighting a rearguard action in defence of “middle-class interests.”...Well, if “middle class values” include the encouragement of variety and individual choice, the provision of fair incentives and rewards for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the State and a belief in the wide distribution of individual private property, then they are certainly what I am trying to defend. This is not a fight for “privilege”; it is a fight for freedom—freedom for every citizen.

From 1972 until 1985 the conventional wisdom was that Britain could only be governed with the consent of the trade unions. No government could really resist, still less defeat, a major strike; in particular a strike by the miners' union. ... [M]any on the left and outside it continued to believe that the miners had the ultimate veto and would one day use it. That day had now come and gone. Our determination to resist a strike emboldened the ordinary trade unionist to defy the militants. What the strike's defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left. Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed, and in doing so demonstrated just how mutually dependent the free economy and a free society really are. It is a lesson no one should forget.

The [Labour] moderates split off and that split of the moderates delayed the realignment of British politics for at least one generation and possibly two, because as a conservative passionately believing in freedom under the law and believing that socialism cannot stand for that, the realignment - you hear me say my job is to stay in long enough so that everyone knows that socialism and the British character do not mix, so socialism has got to go - is to get the fundamental realignment which I think is in keeping with the British character, which is two parties, a free enterprise party, because if you have political freedom under the rule of law you have got to have economic freedom as well. It is to bring about that can only be done really by eventually the Labour Party splitting off the Left and rejecting the Clause 4 and the command economy, and then we really should get a realignment.