Britain Awake
The speech was strongly anti-Soviet, with Thatcher stating that the Soviet Union was "bent on world domination" and taking advantage of détente to make gains in the Angolan Civil War.
The speech was reported on in the Soviet press, including by Yuri Gavrilov in the Krasnaya Zvezda who dubbed Thatcher the "Iron Lady", a term also used afterwards by the news agency TASS.
[3] In September 1975, Thatcher carried out a tour of the United States and Canada, meeting with senior figures such as UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim and US president Gerald Ford.
During the tour, she made a speech at the Washington Press Club setting out her commitment to roll back socialism in Britain and rejuvenate the country through economic liberalism.
She accused prime minister Harold Wilson of cutting defence budgets at a time when the government faced its greatest external threat since the Second World War, that of the Soviet Union.
Thatcher noted that she would attend British Army wargames in Germany in three days at a point when the USSR had an advantage of 150,000 men, 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft over NATO in Europe.
[8] Thatcher criticised détente as providing only an illusion of safety and noted that it had not prevented Soviet intervention in the Angolan Civil War or led to an improvement in living conditions behind the Iron Curtain.
Thatcher referred to contemporary writings by Soviet political writer Konstantin Zarodov [ru] and general secretary Leonid Brezhnev advocating bringing about a proletarian revolution across the world.
[8] A loss would also make it difficult to resolve the matter of independent, white-led Rhodesia (which was fighting the Rhodesian Bush War against communist-supported black nationalists)[9] and South African apartheid.
[8] Thatcher committed her party to follow a foreign policy closely aligned with the US and called for closer ties with European states and the Commonwealth nations of Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Thatcher called for Britain to provide "a reasoned and vigorous defence of the Western concept of rights and liberties" and referred to recent speeches on this theme by the US ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
[8] Thatcher referred to Britain's position in the European Economic Community (EEC) and called for members to maintain strong national identities and to resist any move toward closer union.
[8] Thatcher concluded her speech by stating that the Conservatives believed Britain was a great country and had the "vital task of shaking the British public out of a long sleep".
[8] In his biography of Thatcher, Iron Lady (2004), John Campbell considers that she made a mistake in stating in her speech that "we are fighting a major internal war against terrorism in Northern Ireland and need more troops in order to win it".
[13] Reuters Russian reporter Robert Evans wrote a story on the Soviet press coverage, including Gavrilov's use of the term "Iron Lady", picked up on by Western media outlets.
She led a right-wing Conservative government that rolled back the extent of the state, implemented largescale privatisations and limited the power of the trade unions.
She worked closely with the US president from 1981 to 1989, Ronald Reagan, to present an uncompromising stance to the Soviet Union, which remained until the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985.
