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Is The Margaret Thatcher Era Over?
Here’s the case that it isn’t…
One Response to “Is The Margaret Thatcher Era Over?”
No, the Thatcher Era isn't over.
The woman saved Great Britain from terminal collapse.
One of my flashbulb memories of that time was summer in London in the mid80s, and walking Marylebone Rd. from Euston St at the U of London to Baker St. looking for a payphone to make a call. I stopped at 14 BT phones . . . not a single one in working order…some of them models dating back to the 1940s.
The wave of Thatcher's reforms was a full crest in those years…as she pushed modernization and market reforms through against the sheer rage of the Left.
I had a teacher who told us of her living in the midst of the Winter of Discontent, in 79, and walking through the City which looked DIckensian, with people working by candlelight, on account of the rolling blackouts from wildcat union strikes.
Britain in the early 1990s, at the end of Thatcher's years in power, was a country transformed. Things actually worked. Wildcat union strikes were a memory of the past. One could count on the power working and the garbage being collected.
I recall when Thatcher was deposed in a party coup in 1991, the Times publishing a survey of the leading British historians of the time, who unianimously found Thatcher to be almost the most insignificant Prime Minister of the 20th century – only Stanley Baldwin ranking lower, I think.
Of course that “judgement of history” was biased. . .no historian today would so readily dismiss Thatcher. . .you might hate her, but insignificant she wasn't. (The fact that Thatcher froze or slashed state funding of many academic salaries might have had something to do with the “judgement of history” of that time. )
I always think of that survey when I read Democrats chortling over similar “judgements of history” of the Bush era.
Thatcher was also great for comedy. The best political satire comedy ever – “Spitting Image” – was a huge hit of that era. The Thatcher puppet was particularly brilliant . . . shown beating her Cabinet Minister's heads with a baseball bat, or grinding their fingers in a blender.
She is still reviled by the hard Left, of course; though New Labour has acknowledged her greatness. When the Labour government's plans to give her a State Funeral on her death . . . the only commoner to get one since Churchill, who was the only commoner to get a State Funeral in history, I believe . . . was leaked earlier this year, the Left was apopletic with sheer rage.
Thatcher rose to the top of a male-dominated party in a male-dominated country by sheer force of will (not by being married to a former leader)…by being tougher and stronger than any man. Feminists hated her, of course.
The greatest political woman of our time. An icon.