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April 08, 2013

Comments

Dave

She had these major stokes of luck; she was faced with a split opposition thanks to the SDP breakaway, she had idiotic and desperate men in control in Argentina who wished to make something of the Falklands and she had North Sea Oil to pay the social costs of the industrial decimation.

chris

Yes Dave. One reason why I can't regard politicians as heroes or villains is that their careers are shaped a lot by luck and by environmental factors, rather than by conscious agency.
It's odd that the left - which should be more aware of this than the right with its tendency to a "great man" theory of history - should thus be so keen to demonize Thatcher.

Lasthun

Hatred never dies, it merely gets old. I for one given half a chance will gladly dance on her grave before pissing on it.

H/T Gollum XIV, "ding dong the witch is dead". She was a judas goat leading our country to financialization, coddled actual murdering dictators on the way.

She deserved far worse.

Whiskyandtea.wordpress.com

Thatcher was a democrat; that I have a lot of hatred towards the policies on which she was elected, she acted with a popular mandate. When she is demonised, we should be honest to ourselves and apply the same attitude towards her supporters. It would be condescending not to.

broilster

She never got more than about 40% of the vote and so what, say 30% of the actual electorate. Hardly the mandate to carry out the sweeping and mass immiserization that she went on to do.

Richard

You're principle that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead is ill-founded when it comes to someone who wielded power over so many people's lives. Fine if it's someone unknown, not so for a powerful and controversial public figure who destroyed as much as she created, unless that is you're in the game of writing deeply flawed, misleading hagiographic history.

FromArseToElbow

I think it's simplistic to accuse the left en masse of characterising Thatcher as a devil. There are obviously many who did (Ben Elton built a career on "Thatch", though he was a plastic lefty), but there are also many who appreciated her tactical nous (she believed what she said), not to mention her luck.

Where I think you are spot on is that (revisionist) history will judge her more as a class warrior, driven by a visceral response to the 45-75 era, rather than a calcuating neoliberal revolutionary. It's Mr T Blair who will receive that accolade.

But what I can't help forgetting today is the reaction of ordinary working people in the early 80s (depression via Falklands to miners strike). The word you always heard applied to her was "heartless".

dilberto

The Thatcher governments signalled the triumph of middle class values and interests over the values and interests of the rest of British society and that hegemony has prevailed to the present day but may be ending with the debt crisis.

dilberto

The Thatcher governments signalled the triumph of middle class values and interests over the values and interests of the rest of British society and that hegemony has prevailed to the present day but may be ending with the debt crisis.

dilberto

The Thatcher governments signalled the triumph of middle class values and interests over the values and interests of the rest of British society and that hegemony has prevailed to the present day but may be ending with the debt crisis.

dilberto

The Thatcher governments signalled the triumph of middle class values and interests over the values and interests of the rest of British society and that hegemony has prevailed to the present day but may be ending with the debt crisis.

Jacques René Giguère

Her letter to Hayek regretting she couldn't act like Chile. For that alone, she doesn't deserve the respect due to the dead. For that. alone, she should have been sentenced for treason.

Jacques René Giguère

Her letter to Hayek regretting she couldn't act like Chile. For that alone, she doesn't deserve the respect due to the dead. For that. alone, she should have been sentenced for treason.

ajay

Although both left and right like to mythologize Thatcher as a slasher of public spending, this is not true. During her premiership, the share of spending in GDP fell less than it did in the early years of New Labour, and less than it's planned to fall in the next few years. And spending was higher under her than it was during the 1964-70 Labour government

How much of this was due to massively higher unemployment levels, though?

Toby

The letter to Hayek said "However, I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable"

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