I have no opinion on Margaret Thatcher, folks. Isn’t that refreshing? For once, I have no opinion. Which is why I will now ask you, my readers, to help me form one.
When Thatcher was in power, I lived in the Soviet Union. We all worshiped Thatcher. At least, everybody I knew (including my parents and their friends) did. She was a powerful woman, beautiful, poised, and also extremely strong. Culturally, we respond very well to that. We knew that she was pro-free markets and pro-capitalism. In the Soviet Union, we didn’t know what capitalism really was. We just knew that being in favor of it made you a really good person, and being against it made you one of those bastards who kept us in perennial poverty in our own country.
I was visiting the UK at the moment when Thatcher had just been replaced by John Major. To my intense surprise, I discovered that the people who I was staying with in Birmingham and then in Kent were not as into Thatcher (I’m putting this very mildly) as I had imagined every British person to be. In this sense, Thatcher seemed to have a lot in common with Mikhail Gorbachev. He was also adored abroad and disliked at home.
The nice Brits who opened their homes to me and who railed against Thatcher destroying the economy and plunging the country into dire poverty were a doctor and a nurse on the one hand and a CEO for Range Rover on the other. To a Soviet teenager like myself, their lifestyle seemed princely (and it still does, to be honest), so I found it hard to process the idea that British economy was in dire straits. (I was 14, OK? How smart were you at that age, eh?). As a result, I became very confused on the subject of Thatcher and I still am.
So what say you, people? Are we in favor or against Margaret Thatcher and why?
P.S. See how I can write a post on the subject where I don’t even have an opinion? This is the secret of my blogging success.
Clarissa's Blog 
There is an old adage that applies perfectly to Margaret Thatcher: ‘What is right is not always popular; and what is popular is not always right.’
Margaret Thatcher was almost always right. The fact that she was not widely popular in Britain speaks a great deal about the moral and cultural decline of a people (by 1990 when you visited the UK) following several decades of domestic socialism, that she effectively turned around, in the teeth of bitter opposition, during the 11 years of her leadership.
How much worse that would be in Russia I can only imagine! Surely that is what keeps Putin in power as he degrades his country.
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Margaret Thatcher ideology was what caused the decline in British society her statement “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” says it all.
If Charles really believes that her legacy was a reverse of moral and cultural decline then he is deluded. The only place to profit from her policies was the financial centre of London. At the time she took office Britain had an industrial base similar to that of Germany now it has none whereas Germany still has an industrial base and is the worlds second largest exporter.
Needless to say this real creation of wealth is still working well for the Germans.
As for several decades of state socialism… this was the payback for the population fighting in two world wars in order to keep the rich.
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I have to say, I kind of like the “there are individual men and women” quote. It depends on the context, of course.
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If one is comparing the United Kingdom wth Germany, the relevant criterion should be gross domestic product per head. In 2011 GDP per head in the UK was $34,538. In the same year, GDP per head in Germany was $35,205. This gives Germany a tiny advantage.
In 1979 when Thatcher came to power and Britain was an economic laughing stock, crippled by what was referred to as the British Disease, West Germany was far ahead of the UK. Closing that gap was a phenomenal success for Thatcher. The British people did not relish it bcause job security declined and they had to work a lot harder and become better trained. That is what I mean by moral and cultural decline under socialism. The CEO of Range Rover no doubt was unhappy because his company was liquidated and reformed for poor market performance, for which his lack of business acumen would have been a major factor.
The City of London has been an enormous success story for Britain. it contributes 3 percent to British GDP and is a major net exporter.
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I think it’s true that the UK was not doing well in terms of the economy in the early seventies. I know somebody who left the UK in 1970 and moved to the US because the country was poor.
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Why haven’t you been hired by Fox News?
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That was for charlie, obviously.
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No Charles the relevant criterion would not be GDP as this is just economic activity. I can lend you a billion dollars and you can lend it me it back we have just created two billion dollars of GDP and done absolutely nothing for anybody. This is exactly the sort of GDP the city of London creates.
Your remark about the City of London is laughable! The City is consuming welfare on an industrial scale but they call it a bailout.
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The City of London has been an enormous success story for Britain.
Ha ha ha ha ha! <>
Clearly Charles has been in hibernation since 2008 when the City of London brought the UK economy to its knees. Thatcher’s belief in the self-correcting, self-regulating market has been trounced by the events of the past couple of years with the City requiring more taxpayers money than the welfare state to survive.
Thatcher began the process of deregulation and encouraged the culture of greed (which – before anyone goes there – I freely admit was continued under successive Governments) The bill for this is now being paid by the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hardly a legacy to boast about.
I will NEVER forgive Thatcher – either for what she did in office or for the long term consequences of her actions. I cannot think of a single person in the UK who evokes quite so much contempt, disgust and loathing as she does. Some parts of the country have never recovered from her viscious, divisive policies.
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There’s tons of info/analysis out there on Thatcher. I think you asked a similar question about Reagan – why some people didn’t like Reaganism. For Thatcher the answer’s basically the same – one has other values, another analysis, other priorities.
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The discussion of Thatcher has been revived because of the movie that has just been released. And the articles I see on the subject confuse me completely. They are all highly emotional but give no access to the substance.
To give an example, I read a post last night that condemns Thatcher for getting to power through “male methods” rather than “female ones.” This is not a serious discussion. That’s why I prefer to ask actual people on the blog.
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If this is what she said, then that’s awesome. I don’t believe in group rights. There is only individual rights. If you respect and protect individual rights, then everything is covered.
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Ed That is what she said and the context was about responsibilities. I notice you only talk about rights and not responsibilities.
I wonder how far your protection of rights goes, do you support the right to withhold labor (ie strike) ?
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Have you read Random musings’s post?
I liked parts of her post mentioning facts, like:
Apart from the miners strike, the thing which Thatcher is probably most notorious for is her decision to remove funding for free school milk for schoolchildren. … It was actually Harold Wilson’s government in 1968, who first sheared back the provision three years before Thatcher withdrew it further to only children under seven.* Yet it is Thatcher, who is remembered as the milk snatcher – not the unnamed and unknown Education Secretary who served under Wilson.
The narrative of a woman, and a mother no less, snatching milk from mewling children is too strong a narrative to resist.
AND
Thatcher also presided over the decimation of British Industry – the coal, iron and steel industries all effectively shut down in the 80s, leading communities up and down the country devastated and desolate following their demise.
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I hope you’ll post movie review *as a movie* too, after you watch it.
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I don’t think I will watch it, to be honest. From what I hear, the movie is quite low in quality.
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Unfortunately, ed, Margaret Thatcher’s ethos was rather along the lines of ‘might is right’ and her record on protecting vulnerable individuals was… sketchy at the very least.
There are many things to admire about her; her drive, her determination, and her achievements in a time when a political career for women was pretty much unheard of. For good or for ill, she left a powerful imprint upon the country. Do I admire her for that? Yes. Do I approve of the policies she pursued and the damage she did to social care, and areas of the legal system? Hell no. (For the record, I don’t approve of the many things the current and previous administration did along those lines either.)
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The participation of an actual British person in this thread is highly appreciated!
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Clarissa I am originally an actual British person. I am actually from the industrial wastelands of the north that Thatcher created. The reason I am in Australia is all down to Thatcher.
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Ask an Irish person what he or she thinks of Margaret Thatcher. She was horribly brutal. She let young boys starve themselves to death. She worsened the political conflict between Northern Ireland and England, and she did so with arrogance and a callousness that was shocking. I don’t have time to get into it now but I will check back later to reply more. For now let me throw my chips on the Thatcher was a nightmare side.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if because of Thatcher the UK doesn’t have another female Prime Minister for a long time as a sort of knee jerk reaction for having tried it once and having a really bad outcome for many.
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I’m sure there was at least one lousy male PM, too. What will we do when we run out of genders? 🙂
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railed against Thatcher destroying the economy and plunging the country into dire poverty were a doctor and a nurse on the one hand and a CEO for Range Rover on the other
I hold Thatcher in very low regard, but not because of any of those alleged crimes. Certainly her economic reforms were much needed,To wit GDP per capita went up 150% from the time she took over until she resigned. Tellingly, Blair ran on the promise of not undoing Thatcher economic reforms. It was her social policies, her comments on society, her cuts on academic funding, the poll tax, her support of the apartheid government in South Africa which tip her overall record to the negative.
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Now we are getting somewhere I can relate to. The support for the apartheid and the cuts to academic funding, those are really nasty things.
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A Very Potted History
It was necessary to have lived through the effects that pernicious socialism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent) was having on day-to-day life in Britain, in the 1970s, to fully understand the achievements of Margaret Thatcher who turned the country around, almost single handedly – very often in spite, rather than because, of her colleagues (often termed wets as many did not always have the necessary stomach or stamina for the fight).
Her anti-union stance was not likely to draw support from trade unionist members representing, with the endemic over-manning, a sizeable proportion of the UK population (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3067563.stm): that group of our society was hardly likely to applaud the termination of their own gravy train which had brought British manufacturing industry to its knees, with spiralling wage inflation, holding both employers and the country to ransom over many years. Wage demands in those days, for perfunctory performances at best, had routinely been in double figures so Britain, being uncompetitive, had lost its manufacturing base to the Far East (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/16/why-britain-doesnt-make-things-manufacturing).
The Poll Tax, which was to replace the general rates, would have been a very good method of collecting local taxation as it makes local government equally accountable to ALL citizens. It failed in the UK simply because the contribution from national government was set too low and simply needed a little tweaking.
Many of her quotations are taken out of context as Margaret Thatcher was compassionate, caring as well as being pragmatic, (though she was an advocate of financial prudence); as is clear from her autobiographies:The Path To Power and The Downing Street Years.
She was one of the best Prime Ministers the UK ever had.
It has unfortunately become fashionable to hold her in poor esteem, but history will judge her greatness when comparisons are made with her bland contemporaries and some of her underachieving successors
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The Poll Tax, which was to replace the general rates, would have been a very good method of collecting local taxation as it makes local government equally accountable to ALL citizens.
Elections are supposed to do that not taxes.
It failed in the UK simply because the contribution from national government was set too low and simply needed a little tweaking.
It failed in the UK? it failed everywhere. Poll taxes were eliminated in most countries in the XIX century. It was a harebrained idea to begin with and not recognizing that it was so it was even more harebrained. The tax was threatening to take down the entire Tory party and she wouldn’t budge, so they had to stage a coup to get her out.
This marked the beginning of the decline of her formidable mental powers. By the end of the 90s she was writing odes to Pinochet and making other such down right embarrassing statements.
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” By the end of the 90s she was writing odes to Pinochet ”
– You are not serious??? Really? How come I had no idea? If I’d known this one fact, I’d never have published the post at all. Pinochet is a vile, disgusting, unnatural creep.
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Perhaps you also did not know that Maggie Thatcher was an cross-dimensional insectoid alien drone laying groundwork for the apotheosis of the Moon Child in the body of Elizabeth II who shall herald the eternal reign of the King-of-All-Tears.
Source: Grant Morrison.
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“Perhaps you also did not know that Maggie Thatcher was an cross-dimensional insectoid alien drone laying groundwork for the apotheosis of the Moon Child in the body of Elizabeth II who shall herald the eternal reign of the King-of-All-Tears.
Source: Grant Morrison.”
– I did not understand a word of this comment. 🙂 I’m hopelessly behind on my British politics.
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Apportioning the burden of local (or even national) taxation is clearly the job of government.
The Poll was a tax on people, not property, and was therefore more democratic as profligate councils would be more easily reigned in if they were accountable to more, rather than fewer, constituents.
Being forced to fund, at least, some small fraction of the local community costs (with assistance in the case of hardship) is likely to encourage some thought about the election process and provides incentives for more voters to help evict poor performing, local councillors.
( http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081023015821AAR5mT8 )
The method fell, largely as revenge at the hands of the militants she had previously tamed,
( http://www.militant.org.uk/PollTax.html )
and mainly because, though fairer, the cost was too high and some poorer people, previously exempted, were now drawn into the net. The cost was too high as the percentage contribution from national government had been set too low and this could have easily been amended by John Major.
Whilst Margaret Thatcher (who had only as many votes in parliamentary debates as any one else) did indeed possess a will of steel, that was the very reason why she won so many consecutive elections; it was the essential quality required to get the country back on its feet – which she did.
The revenge of a few disloyal wets caused the downfall of Margaret Thatcher – though any government in continuous power for that long will become unpopular,
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I’d actually forgotten her friendship with Pinochet. In the context of her innumerable crimes, that had fallen off my radar.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/198604.stm
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“Despite this, she has always been acutely aware of General Pinochet’s extremely poor human rights record – alluding in her letter to abuses “on both sides of the political divide” – and kept her distance while in office.”
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“Margaret Thatcher was compassionate, caring as well as being pragmatic, (though she was an advocate of financial prudence); as is clear from her autobiographies:The Path To Power and The Downing Street Years.”
Haha, really? An *auto*biography?
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Thought you might say that! But, nevertheless, that’s what she was.
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Thatcher was NOT compassionate and caring – a fact even accepted by her own party who subsequent to her departure spent over a decade trying to rid themselves of her toxic legacy as the ‘nasty party’ and even at the last election couldn’t summon up a majority.
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Who is your favorite male politician? Was he compassionate and caring?
Besides Gandhi, I can’t even think of one. Ukrainian Prime Minister Vinnichenko was all that but these features of his made him a complete failure as a politician. Unfortunately.
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The one time thatcher was compassionate was when tracking down her idiotic playboy son who managed to get himself lost on the paris-Dakkar rally due to his inability to read a map. using taxpayers money, she sent in the SAS to locate him.
Easy to be caring with other people’s cash.
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Thatcher was your UK Reagan. She had Pinochet, he had Noriega. Race riots in Brixton and Liverpool? We got a systematic attack on civil rights that contributed to the 1992 LA riots. War in the Falklands, war in Grenada. Opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa, open support of pro-apartheid leaders. Both veeeery interested in the ole Levant. Both veeeery anti-drugs. Both veeeery big on money, money, money = awesome. Both lionized by later generations gazing wistfully through a filmy lens of undeserved nostalgia.
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The Falkland war was strictly the fault of the insane government of Argentina that needed it for political purposes of its own.
I know that Thatcher needed it for identity reaffirming (and very silly) purposes, too, but the Argentineans really got themselves into a mess here.
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IN ANSWER TO: Thatcher was NOT compassionate and caring – a fact even accepted by her own party who subsequent to her departure spent over a decade trying to rid themselves of her toxic legacy as the ‘nasty party’ and even at the last election couldn’t summon up a majority.
In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power following The Winter of Discontent, Britain was effectively ruled by, and in the grip of the Trades Unions; who were out of the control even of the Labour government to whom most were affiliated.
The country was in decline, over regulated and over taxed. Industry was inefficient, over manned, and uncompetitive, with large chunks nationalised, loss making and riddled with restrictive practices and a closed shop mentality.
Investment was low or non-existent, education and training was of a low standard and inflation was high:
Britain were rightly epitomised as The Sick Man of Europe.
Read more….http://oyiabrown.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/compassionate-and-caring/
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Thank you for your contribution to the discussion, OyiaBrown. I find it very enlightening.
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«When Thatcher was in power, I lived in the Soviet Union. We all worshiped Thatcher. At least, everybody I knew (including my parents and their friends) did.»
Might explain why you suck so much.
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Yes, all of us who had the misfortune of being born in the Soviet Union suck. Lucky you to have been born away from that horrible place.
Feel better now?
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I don’t have any problem wih that, but I am not surprise that you would have such an attraction towards a total jerk like Thatcher.
There was anachirst living in the Soviet Union, so that’s not really a good reason for you.
Can’t you think by yourself? Are you going to blame the universe?
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“I don’t have any problem wih that, but I am not surprise that you would have such an attraction towards a total jerk like Thatcher.”
– Please read carefully before you post comments. The post starts by saying that I have no opinion on Thatcher because I lack knowledge. How you manage to translate that into “attraction” is a mystery. Are you attracted to everything you have no knowledge about?
“Can’t you think by yourself?”
– In order to think, people need food for thought. Which is what I asked my readers to provide. What’s the problem with that?
“Are you going to blame the universe?”
– For what?? Are you sure you are commenting in the right thread?
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Goddam universe, always on the attack.
I find many people use this rhetoric to counteract intellectual attitudes they don’t understand– they presume I am “blaming the universe”. This implies that the universe has some consciousness or identity, which I don’t think it has. People needs to get over their idea that the universe has some kind of identity or that the world is basically just and therefore nothing on Earth should be questioned or criticised.
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Besides, why would I call on something as immense as the universe to explain the opinions I held about Thatcher at age 11? I was a child, for Pete’s sake. let’s all condemn me for not having a sophisticated understanding of politics at that time.
Many people seem to get upset when others don’t share their exact opinions on absolutely everything. That is very strange to me.
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«I was a child, for Pete’s sake. let’s all condemn me for not having a sophisticated understanding of politics at that time.»
You still don’t and it’s my field (with History).
You are vey conservative and really right wing on a lot of matters. You do like to talk down to people and spit on them while they are in the gutter. Could go on. You don’t understand the importance of institutions and society.
The fact that Thatcher says that there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families, while being the head of the STATE, is a total joke in itself.
In fact, there can be no individuals, no families without society. And no, society is not the State.
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Pinochet connection: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/304516.stm
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So Pinochet brought democracy to Chile, eh? I’ve been wondering what it was he brought there. Turns out it’s called democracy.
I have no more questions about Thatcher after this. Thank you for the link!
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Video of actual meeting Thatcher/Pinochet: http://youtu.be/XJJnoRwF9ow
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Well Thatcher opposed Rhodesia, which was hugely unexpected by the government of the time.
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