they are simple.
agent of change, for good and for ill, depending on who you are.
sometimes a country can swing too far to the left or the right. in my view, gb in the 1970s was going downhill fast as a result of excessive socialism and insufficient individualism.
many saw the problem. she and various cerebral intellectuals of the right such as enoch powell, keith joseph, geoffrey howe devised a set of ideas designed to turn the tide. they saw gb as requiring a dose of monetarist/capitalist medicine.
in thatcher, they found a person with the will to administer it regardless of the consequences. what she wanted was to free the market forces she thought would cure britain's malaise. to free them she had to make resistance difficult. so she made life tougher for the status quo forces (state-controlled institutions, unions, old businesses) and tried to make things easier for entrepreneurs.
she created a better balance, but chose the hard path of confrontation to engineer it. her legacy is contentious because of the suffering her method engendered during the transition. but i think the result of her efforts was a more competitive, more confident country.
she was also a huge figure on the world stage. once again, she was contentious - she had success in her relationship with reagan; won a war over some island possessions; but gb's relationship with europe went pretty sour.
overall, impressive effort for a grocer's daughter with a robust handbag who became the uk's first and only female pm.
if anyone represents the notion of will that german philosophers of the nineteenth century revered, she was that person. but she did damage to many people's lives along the way.
so she will be remembered by some as a heroine and by others as a villainess.
i kinda admired her, but she couldn't stop herself from demanding further radical change when folks wanted a break from it. she lacked the brake to go with her accelerator. her greatest strengths were also her greatest weaknesses. she thought increasing individualism at the expense of established organisation was always a good. and there comes a point when it ain't.
at the same time, she wasn't the same sort of politician as modern republicans. she wanted to preserve the national health service (albeit by introducing market elements into it) and the post office. she saw science as a positive influence eg re technology development, climate change and evolution. religion was a private thing to her and she had a difficult political relationship with the church of england. abortion was not a conservative party issue. etc
so although she was pushing towards the right, the place she ended up was around about where united states democrats currently exist.
| 