In the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death, there has been an outpouring of remembrance of her role as Britain’s first female prime minister. Hugo Young, a political columnist for the Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and Thatcher’s biographer, wrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died.
… Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head.
The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. What happened at the hands of this woman’s indifference to sentiment and good sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who lost their jobs. It led to riots that nobody needed. More insidiously, it fathered a mood of tolerated harshness. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Everything was justified as long as it made money – and this, too, is still with us.
….Second, it’s now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain’s idea of its own future. Nations need to know the big picture of where they belong and, coinciding with the Thatcher appearance at the top, clarity had apparently broken through the clouds of historic ambivalence.
….
One also can’t forget what happened to the agency that made Thatcher world famous: the Conservative party, of which she seemed such an improbable leader. Without it, she would have been nothing. It chose her in a fit of desperation, hats and all – though it quite liked the hats. It got over a deep, instinctive hostility to women at the top of anything, and put her there. Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation.
* Refrain from the English Beat’s “Stand Down Margaret”
Selected lyrics:
You tell me how can it work
In this all white law
What a short sharp lesson,
What a third world war
I sometimes wonder
If I’ll ever get the chance
Just to sit with my children
In a holiday jam
Our lives seem petty in your cold grey hands
Would you give a second thought
Would you ever give a damn, I doubt it
Stand down Margaret
Awar!
Everybody shout it
Stand down Margaret!
I lived in England during the Thatcher years, no doubt about it, she was hated!
Why are the republicans fawning over her now? I remember well when American dollars were being sent to the IRA to blow up the Grande Hotel in Brighton where she was staying, she did not get injured, an old schoolfriend of mine – Margaret Tebbit was paralyzed from the neck down for life, she was married to Norman Tebbit, assistant to Maggie. Peter King of NY was one of the people strongly supporting the IRA.