Thatcher's Politicial Legacy.

[crazy canuck]

In economics, it was merely a speedbump along the path of inevitability.

Hardly. The success model of the 21st century so far is state intervention economics Asian style, not Thatcherism. It was certainly influential, but I think it is past its apogee nowadays.

[crazy canuck]

Interesting article on the legacy of Thatcher, from last year: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/not-all-socialists-want-to-dance-on-margaret-thatchers-grave-i-want-her-to-go-on-and-on-8143089.html - reasonable IMO, from a left wing perspective.

What part of that was reasonable?  The only reason he didnt want to dance on her grave (even though he really did want to do it) is because of the media backlash to such boorish behaviour.

[Zanza]

Hardly. The success model of the 21st century so far is state intervention economics Asian style, not Thatcherism. It was certainly influential, but I think it is past its apogee nowadays.

Which part is ? I added another sentence to clarify the second part. The first part is just a fact, no way around it.

[crazy canuck]

Hardly. The success model of the 21st century so far is state intervention economics Asian style, not Thatcherism. It was certainly influential, but I think it is past its apogee nowadays.

Which part is ? I added another sentence to clarify the second part. The first part is just a fact, no way around it.

The first part is an assertion of fact laden with all kinds of difficulties which earned you a well deserved. 

[fhdz]

Hardly. The success model of the 21st century so far is state intervention economics Asian style, not Thatcherism. It was certainly influential, but I think it is past its apogee nowadays.

Which part is ? I added another sentence to clarify the second part. The first part is just a fact, no way around it.

The first part is an assertion of fact laden with all kinds of difficulties which earned you a well deserved. 

Maybe he's talking about fragile, short-term successes rather than longer-term, less-stable-but-less-fragile-to-catastrophic-shocks successes?

[Sheilbh]

Not just the GLC, she also got rid of the other metropolitan county councils, Tyne & Wear, Greater Manchester etc

Yeah. I think centralisation's one of her legacies too. Admittedly I'm from Liverpool where destroying local government was probably a bit deserving

I liked Iain Martin and Andrew Sullivan's pieces. From Sullivan's:

Thatcher, Liberator
APR 8 2013 @ 12:01PM
...
I owe my entire political obsession to the one person in British politics who refused to accept this state of affairs. You can read elsewhere the weighing of her legacy – but she definitively ended a truly poisonous, envious, inert period in Britain's history. She divided the country deeply – and still does. She divided her opponents even more deeply, which was how she kept winning elections. She made some serious mistakes – the poll tax, opposition to German unification, insisting that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist – but few doubt she altered her country permanently, re-establishing the core basics of a free society and a free economy that Britain had intellectually bequeathed to the world and yet somehow lost in its own class-ridden, envy-choked socialist detour to immiseration.

I was a teenage Thatcherite, an uber-politics nerd who loved her for her utter lack of apology for who she was. I sensed in her, as others did, a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system. And part of that identity – the part no one ever truly gave her credit for – was her gender. She came from a small grocer's shop in a northern town and went on to educate herself in chemistry at Oxford, and then law. To put it mildly, those were not traditional decisions for a young woman with few means in the 1950s. She married a smart businessman, reared two children and forged a political career from scratch in the most male-dominated institution imaginable: the Tory party.

She relished this individualist feminism and wielded it – coining a new and very transitive verb, handbagging, to describe her evisceration of ill-prepared ministers or clueless interviewers. Perhaps in Toynbee's defense, Thatcher was not a feminist in the left-liberal sense: she never truly reflected on her pioneering role as a female leader; she never appointed a single other woman to her cabinet over eleven years; she was contemptuous toward identity politics; and the only tears she ever deployed (unlike Hillary Clinton) were as she departed from office, ousted by an internal coup, undefeated in any election she had ever run in as party leader.

Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir preceded her; but Thatcher's three election victories, the longest prime ministership since the 1820s, her alliance with the US in defeating the Soviet Union, and her liberation of the British economy place her above their achievements. What inspires me still is the thought of a young woman in a chemistry lab at Oxford daring to believe that she could one day be prime minister – and not just any prime minister, but the defining public figure in British post-war political history.

That took vision and self-confidence of a quite extraordinary degree. It was infectious. And it made Thatcher and Thatcherism a much more complicated thing than many analyses contain.

Thatcher's economic liberalization came to culturally transform Britain. Women were empowered by new opportunities; immigrants, especially from South Asia, became engineers of growth; millions owned homes for the first time; the media broke free from union chains and fractured and multiplied in subversive and dynamic ways. Her very draconian posture provoked a punk radicalism in the popular culture that changed a generation. The seeds of today's multicultural, global London – epitomized by that Olympic ceremony – were sown by Thatcher's will-power.

And that was why she ultimately failed, as every politician always ultimately does. She wanted to return Britain to the tradition of her thrifty, traditional father; instead she turned it into a country for the likes of her son, a wayward, money-making opportunist. The ripple effect of new money, a new middle class, a new individualism meant that Blair's re-branded Britain – cool Britannia, with its rave subculture, its fashionistas, its new cuisine, its gay explosion, its street-art, its pop music – was in fact something Blair inherited from Thatcher.

She was, in that sense, a liberator. She didn't constantly (or even ever) argue for women's equality; she just lived it. She didn't just usher in greater economic freedom; she unwittingly brought with it cultural transformation – because there is nothing more culturally disruptive than individualism and capitalism. Her 1940s values never re-took: the Brits engaged in spending and borrowing binges long after she had left the scene, and what last vestiges of prudery were left in the dust.
...

And Iain Martin:

Margaret Thatcher was a truly great leader with flaws. She should not be treated like a religious icon
By Iain Martin Politics Last updated: April 8th, 2013

Margaret Thatcher was a great Prime Minister. It is a claim that would have validity even if it rested on her foreign policy achievements alone. Under her leadership a country at a post-imperial low, which had spent decades going down the plug-hole of international affairs, arrested decline and demonstrated that it still had a proper role to play. There would be no return to the past, but Britain need not assume that it must continue to be trampled upon. She was a pivotal figure in the battles against communism and totalitarianism and the truth is that parts of the extreme Left – where hatred of country is not uncommon – have never forgiven her for it.

Yet her legacy on the domestic front was much more contested. For that reason the reaction to her death was always going to be like this. It only took seconds after the announcement by Lord Bell for the idiocy to manifest itself. Various attention-hungry Left-wing comedians, such as George Galloway, made vile comments on Twitter and elsewhere that will, inevitably, lead to a heated debate that will last for days on what it means. In essence it means that some people lack manners and grace, as they always have, but thanks to the wonders of social media they can now advertise this fact widely. Where their ancestors muttered under their breath, or shook their head when a newsreel was shown in the cinema, nowadays there is national competition to see who can shout loudest in 140 characters.

Historically, Thatcher was (I had to stop myself from writing is) much too interesting a figure to be reduced to a giant Twitter spat between abusive morons and those demanding that her critics recognise her greatness or shut up.

As the news broke I was on a train that had just left Glasgow. The train heading south passes a few remaining rotting hulks of industrial plants long since closed. For all the efforts at regeneration it is still a post-industrial landscape, of brownfield land stretching on for miles, all waiting to be reclaimed. Motorways cut across it, pointing at the City centre where the new Glasgow economy resides, based on retail and the service sector.

Margaret Thatcher's critics north of the border are clear about what happened, even though the story of industrial decline did not start in 1979 and is much more complex than is usually credited. For many decades Scotland had coasted, relying on the inheritance of the industrial revolution and empire. Poor management, rampant trade unions and capital flight (as investors sought higher returns in countries such as the US) combined to create complacency and a lack of innovation. One can dispute how Thatcher responded, but she appeared on the scene, in terms of this story, at five minutes to midnight. She couldn't instantly unpick decades of poor policy and transform central Scotland or the North East of England into the equivalent of the ultra-efficient German industrial heartland. She was trying to conquer the menace of inflation, which bedevilled the British economy.

Still, no politician of the modern era has a hold on the popular imagination like Thatcher does. Scotland, or the Scottish political class, will be insufferable in the days ahead, as its representatives compete to scramble onto the low ground, mistaking it for the high ground. The Scottish Left, which means most politics is Scotland, is consumed with the idea of Caledonian supposed moral superiority and the supposed crimes of Thatcherism.

Our train then passed through the North West, where there were actually plenty of Thatcher fans, as the election results of the 1980s show. Now we are in the Midlands. Here there was deindustrialisation, or necessary economic reinvention. Voters in their millions were attracted by Thatcher's aspirational credo. Soon we'll pass through the South East, and some of the Tory strongholds where her voters grasped that she instinctively understood their desires, not because she had been shown the findings of a focus group but because she really was one of them. And soon we'll be back in London, home to the metropolitan bubble.

Thatcher was great, but the legacy she leaves is a complex one. There is no point pretending otherwise, or treating her like a religious icon, unless we want to leave our brains at the door. Her economic revolution produced enormous benefits for many, but there were unintended consequences, one of which was the financialisation of the economy which contributed to the British end of the 2007-2008 banking disaster. She took on and defeated the trade unions, whose leaders thought, arrogantly, they had the country by the balls. She was a true patriot, yet in some parts of the country she was seen, unfairly in my eyes, as other and alien. Ultimately, the work it fell to her to undertake at a critical time in the nation's history was so difficult that it was always going to be impossible for her to be universally loved.

However, Britain's first female Prime Minister was widely respected, and deservedly so. The impeccable and brave way she conducted herself after the horror of the Brighton bomb stands out as an example of her extraordinary determination and capacity for endurance. The Tories and the country were lucky to be led by a conviction politician with deeply held values, epic style, and an understanding – until 1989 – of the art of wielding power.

Margaret Thatcher at her peak was disputatious. She tended to call it as she saw it, so why shouldn't we? She was a truly great Prime Minister of grand historical proportions, who also had significant flaws.

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally I don't think her changes or her legacy were inevitable.

Edit: Also I'd love to see a longer piece on the differences between the memories of Thatcher and Reagan.

[MadImmortalMan]

In economics, it was merely a speedbump along the path of inevitability.

Hardly. The success model of the 21st century so far is state intervention economics Asian style, not Thatcherism. It was certainly influential, but I think it is past its apogee nowadays.

EDIT: Thinking about it, it's not past its apogee, but it's certainly no longer the force it used to be. Privatization is all well and good in some sectors, but the wholesale dissolution of state services has become quite unpopular here. That won't win you elections anymore.

That's why it was a speedbump, yes.

[CountDeMoney]

I don't think Thatcher was opposed to East joining West because the Ossies were going to surround and start shelling Kreuzberg.

I'm not the one contesting ethnic politics as an "outdated modelling of European politics", you are.  So there.
You Euros have the same fucking hang-ups you've always had.

[crazy canuck]

Thanks for posting those Sheilbh. 

[fhdz]

In economics, it was merely a speedbump along the path of inevitability.

Hardly. The success model of the 21st century so far is state intervention economics Asian style, not Thatcherism. It was certainly influential, but I think it is past its apogee nowadays.

EDIT: Thinking about it, it's not past its apogee, but it's certainly no longer the force it used to be. Privatization is all well and good in some sectors, but the wholesale dissolution of state services has become quite unpopular here. That won't win you elections anymore.

That's why it was a speedbump, yes.

Eh, we'll continue to get rude awakening after rude awakening...and we'll continue to centralize and intervene economically. I don't necessarily have a philosophical problem with that as much as I have a practical problem with it. The more structure we build around these services, the more we have tiny numbers of people tipping the scales this way and that, the more fragile we make our complex economic system to violent shocks...just like bacteria become more resistant the more antibiotics we throw at them.

[Valmy]

Incidentally I don't think her changes or her legacy were inevitable.

Your article suggests they were.  'Five minutes to midnight' and all that.

[Sheilbh]

Your article suggests they were.  'Five minutes to midnight' and all that.

Yeah, that doesn't mean we'd get Thatcherism.

[Admiral Yi]

I can't think of any country that has experienced economic success with the pre-Thatcher model of state ownership of money-losing overpaid heavy industry.

[Valmy]

Yeah, that doesn't mean we'd get Thatcherism.

Besides putting the dying animal of the British industrial system mercifully to sleep but else is there to Thatcherism?