In ‘Revolution,’ an episode from Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, his assessment of Margaret Thatcher becomes most unpalatable when he veers towards gushing admiration, yet more importantly he highlights the worst feature of Thatcher’s reign: the extent of her influence.
Dancing on the streets in celebration of her death is a bit like celebrating the death of a monarch while remaining the subject of a monarchy.
After Thatcher fell from power, Thatcherism lived on, not least through her ideological step-child, Tony Blair. Since she had already sold off all of Britain’s other assets, he sold off politics itself and exchanged ideology for marketing. The only ideology that remained sacrosanct was the one he had been bequeathed by Thatcher: that of small government and free-market economics.
The Thatcher-Blair era helped set the stage for global economic crisis and through Britain’s vassal status to the U.S., a decade of wars in the Middle East.
Thatcher destroyed the Britain I grew up in by destroying the vital transfer of worker’s knowledge from the old journeymen to the apprentices. The result is that Britain now can make nothing…the new Queen Mary built in a French shipyard is the emblem of this loss. Americans should worry because the Thatcher legacy is at work in every American corporation.