The Lady's Not For Learning
She helped drag Britain kicking and screaming into her version of the late 20th century, but she would have left it there, if given half a chance. In many ways she did it by reimposing her idea of the nineteenth century, but without the philanthropy and better instincts; she also did it by imperiously and hypocritically using Big Government to interfere whenever she thought small government, democracy, or localism produced the wrong result. As she proclaimed, she was a conviction politician, not a consensus politician; but her convictions were often less strictly ideological than psychological – she was a Believer, but I suspect political and economic ideologies played a small role compared to the personal and familial. And she's so often made the scapegoat for so much of the destruction that was really self-destruction on the left, especially in the union movement. Unmaternal, she was also pleasingly and deeply anti-Paternal. She was adept at smashing barriers – but mostly for the rich, the powerful, and the lucky. Like a lot of NeoCons, she conflated fairness and freedom, but they're not at all the same thing (freedom usually comes at quite a cost to fairness, and vice versa).The shabby, demoralised, demoralising, broken-down London I inhabited in the Thatcher Years certainly suffered both from the immediate past decades and from the Thatcherite cure, but even as late as then a lot of the people I knew didn't see the change, didn't believe there'd be any sort of permanent revolution. She, however, surely never doubted; nor did I.
“There's no such thing as society” – just Us and Them, I guess.
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