Obituary: Margaret Thatcher - BBC
It is a hard sell that Britain’s economic troubles through the 70s and 80s were due to too much stability among banks, too many jobs for the workers, too many houses for the homeless, too many sick people becoming healthy, or too many schoolchildren drinking too much free milk.
Even as its deleterious results become increasingly apparent, Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang has been repackaged over the years into the schoolmarm’s righteous knuckle-rap so richly deserved by a spoiled and wayward nation.
For her favored children were not The People but rather The Winners – a kind of Hunger Games with a Duran Duran soundtrack. She legitimized self-serving policy and retarded a nation’s development, returning to the juvenile notion that happiness lies on the path of private betterment. She was not a worldly person but, like so many of her co-ideologues, moved through the world confined to her own slice of experience.
It is a strong leader and a strong nation that dares contemplate and improve the fate of others. She, a craven soul behind a screen of bluster, revealed how easily humanity might startle at the grandeur of civilization and walk right back into the cave.
So odious was her disdain for others, so paranoid and anti-social, her own Conservative party concluded that deposing a sitting Prime Minister would be the lesser political injury.
Repairing her damage to the tapestry of global finance, the sense of stewardship between generations, the tolerance between ethnicities and the opportunities for a new generation remains the unfinished chapter of her life.