The woman who wrecked Great Britain - by Alex Pareene for salon.com

[Douglas Carpenter]

Margaret Thatcher earned every single cheer that greeted her death


Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet in March, 1994, during a private meeting in Santiago. (Credit: Reuters)

As the trade unions were broken “The City” — London’s Wall Street — experienced the deregulation and subsequent astronomic growth that would eventually lead to Libor-rigging and, paired with similar deregulatory efforts in the States, the spectacular international financial catastrophe itself.

Britain no longer “makes” much of anything, and when those lost jobs were replaced, they were replaced with low-wage, no-security service industry work. Thatcherites insist, still, that Thatcher did what had to be done, that globalization would’ve devastated hidebound, union-choked Britain regardless, and that Thatcher “rescued” the country from inflation and a general 1970s feeling that the 1970s kinda sucked. Germany and France, luckily, never had Thatchers of their own to “rescue” them. (The myth — and it is a myth — that the 1970s were Britain’s lowest point persists mainly because “winners” of Thatcher’s upward wealth redistribution are more likely to write books and newspapers columns and host television shows than former miners are.)

Really, it’s hard to argue with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who remembered Thatcher on Sky News yesterday:

She created today’s housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefit rather than register them as unemployed because the Britain she inherited was broadly full employment. She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed, and the benefits bill, the legacy of that, we are struggling with today. In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong.

Her role in international affairs was equally belligerent whether in support of the Chilean dictator Pinochet, her opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa; and her support for the Khmer Rouge. Thatcher wasn’t just a supporter of brutal Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet, she was the dictator’s personal friend. And, yes, she called Nelson Mandela a terrorist.

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/the_woman_who_wrecked_great_britain/