It bears remembering that Britain in the late 1970s was on a malaise bender that made Carter’s America look like a frat party. Three-day workweeks, Callaghan’s “Winter of Discontent,” strikes, and the detritus of nationalized industry caught in a stagflation spiral – Margaret Thatcher came to power in a country infinitely further down the road to socialism than the United States ever was, no matter what modern wingnut media blowhards will tell you about the collectivization evils of raising the top income tax rate to 39.6%. Thatcherism was very much a philosophical and intellectual challenge to the political and economic ethos of postwar Britain, and represented meaningful change.
Consider also that this was largely a battle over economics. Thatcher was no particular friend of social liberalism, not that the 80s were a boom time to be gay or black or a woman (one person famously remarked that because she had climbed the greasy pole herself, Maggie’s conclusion was that there was no such thing as grease) – but the sort of Christian Right-Moral Majority fire that fueled the Republican ascendancy wasn’t so much a thing. Thatcher’s elections never turned on the likes of prayer in school, or the Pledge of Allegiance, or abortion: it was all about capitalism and the fight against Soviet Communism.
And the Tories held on seven years longer after she was pushed out, and when Labour finally came to power after eighteen years, it was “New Labour,” the Clinton-esque Third Way-styled party of the left that had foresworn government control of the means of production. Nobody was rushing out to re-nationalize British Rail, and until 2008, nobody was attempting to slap the reins back on the City of London and wrangle with the bankers and financiers who made London the money capital of the world from the 1990s on.
It’s because of that transformation that she’s still such a polarizing figure. “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead,” from The Wizard of Oz, is literally climbing the charts in Britain right now and could possibly be the #1-selling track by the weekend. There were street parties at the news of her death, especially in Brixton (home of riots in 1981) and the northern coal-towns where the miners lost a year-long strike effort. You could make a case that the Big Bang – the 1986 financial deregulation – was the pivotal blow in replacing the Little England of old with the modern whiz-bang high-roller economy, with foreign investors living two weeks a year in vacation homes in Mayfair while Dr Martens production gets shipped out to Vietnam. Thatcherism turned the UK into a 21st century economy, for better and for worse.
One of the refreshing things about the UK is the agreeable lack of hagiography as soon as somebody dies. When Reagan went in 2004, all of a sudden everything was Saint Ronaldus Magnus all the time, indulging the idolatry of every GOP fetishist in a tidal wave that continues to this very day. In Britain, among the hosannahs and glorious remembrance of the Tories, you’re also getting the Beat and Elvis Costello and the Specials and memories of the Young Ones. “Vyvyan’s baby will be born a pauper! Back to Victorian values! Charles Dickens! Oliver Twist! I HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED THATCHER!!” As Geoff Lloyd pointed out, irrespective of what you think about her, 80s music in Britain isn’t the same without the Iron Lady. (And unlike in the United States, British political protest usually has a beat and you can dance to it.)
Margaret Thatcher transformed Great Britain. That’s a fact, regardless of what you think of the transformation. And what she did doesn’t all become good just because she popped her clogs. A fact that Americans would do well to think about and internalize for future reference.