Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) by Christopher Hitchens


It is easy to summarize the foulness of the Thatcher years: the combination of Malthus and Ayn Rand that went to make up her social philosophy; the police mentality that she evinced when faced with dissent; the awful toadying to Reagan and now Bush; the indulgence shown to apartheid; the coarse, racist betrayal of Hong Kong; the destruction of local democracy and autonomous popular institutions. Yet every Tory in the House had voted gleefully for all of those things, and one of them, her newly anointed clone, John Major, has disagreed with Thatcher only from the right. While on the ostensible issue of principle, a common European system. Labor's conversion has been too late and too shallow to be convincing.

From an article in The Nation called "Lessons Maggie Taught Me" 
December 17, 1990