The day that Thatcher died

Celebrating Thatcher's death is like an extreme case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

As a head of government she was an abject failure. The job of any government is to bring the polis closer to justice. She did the exact opposite. This was partly due to her extreme ignorance, but also to her weakness. Those who claim that she was 'strong' or 'power-crazy', like many in this thread and elsewhere, fail to see that for much of her premiership she merely gave away power to a coterie of barons, like Rupert Murdoch. It's very easy to be acclaimed as 'strong' like that by those who hold the real power.

The real reason why politics seems so bleak and hopeless today, and has caused so much apathy, was because the reach of the state, which should be the promoter of justice, has so much diminished. I'm certainly not saying that many states or governments have been reliable promoters of justice, but this is where that power should be vested if any states should exist.

'Breaking' the unions is often cited as a key example of her 'strength', but it's much easier to defeat a rabble than a well-defended vested interest, and so she chose the path of least resistance. The problem with the unions was not rooted in their alleged excessive power but in the hostile relationship that they had with the state. That relationship should normally be one of constructive collaboration and a key check on the government's and industry's power, and welcomed by both. The reasons why the relationship was historically so poor are of course not of Thatcher's making, but she utterly failed to broker the situation.

The real reason why she created the illusion of strength is because her rule was reminiscent of that of English monarchs, whose power, following the Magna Carta, was diminished compared to other European kings, having been handed over to the barons. With very few exceptions, monarchs acted for the most part like figureheads and deflected attention away from the de facto, as opposed to de iure (always a difficult concept with the shape of the 'law' in Britain being what it is) form of government, which was not monarchy but aristocracy for most of its post-Conquest history.

As for the rest of her policies, they have for the most part already been shown up as having unbalanced world politics, her economic policies in particular.

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.

It was of course not just her but her axis with other incompetent and weak leaders like Helmut Kohl or Ronald Reagan that caused the damage.

Rest in peace nonetheless. There's no need for hell or any nonsense like that. She has had ample punishment already in the revulsion in which she is held by so many. We have to move on and continue to try and repair some of the damage she caused, much as it now more of an uphill struggle than ever before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9eap_cKLP4