THATCHER'S LEGACY

Mr Jaithirth Rao's wrote an obituary for Margaret Thatcher (The Economic Times, India, Op-Edit, April 9th) that reads like Mark Antony's peroration at Caesar's burial except that Mr.Rao came to praise Thatcher, not to bury her. Essentially he credits her with everything except sliced bread. We need to place Thatcher's contribution in perspective.

Mr Rao's assertion that but for Thatcher we'd all be socialists now, queuing up for life's necessities, is as inaccurate as it is alarmist and unfounded. In so far as any personal credit is due at all for this so-called dismantling of Socialism, it should go to Ronald Reagan.

Notwithstanding her visceral dislike of socialism as a political system or an economic philosophy neither the idea of bankrupting the Evil Empire nor the execution thereof was Thatcher's. Socialism's own failures assured its demise. Let alone bankrupting the Soviets, Britain was itself barely solvent. Mr.Rao's claim reminds me of comedian Spike Milligan's claim of playing a key role in the down fall of Hitler!

The UK's physical location willy nilly placed it in the forefront America's confrontation with the USSR. Thatcher was the voice of the anti-soviet rhetoric thanks to her oratory skills in comparison to the complexity-challenged Reagan. The means, the materiel, the desire, all resided in Washington. In any case, Gorbachev was already moving to dismantle (perestroika, glasnost) the old Soviet system even before the West got to know him. We cannot ignore the lasting damage done by her opposition to sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. We have witnessed what the precipitate dismantling of Soviet State has wrought – a unipolar world without any counterweight to that unipolar power, emergence of a confrontational brand of Islam, and the strife in resource-rich middle east. Achievements to be celebrated? Hardly.

Thatcher used democratic means to acquire power but was not a true democrat by temperament or intent. She supported oppressive regimes that made a mockery of her claims to support democratic aspirations of people around the world. Think South Africa or Pinochet's Chile . She supported the American invasion of Grenada, a tiny island incapable of defending itself let alone threatening its neighbours. Her democratic credentials were exposed by the rebellion in her own party culminating in Geoffrey Howe's resignation and the ascent of John Major.

Much credit is given to her for destroying Britain's militant labour unions and perhaps deservedly so. That view ignores the fact that the power and hold of the unions, led by coal unions, were weakened by the flow of oil and gas from North Sea.

Thatcher unleashed two trends which came back to bite Britain. One was to make London the centre of new forms of financial buccaneering. The other was to usher in the “home owner democracy”. Home ownership was promoted as a virtue in itself. The rush to own homes gave a fillip to the economy in the short run. This trend was neither desirable nor sustainable as later events were to prove. More than a million home owners on the verge of retirement around 2010 were at risk of losing their homes, unable to pay off their loans. Her support for the Financial sector, and neglect of manufacturing saw Britain lose whatever manufacturing edge it had, over the next two decades.

Commentators aver that Thatcher's quintessential Englishness and abrasiveness alienated the Scots, for one, and kept the Irish troubles on the boil. Scottish devolution is almost a reality now and without Thatcherite abrasion Northern Ireland is quiet. She was a shrewd, ambitious, ruthless, and divisive politician who played a larger than life role in British politics but cleverly accepted credit for developments of which she was neither the instigator nor the executor.
Lord Ashdown put it very succinctly in a TV interview: she was very good at destroying things: labour unions, her own party, international comity and the like.

Additionally, see this analysis: http://business.time.com/2013/04/09/was-thatcherism-good-or-bad-for-the-economy/?xid=newsletter-daily
Or this
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/did-thatcher-turn-britain-around/