Posted on 5/5/2019, 10:30:17 PM by Rummyfan
Today is the 40th anniversary of the election of Margaret Thatcher as the first female prime minister of Great Britain—a precursor of the election the following year of Ronald Reagan.
Before her arrival many people thought England’s long, slow postwar decline was irreversible. “Britain is becoming a third world country . . . an offshore industrial slum,” Economist magazine correspondent Robert Moss wrote in 1977. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw recall in their book The Commanding Heights of the episode when Thatcher visited the Conservative party’s research department after she became party leader, where she found a party staffer writing a paper on how the Tory party should adopt a “middle way” between left and right. Thatcher erupted. “She was not interested in refurbishing Harold Macmillan,” Yergin and Stanislaw recount. “Instead, she reached into her brief case and pulled out a book. It was [Friedrich] Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. She held it up for all to see. ‘This,’ she said sternly, ‘is what we believe.’ She slammed it down on the table and then proceeded to deliver a monologue on the ills of the British economy.”
If the the feminist and identify politics left were sincere about their demands for “diversity” and female representation at the summits of power, Thatcher would be one of their patron saints. Certainly she was not averse to feminist sentiments, such as her famous early (1965) comment that “If you want a speech made you should ask a man, but if you want something done you should ask a woman.” But of course the feminist/diversicrat left is really interested in leftism, not “diversity.” I recall that back in the 1980s feminists would refer to Thatcher (also Jeane Kirkpatrick, then our UN ambassador) as “female impersonator
I thought this was about the Rod Stewart song & I was going to say I heard it on the radio yesterday & it’s still a great song ; )
Presumably there was nothing in Hayak’s book about the right to keep and bear arms, because she confiscated all self loading center fire rifles in 1989
Thatcher was the perfect remedy for the malady at the time. She was an avowed economic libertarian. But she was not a social conservative by the standards of Free Republic...
Ha! Same thing here. But that Maggie is closer to 50 years. Good Lord that make me feel old.
Having lived through her reign, I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree. Something needed to be done, but destroying the manufacturing base of the country wasn’t it.
This is one reason why Sir Mick gets a pass from me.
He was one of the few rock artists that publicly said he supported Thatcher.
You can blame Atlee and the Socialists for that, not modernizing Britain after the end of the war. The bill came due.
The Iron Lady was a great British leader.
And a true friend of Reagan and the U.S.
Sir Roger Scruton, eminent conservative and Philosopher, and a contemporary of Thatcher, states what I stated. And even he is somewhat to the left of FR. The kind of robust evangelical Christianity that is the predominant philosophy here would be alien to Thatcher...
Ha!
I was talking about her economic policies, destruction of manufacturing industries in favor of finance and tourism.
“Don’t go wobbly on us Ron.”
May not be the exact quote but she and Reagan had the future of the English speaking world in their minds and hands. We seem to have that kind of leader today in POTUS Trump. May God watch over him.
And today there are Germans,Belgians,Frenchmen,Irish and Scots trying to destroy her again.
No arguments with her economic policies.
I think how fortunate in the 80s that we had Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Helmut Kohl.
Outside of Trump, look what we’ve got today.
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