Coltrane said:
...as an American who is unfamiliar with the inner-workings of the British political machine, could someone enlighten me as to why Margaret Thatcher stirs such disdain among so many?...
Most glorifying her death on here probably only heard about her time as PM second hand but when she came to power, inflation was high, we were in hock to the IMF, the unions were all-powerful and forced through wage settlements completely out of line with what their industries could afford and many of those industries were owned by the state and required huge volumes of money pumping in regularly.
She curbed the pwoer of the unions, brought inflation down and got government finances under control, withdrew support from failing uncompetitive industries and reduced the ludicrous levels of taxation we had, where you could be paying 98% tax on some income. She also allowed people to buy the council houses they'd rented for years at knock-down prices.
The downside of all that was that most of our major manufacturing industries went out of business or were sold off to foreign companies, unemployment mushroomed, many communities around those industries were devastated and we shifted from a manufacturing to a service economy.
Much of what she did set the scene for the next 35 years, some of which was right and sme of which was wrong. We may be in a mess now but without her we's have probably been in a much worse mess.
She single-handedly moved politics well to the right, from the point where she was considered far too right wing by the Tory party before she came to power to the point where her natural heir was Tony Blair and New Labour.
