Margaret Thatcher "The Iron Lady" Dies at 87

Margaret Thatcher provoked strong reactions and opinions both in life and now in death.  Some worshiped her and others hated her.   That will not change now that she has died of a stroke at age 87.  I am not one to judge the dead, but Thatcher did some good things.  She also did some bad things and often she never apologized for her bad deeds even if she perhaps knew she was wrong.  Some like the singer Morrissey, of the 1980s band, The Smiths, has little good to say about her:

Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone—and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.  .   .  .  .  the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.

UK Gay rights activist Peter Tatchell is perhaps less harsh, but cannot forgive Thatcher for the passage of  Section 28 which was approved as part of the Local Government Act enacted in 1988 and which provided that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship."  Here's a sampling of Tatchell's remarks:

“Margaret Thatcher was an extraordinary woman but she was extraordinary for mostly the wrong reasons. So many of her policies were wrong and heartless. Nevertheless, I don’t rejoice in her death. I commiserate, as I do with the death of any person. In contrast, she showed no empathy for the victims of her harsh, ruthless policy decisions,” said human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

“In 1988, the Thatcher government legislated Britain’s first new anti-gay law in 100 years: Section 28. At the 1987 Conservative party conference she mocked people who defended the right to be gay, insinuating that there was no such right. During her rule, arrests and convictions for consenting same-sex behaviour rocketed, as did queer bashing violence and murder. Gay men were widely demonised and scapegoated for the AIDS pandemic and Thatcher did nothing to challenge this vilification.

A piece in The Daily Beast gives a more positive spin to Thatcher's legacy.  Here are excerpts:

Thatcher’s steely reputation as Britain’s first and only female prime minister, serving for more than 11 years from 1979 to 1990, was based on a succession of showdowns with labor unions, with the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army, with the Argentines in the Falklands War, and with many in the leadership of her own Conservative Party. She was also a devoted friend and counselor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan in his confrontations with the Soviets’ “Evil Empire.” (As recently as a year ago her face would brighten at mention of Reagan’s name, and the memories would flood back.) Thatcher had no problem with what she saw as moral absolutes.

“She was completely uncompromising,” says Lord Peter Palumbo, a close friend and associate for many years. “She had a very, very definite view. She had vision, which politicians, really, all over the world don’t share today. She was one of those people, like Winston Churchill, who gave the country hope. She came in at a very low ebb and singlehandedly turned it around. She felt that, on the whole, the country had 1,000 years of rather glorious history, and everything good that was British should be celebrated. She was unflinching in that view.”

Thatcher had to crash through countless glass ceilings not only of gender but of class. “The Tories played a very risky card in selecting her,” says Palumbo. “They knew it was risky. And having won the election both as leader of the party and as prime minister, I think they rather turned up their nose about a woman who was the daughter of a grocer in Grantham, and I think she took a very hard line because it was survival time. She would have been just run over by the grandees of the party, but she ran over them.”

That pattern was repeated over and over again when anyone underestimated Thatcher. In 1981, Irish prisoners staged a much-publicized hunger strike to protest British rule over Ulster and the conditions under which they were incarcerated. Ten starved themselves to death. “I don’t think any other prime minister would have allowed the hunger strikers to kill themselves as she did,” says Harris.

Andrew Sullivan gushes:

Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir preceded her; but Thatcher’s three election victories, the longest prime ministership since the 1820s, her alliance with the US in defeating the Soviet Union, and her liberation of the British economy place her above their achievements. What inspires me still is the thought of a young woman in a chemistry lab at Oxford daring to believe that she could one day be prime minister – and not just any prime minister, but the defining public figure in British post-war political history.

That took vision and self-confidence of a quite extraordinary degree. It was infectious. And it made Thatcher and Thatcherism a much more complicated thing than many analyses contain.

It should be noted that in the 1960s, Thatcher went against traditional Tories by voting in favor of a law that would legalize homosexuality.  I will let others reach their own evaluation of Thatcher.  She seems to have been multifaceted and not easily pigeon holed.  I know one thing for certain, however: I would NOT have wanted to debate her.  She could give back better than she got.