We should admit (now more than ever) that there is something deeply personal (even erotic) in our abject hatred for Margaret Thatcher.

We should admit (now more than ever) that there is something deeply personal (even erotic) in our abject hatred for Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher's bizarre hold on the British (and, very sadly, Irish) psyche is easily explained; the orange haired witch was everybody's mother from hell. We tend to find cruelty in a male leader acceptable, even desirable, but we find cruelty in a woman unforgivable, evil, a perversion of nature. Still, however neurotic our ire there was something detestably unemphatic about Mrs Thatcher. When Tory politicians expressed concern that her policies were adversely affecting the poor, she smeared them with the sobriquet "wets", or, to translate into less guarded slang, they were behaving like a "sissy", or a "pussy", or a softie who couldn't muster the will to stick in the knife. 

Perhaps in certain regions, like Ireland, where Mrs Thatcher was correctly seen as a political sellifield, leaving us in constant fear that Irish sea winds would blow radioactive waste onto our shores, in this case, radioactive belligerent Unionism and radioactive class-war, our rancour was more political than psychosexual. 

Moreover, I reckon Mrs Thatcher's (and her supporters) opposition to "socialism" was also deeply emotional, personal and psychological.  Which, if true, would mean Thatcher was not the free-market ideologue of popular myth, but a Tory of far more old fashioned variety, a sort of idolotor of a Protestant, Unionist Empire where there is flagrantly still honey for the tea.  "Socialism" for Mrs Thatcher and her ideologues meant far more than trade-union dominated state industries, it was always redolent of the grim Industrial North and a value system at odds with the individualism of the south. This was illustrated spectacularly with the tragic and irreversible conflict between the Conservative government and the coal miners.  Coal miners embodied opposition to everything the careless term "Thatcherism" came to mean, they valued tradition and continuity above social aspiration, these blackened morlocks didn't want to "better themselves", because they refused to accept their generations-old form of labour was something to be bettered, and of course they placed the interests of the community ahead of any individual's aspirations and desires.  I grew up in the aftermath of Catholic dominated Ireland, so I know the guilt, submissiveness and resignation that goes with a "sense of community", but I will admit the coal miners (perhaps even Arthur Scargill himself) have as much right to consider themselves defenders of "British values" as the Grantham born grocer's daughter. Is not a sense of social responsibility a "British value"? Or, perish the thought, "Britain" is itself an amorphous concept? 

A good indication that Mrs Thatcher (and the abstract noun she spawned) is not a "market liberal", or, for the love of God, a "progressivist", or a "feminist" but an authoritarian British nationalist and imperialist of an old fashioned variety, is the fact the economist and philosopher considered one of the principle influences behind "Thatcherism", Freidrich Hayek, is very badly misunderstood.  In his book "The Constitution of Liberty", he remarks "a successful free society, will in a large measure be the most tradition bound society". A good insight into what "freedom" can mean in "libertarian" contexts!  Moreover, the influence the bigoted, clownish reactionary Enoch Powell had on Mrs Thatcher is often overlooked. The historian Richard Vinen's analysis of Powell's views on the free-market is very revealing; 


'He (Powell) opposed nationalisation, economic planning, high public spending, exchange controls and any government policy on price and incomes. Increasingly, he argued that the sole economic duty of government lay in control of the money supply. Powell's admiration for capitalism did not necessarily imply admiration for capitalism. He had little time for the Heathite cult of the manager ("this new model army of gentlemen who know best") or for the Thatcherite cult of the entrepreneur. It was the market itself that Powell admired. He saw it as something natural and organic that contrasted with the artificial creations of the modern state, and he celebrated it in tones of romantic nationalism; "the collective wisdom and collective will of the nation, resides not in any Whithall clique but in the whole mass of the people.expressing (itself) through all the complex nervous systems of the market'. (Richard Vinen, Thatcher's Britain, 51-52).


There is more than a flicker of Enoch Powell's archaic, romantic, bigoted version of "capitalism" in the woman whose ideas dominated Britain in the 1970s and 80s.