Margaret Thatcher dies aged 87

Well it will set the chattering classes off as we are regaled with the various paeons to the New World she ushered in.  However my own feelings about Thatcher are somewhat different-I consider her vile government and her pernicious impact to be one of the great disasters for British and European society in the twentieth century.  But I also consider her to have been a lame duck and incompetent politician saved by a momentous concatenation of events mostly reliant on two factors provided by two different very stupid men, both of whom suffered from tremendous hubris allied to an astonishing lack of strategic insight.  The first was Arthur Scargill, an egotistical communist with an agenda so hopelessly out of place that to see him lead the brave miners who so faithfully followed this strutting martinet was heartbreaking.  The other was the gold braided thug General Galtieri who invaded the Malvinas Islands as a means of stoking up his political capital at home which was ebbing as a result of his almost complete political ineptitude.
The result was that the lame duck was transformed into 'The Iron Lady', and a fantastical Catherine The Great type character was manufactured by the Media and the myth was born of the Lady who was not for turning.
The asset stripping of the country's natural wealth and housing stock from public ownership into private hands at knock down prices remains one of the great grand thefts of history.
The death of manufacturing to be replaced with parasitic financial service industries remains a huge social and national disaster whose grim effects continue.
The narrative that transfigured the great socialist objective of equality into a lie about laziness, and the 'ill man of Europe' continues as a myth underpinning greed, selfishness and the chronic cult of the individual at the expense of all else.
The legacy of Thatcher is the mentality of greed and selfish individualism over collective responsibility.
To call it Thatcherism lends it an intellectual coherence it never actually had as a set of ideas based on gut feelings much like a political system founded on the letters page of The Daily Mail.
Yet there is one thing that can be said for Thatcher as she performed in the House surrounded by her yes men-there was no doubt who was wearing the trousers!