Ruthlessly imposing her ideas on British society, Margaret Thatcher turned the United Kingdom into a totally different country - making it more and more divided by way of a “mass sell-off of civic society,” says RT contributor Afshin Rattansi.
RT:Margaret Thatcher earned the name 'the Iron Lady'
for her strong leadership and uncompromising policies. Which
lessons did she help Britain learn?
Afshin Rattansi: Well, her body is at the Ritz Hotel
belonging to the millionaire Barclay brothers. But, of course, the
attitude of the British people towards her is very mixed… or maybe
it isn’t.
Because she deliberately, and from a principal stand as she saw it,
made this country into something it wasn’t after World War II, she
achieved a post-World War II consensus. And what inadvertently,
perhaps she would say, is that she made this country more and more
divided.
And now, up to 99 percent, maybe younger generations of British
people don’t remember: Britain was more of a unified nation. There
weren’t so many gated communities and so forth. But Mrs Thatcher
ruthlessly used her ideas, which came from theoretical ideas –
[Friedrich] Hayek and so on, Milton Friedman, but they neatly
fitted in with the Washington Consensus.
We mustn’t forget that she was elected very shortly after the
British government of James Callaghan was in hock to the IMF and
the World Bank. Her first term – was it Mrs Thatcher or the IMF and
the World Bank, who were running the economic policy, what she was
doing neatly fitted in a particular structure and a particular
elite structure in Britain that matched different types of wishes
and desires so that we would end up with asset stripping on such a
large scale and the mass sell-off of civic society.
RT: Does Britain and Europe need another leader like Mrs
Thatcher now at this time of economic and political crisis?
AR: Without doubt she had a massive effect, perhaps the
biggest effect is on British parliament. I even remember watching
her before the parliament was televised in the House of Commons.
Obviously, this generation of parliamentarians watches her videos
because they follow her policies. The opposition Labor Party of
Tony Blair and Ed Miliband, let alone the party of David Cameron
they are much more to the extreme right to Mrs Thatcher.
Perhaps Mrs Thatcher is a socialist compared to the present people
in the British parliament. But she, of course, had that huge
influence. As to whether they can learn anything, the tide has
completely turned and the banks here are now in the taxpayers’
hands and the talk is nationalization after the massive failure,
the kind of blip some may look upon it a thousand years from now of
this new liberal idea of a nation of shareholders, a shareholding
democracy as all we now realize what it did was to concentrate
wealth in fewer and fewer hands and ultimately cause division that
was dangerous to the stability of the nation itself.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.