He did redeem himself many years later when he signed a letter sympathising with her resistance against joining the EU monetary union. This was also the issue that was a big part of her downfall, while it now appears that her concerns showed much foresight.
And all of this derives from ones initial starting point.
In 1979, the UK was recovering from a terrible decade, we had gone bankrupt (loans from IMF in 74, suffered years of Union-led disruption (rubbish piled up in streets for months). New York was in a similar position as you can see from films of the period, with less overt union action.
So successive Tory (UK republicans) governments had had their entire, democratically elected, mandates wrecked by unelected union leaders. You could see this as labour rectifiying biased institutions in favour of the working class, or you could see it as an attack on democracy. Neither would be "wrong". Thatcher saw it as latter and set out to destroy the power of the Unions. This also chimed with her personal views on self-reliance.
The goal she set out to achieve (to break unions "holding back business") she was mostly successful in. It was not a "wrong" goal.
The execution was at times brutal - the 1984 miners strike divided our nation and is still being felt. One can argue it was wrong to do it that way. But three previous tory governments had tried other ways and failed.
As for consequences, well, UK industry contracted terribly, the Big Bang lit a fuse under the London financial sector and ... Greece and Spain and Portugal and France and Italy did not break their unions power in the 80s or 90s. Now both the unions power and their economies are broken.
At certain scales, and at certain time scales, wrong is really hard - I think you need to start measuring wrong in body counts, not ideology.
miners strike: http://www.defendtherighttoprotest.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
PS - terrified how my 16 year old self would feel reading this - probably march against the idea of becoming old and right wing.
you don't think differently. don't kid yourself. you like the rich kid's war
I am one of "Thatcher's children" having grown up in the late seventies and eighties. I clearly remember watching her enter Downing St and my mother telling me that things were going to get better now a woman was in charge.
She oversaw wrenching shifts in Britain's social and economic structures, was hated, respected, but rarely loved and kicked out without ceremony.
But my abiding memories are of something getting done. Rarely were there somethings that everyone agreed upon, rarely was it done well, but things were done. Thatcher had an agenda when she came to power. Her "success" over the Falklands enabled her to push that agenda - one of massive economic change. It seemed obvious and overdue to her and her main advisors that the semi-Keynesian establishment needed shaking up. And she and her band of, at the time, outsiders, did just that. Something happened. Something inevitable.
In the deadlocked worlds of politics I see in the UK and US, this is a trait that might be worth admiring.
But now in my own middle age, well, if I were PM now, my personal focus would be on the changes needed to deal with the Internet as the Central nervous system of humankind - issues of privacy, of government accessibility, of security of networks and national assets, of education policy. Those are my "Bleedin obvious" policy shifts. Things I would drive home ruthlessly, because not to do so would be like a time traveller knowing the all the days winning horses and still not betting.
So, to sum up, doing something in politics takes a special kind of ruthlessness. Sometimes we need to have people who will sacrifice others in order to make the inevitable happen now - there are many mining towns feeling the sacrifice to this day.
But we need now not to debate the issues of 1980, but to look at the next inevitable changes - and do our best to get ahead of them. Much of the Eurozone troubles are down to the countries missing a Thatcher, and having politicians who simply waited till the inevitable happened. Can anyone spot a politician who gets the needs of 2040?