LONDON — The single greatest testament to the life and career of Margaret Thatcher is that it is impossible to imagine what Britain would be like in 2013 had she never existed or never become prime minister. Love her or revile her, this Iron Titan made every other postwar prime minister seem a pygmy by comparison.
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Thatcher challenged the widely accepted notion that decline -- both relative and absolute -- was inevitable. No, no, no … it was not. Britain did not have to be the sick man of Europe. Her mission was to put the Great back into Great Britain. She so transformed British politics that every mainstream party, whether left or right, is an heir to Thatcher.
The arguments that rage in Britain today -- over the country's relationship with the European Union, over the size and purpose of the state, over the nature and extent of the welfare state -- all began in the age of Margaret Thatcher. She did not settle all these questions, but she made the weather for today's politics. She was a politician of consequence: The Lady was not for turning, and there has been no turning back from her legacy. No Margaret Thatcher, no Tony Blair. No Tony Blair, no David Cameron. We still live in the shadow of Thatcherism.
Her legacy is everywhere. She sold off huge chunks of social housing at discount prices, helping aspirational Britons onto the property ladder. If Britain was once a nation of shopkeepers (according to Napoleon), it became in the 1980s, for the first time really, a true democracy of property owners. An obsession with permanently rising house prices would prove damaging 20 years after the Iron Lady fell, but in her 1980s pomp, millions of working-class and lower-middle-class Britons were grateful for the chance to buy their own homes.
She believed in a stockholders' democracy too. When she came to power, British business was nationalized to an extraordinary degree. The government owned hotels and trash removal companies, as well as steel and shipbuilding industries. None were any good. Thatcher privatized state-owned industries such as British Airways, British Telecom, and British Gas. Millions of Britons purchased shares in the newly privatized utilities (though most were sold soon after), and almost every newspaper offered lucrative competitions to their readers based on the performance of the stock market. Financial deregulation -- the so-called "Big Bang" of 1986 -- transformed the City of London's prospects, kick-starting a revolution in financial services that saw London regain its place as a global financial behemoth. Here too, a critic might suggest, the seeds of 2008's great financial crash were sown. Nevertheless, from Latin America to India, other countries followed Britain's lead.
Like every other great leader -- and, like her or not, few dispute Thatcher's greatness -- she contained contradictions. She was a very pragmatic revolutionary. When she became leader of the Tory party in 1975, she could barely muster support from much more than half the Conservative parliamentary caucus. Nor were Thatcherites in a majority in her first cabinets. She and her small band of supply-side true believers were outnumbered by the so-called "wets" on the Tory benches.
Indeed, Thatcherism was an insurgency that only slowly took control of the Conservative Party. And though she won three thumping election victories, Thatcherism never quite enjoyed a majority in the country at large. Although many -- most of them men -- were devoted to her, she was more widely admired than loved. And, of course, she was hated too.
Her downfall was two-pronged. Trouble on the home front was combined with problems abroad to devastating effect. A disastrous reform of local taxation, following her third election victory in 1987, levied flat rates -- regardless of personal circumstance or income -- and was swiftly and devastatingly dubbed a new "poll tax." She seemed out of touch, indifferent to suggestions that it was manifestly unfair for a duke to pay the same charge as a bus driver. Her political judgment, for so long so sure, had failed.
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