"She Didn't Change All That Much."
Dead wrong. Believe it or not, some revisionists have tried to argue over the years that Thatcher's impact is vastly overrated. There are the Marxists who claim that we exaggerate her effect as an individual, since she was merely responding to the social and political conditions of her time. There are the conservative purists who insist that Thatcher didn't really change Britain in the ways that mattered. But this is an especially hard argument to make.
Andrew Marr comes much closer to the truth in his excellent TV series History of Modern Britain. "Don't think of her as a politician," he says at one point. "Think of her as a one-woman revolution, a hurricane in human form." Thatcher transformed her country beyond all recognition. During her time in office, she succeeded in dismantling the "postwar consensus" that had dominated British politics since the end of World War II. In 1945, the Labour Party won a landslide victory by promising voters a new vision of Britain based on a comprehensive welfare state (including single-payer health insurance), public ownership of key industries, all-encompassing regulation, and a prominent decision-making role for trade unions. Arriving in office at a moment when rampant inflation and industrial decline had made the limits of this model all too apparent, Thatcher proceeded to implement her own ideas of what Britain should be -- to dramatic and lasting effect. "We still live in the Britain that Maggie built," as Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland notes. Love her or hate her, it's impossible to imagine modern Britain without her.
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