PAUL ROUTLEDGE: Now that she’s gone, it’s fashionable to say that “whatever you think of Maggie, at least you have to admire her for sticking to her guns”. I repudiate this modish claptrap. Look where she pointed those guns – at those who couldn’t defend themselves, their jobs and their way of life.
The pitmen, the steel workers, the rail employees, the hundreds of thousands of employees in state sector business thrown on the scrapheap in the name of privatised profits. Businesses now – like water and electricity – largely in the hands of foreign owners ripping off the British consumer.
I lived through the Thatcher years as a London-based journalist for The Times and The Observer, when I reported on all the major industrial, political and social upheavals of her rule. I do not look back on those times through the rose-tinted spectacles of her admirers. I remember instead the young lads throwing themselves off the Tyne bridges in Newcastle because they had no work.
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thatcher and reagan were cut from the same cloth, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. their pakistani best friend was general zia ul haq. he died much earlier in a plane crash but his legacy continues to dictate pakistan’s future.
“In Pakistan, Margaret Thatcher was best known for supporting General Zia ul Haq’s military dictatorship,” tweeted Time magazine’s Pakistan correspondent Omar Waraich yesterday, referring to the Iron Lady’s anticommunist alliance with the country’s vicious, Islamist dictator. In a speech at a banquet hosted by Zia in 1981, Thatcher praised the general’s “courage and skill” and toasted “the health and happiness of His Excellency”. She made no reference to the need for democracy or elections in the self-styled “Islamic Republic”. More here.