Word: thatcherism
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When Tony Blair was elected to Britain's House of Commons in 1983, he was just 30, the Labour Party's youngest M.P. Labour had just fought and lost a disastrous election campaign on a far-left platform, and Margaret Thatcher, fresh from her victory in the Falklands War, was in her pomp. The opposition to Thatcher was limited to a few ancient warhorses and a handful of bright young things. Blair, boyish Blair, quickly became one of the best of the breed...
...historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the 300th Anniversary University professor, agreed. “Harvard’s elongated semester contrasts starkly with those of other research universities,” she wrote in an e-mailed statement. “I certainly wouldn’t oppose a change...
...Thatcher first. Her political party may have been called Conservative, but she was in truth one of the most radical leaders Britain has ever had. Thatcher could not abide the cozy and mildly corrupt arrangements that - as she saw it - had condemned post-1945 Britain to a managed decline, and was determined to blow them up. As one of her more waspish M.P.s once said, Thatcher could not see an institution without "hitting it with her handbag." But she never understood that once you removed the need to show deference to any institution - the BBC, the labor unions, the professions...
...here's the uncomfortable truth. Britain needed both Thatcher and Diana. Its old institutions were indeed rotten; its disdain for trade, for market values, was indeed debilitating, and condemned generations of Britons to stunted life chances. Britain's traditional masculine values of the stiff upper lip and "mustn't grumble" did indeed breed emotional cripples, unable to appreciate the heights - or handle the depths - of human experience...
...only have been men; would have done no more in captivity than suck on a pipe while dressed in a peacoat; would have just muttered, "Hello sir, glad to be back," when released, was not in most ways a better place than the insanely meritocratic, undeferential, deinstitutionalized Britain that Thatcher and Princess Diana unleashed. Every so often, however, Britons should be allowed to look back at that older nation - and mourn its passing...