Thatcher was allied to Reagan, but never kowtowed to the USA

The Falkland Islands.

Grenada.

Supporting the right to first use of nuclear weapons.

Repelling Iraq from Kuwait.

On all of these, Thatcher disagreed with the US President of the day.

Why?

It was principle.

Thatcher week and then some

It's been huge in the UK.  Paeans on one side, hatred on the other.  So much to read, but today's bits are

- City AM editor Alastair Heath on how the left are wrong that Thatcher's policies led to the banking crisis and as an acolyte of Hayek, she would have disapproved of the protection from moral hazard presented by the pre-crisis regulatory and monetary policy environment (and the post-crisis bailouts).

- People are organising "Thatcher death parties" which, of course, she would say is their fundamental right.  Reminding us all that to even discuss such a thing for a dead leader in the former Soviet bloc would be to risk   the secret police having one, for you, without so much laughter.  She might have wondered if they think their children and grandchildren would be proud of them, and who else they would hold such a party for, but finally that it says more of them than of her.  Highlighted is one Romany Blythe, a drama teacher who is organising a death party saying "people danced when Hitler died" and who proudly flies the red flag.

Think the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust might invite this vapid empty head to meet some people who can tell her what Hitler was like.  She's prove beyond doubt that Thatcher's biggest mistake was not to privatise education.

- The Adam Smith Institute take on current popular UK leftwing pinup Owen Jones on "something called facts", which as a child of communist parents Jones finds get in the way of a good bashing of capitalism.

Meanwhile...

Here is the intellectual depth of most of the hatred of Thatcher

Meanwhile, George Galloway, sympathiser of Saddam Hussein, supporter of "accepting" the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who said the Syrian people are "lucky" to have Bashar Assad as their leader (and who calls out Western intervention wherever he finds it, but is curiously silent about Russia's intervention in Syria, has done one better.

He now sympathises with North Korea with its "innocent and pristine" culture.... of locking up children as political prisoners for the sins of their family.   Of course he still trots out the North Korean line that the USA started the Korean War, a piece of propaganda disproved by the opening of the Soviet archives and even more recently by a few Chinese academic pronouncements.

- Christine Lagarde and the IMF warn against what monetary policy retard Russel Norman is proposing.  Money printing is creating a timebomb (City AM) warning it will be hard to reverse these policies when it is needed without there being a profound market reaction (i.e. bursting bubble)

British politics changed this week - principles are being discussed

Having lived only in the UK and New Zealand, I've witnessed only a few passings of political leaders.  In the UK,  I barely missed Ted Heath and James Callaghan's passing.  In NZ, I recall the passing of Rob Muldoon and David Lange, oh and Bill Rowling (truly a footnote I barely recall).

None have been more than a fraction of the influence that Margaret Thatcher has had on the world, and because she was driven first and foremost by principle and a commitment visceral belief in freedom and resistance to communism.

The more there is of her, the more it is abundantly clear that she turned the tide of history for the UK, and that the left, with its faux compassion and peculiar attachment to central planning, only wishes it could do the same in reverse.

The media coverage of her has been wall to wall, and there is no lack of writing for and against her, but what really counts is the level of discussion.  Conservative Home is perhaps the best place to find links to much of that coverage, positive and negative.

Perhaps the most poignant point made of her yesterday was in the House of Lords. Lord Tebbit, who left Parliament in 1987 for family reasons, regretted his retirement from politics saying "I left her, I fear, at the mercy of her friends. That I do regret".   Men, and they all were, who will themselves be footnotes in history, floored a giant.  Yes, because she made one big mistake, but none would get her to change that through principle, but for popularity.  She wasn't going to have that.

Time after time, backbench Conservative MPs have paid testimony to her out of principle. Those who opposed her have shown themselves up for what they are.  Socialists who think they know how to spend other people's money, whose compassion is only shown by their belief in spending other people's money, and whose decade after decade of caricature have been shown up for being false.

Portrayal of Thatcher as a warmongerer, for taking on the invasion of the Falklands by a fascist military dictatorship is simply churlish.  To say she supported apartheid has been thoroughly shouted down, because she considered those fighting it to be no angels either.  The claims that what she did "caused the ills of today" are treated as laughable, 23 years later.  Memories of rubbish piling up in the streets, blackouts and strikes shutting down the economy, and limits on foreign currency purchases, cause some of the young to notice how far we have come.  Few want to go back to a phone monopoly that took weeks to supply a new phone.

Finally, the caricature of her as a predatory heartless hater of the poor is shown to be just that - the creation of leftwing spin that could not confront her willingness to cut the blood supply of dying industries, that was draining the life from the living.  She didn't cut the welfare state, she didn't privatise the NHS and nobody could accuse her of withdrawing state support for the poor.  She was a conservative, not a libertarian.  She believed the welfare state existed to cover people when they had bad fortune, to give them what they needed before they found or created a new opportunity.  The left simply wanted all of these people to be forever dependent on the state, and the unions that destroyed businesses by demanding pay rises of 20-30% every year.

"Divisive" Thatcher won three elections in a row, with landslides, whereas the 1970s were plagued with governments of tiny majorities and a short run coalition.  Indeed the late 1970s were plagued with militant union strikes under the Labour Party, as the unions thought Callaghan to be too moderate, as what they wanted was Soviet style socialism (don't believe me? Google "Arthur Scargill and Lenin").  

There were 605,000 miners in 1960, 289,000 in 1970, 235,200 by 1979 and 62,000 in 1990.  Far more lost their jobs under Harold Wilson than under Thatcher.  Manufacturing production rose 7.5% between 1979 and 1990, smashing the lie that she destroyed industrial production.  What did happen was that the services sector took off, shrinking manufacturing as a proportion of GDP.  

What shines above it all were her principles, and these are like a shining light in today's politics of spin, compromise and polls... they are worth remembering.

Margaret Thatcher : The not so libertarian PM who stopped the socialist slide

I was young when I first heard of Margaret Thatcher, and having a few relatives who were socialists, I wasn't fond of her at the time, although she was a curious figure, as I hadn't ever seen a political leader who was a woman.  Certainly the mainstream media in New Zealand and most of my teachers held her in some degree of scorn.  However, I learned better, one could tell from so many of those who opposed her, what she was made of - courage.  Courage to take difficult decisions that caused much short term pain, for long term gain.

She was courageous, and it was difficult to be neutral between her and a tinpot military dictator seeking to take some islands full of hard working farmers and fishermen, and then difficult to side with a communist mining union, that used violence against those willing to turn against them.   I became warmer towards her over time, as her opponents increasingly looked like control freaks, or deniers of economics, and she looked ever braver as time went on.

For there was, at the time, a stark choice.  Margaret Thatcher, against those who thought they knew best how to run businesses, grow the economy and provide people with a living.  In 1983, Labour's Michael Foot tried to sell neutrality in the Cold War, unilateral nuclear disarmament, much higher taxes, nationalisation of major industries, withdrawal from the European Economic Community (to create a fortress Europe).  It nearly came third in the popular vote as it opposed fighting for the Falklands and supported unions that openly sympathised with the Soviet Union.

Margaret Thatcher against those who taught the politics of envy, the politics of moral relativism, and those who believed fervently in class warfare.  Margaret Thatcher against those who thought that the UK should be neutral in the Cold War, as if neutrality against totalitarianism was the moral highground.   Ken Livingstone was one of those who embraced the authoritarian left, and continues to crawl in the gutter.

She was no libertarian, but in the equation of freedom for me, she moved two out of three in the right direction, and the black marks she left on freedom do not mean she deserves the opprobrium her death is now bringing from the simple minded and the statists who despise her. For none of them have the slightest interest in individual freedom.  Indeed, the reason she stirred up such venality is because she argued on principle - short term populism was not her game.

That in itself, is rare in politics today.