Biographer Charles Moore said “Europe was Thatcher’s ultimate downfall as The Cabinet were alarmed that Thatcher wanted to turn the issue of Europe over to the British people through a Euro Referendum and a general election at which Europe would have been a central issue.”
Also, revealed for the first time is the manner in which Sir John Major tricked Thatcher into supporting him to be her successor.”
+ Thatcher: Death of a Revolutionary
+ Thatcher on Communism, Morality and Family
+ Thatcher: the Myth of Deregulation. New report debunks the idea that Thatcher deregulated financial services
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Claire Berlinski on “Why Margaret Thatcher Matters“. Especially Today.
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Thatcher Deregulation?
“It is simply untrue that she favored free markets with no regulation at all. Quite the contrary. She was a strong proponent, indeed a passionate proponent, of proper regulation—the kind of regulation that makes free markets function properly.
She was emphatically not an anarchist—and she certainly did not advance the notion that the best state is one without rules or their enforcement. You will note that those who say “Thatcherite deregulation” is to blame never seem to point to a specific deregulatory failure connected to Thatcher.
The laws and regulations she favored were generally good ones and remain good. Only someone who is really not thinking could blame shoddy subprime mortgages and complex credit derivatives on Thatcher: When she came to power, the financial instruments in question had not been invented.
What kind of deregulation did Thatcher promote? She eliminated the foreign exchange controls that had been in place in Britain since the Second World War. She opened the stock market to foreign and domestic traders. This was the essence of “Thatcherite deregulation” in the financial sector.
No one in his or her right mind is seriously suggesting, now, that these reforms were a mistake, and no one is seriously proposing to reverse them. No one ever points to a specific Thatcherite regulatory reform that can be connected to the current crisis, because there wasn’t one. “She promoted greed” is not an intellectually serious argument. Greed has been with us since the Garden of Eden.” —There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters by Claire Berlinski, 2011.
Catholic Critique 