A N Wilson: She's hailed as this country's saviour. So why, 30 years on, do the Left still hate Maggie so?
[A N Wilson writes for the Daily Mail.]
Want to know what Britain would be like if ruled by extreme Left-wingers? Then you would only have had to visit Liverpool while Derek Hatton was deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the early Eighties.
He was expelled from the Labour Party as a member of Militant Tendency, but not before turning Liverpool, once the proud port of the mightiest empire in the world, into a bankrupted, slum-ridden, crimeridden dump.
And Margaret Thatcher? Well, ask any working-class person who, during her premiership, was suddenly able to buy their own council house.
Ask the liberated people of the Falkland Islands. Ask the peoples of Eastern Europe. They would say she was undoubtedly the greatest political leader Britain had after Winston Churchill.
Yet Hatton has delivered a verdict on Margaret Thatcher which reflects his own repulsive character far more than it tells us anything about her.
'The only problem I've got with her, with her mother, is that she never believed in abortion . . . It's a shame she was born,' he told a newspaper in Cyprus.
The image is a nasty one, isn't it? What is it about Margaret Thatcher which brings out not merely passionate political disagreement, but sheer nastiness of this kind from her Left-wing enemies?
Derek Hatton, and many on the Left, would like to believe it is because she, with her fervent belief in the free market, destroyed what was left of the dear old Britain we all loved.
'She more than anyone destroyed the world we knew in England,' he said.
'And she created a situation which actually produced the financial problems we have now. She is responsible for the current mess.'
So, we are to forget more than a decade in which Gordon Brown has been plundering pension funds and veering from a position of supposed 'prudence' to one where he wants to bail out any dud bank which calls for his help.
Are we to forget, too, the disastrous lending policies of U.S. mortgage companies? Are we to forget the scarcely glorious years of Norman Lamont's Chancellorship of the Exchequer under John Major when the Tory Party stubbornly clung to membership of the ERM - something Margaret Thatcher deplored from the beginning?
The person we are to blame for the downturn in the world economy, apparently, is a little old lady aged 84...
Read entire article at Daily Mail (UK)
Want to know what Britain would be like if ruled by extreme Left-wingers? Then you would only have had to visit Liverpool while Derek Hatton was deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the early Eighties.
He was expelled from the Labour Party as a member of Militant Tendency, but not before turning Liverpool, once the proud port of the mightiest empire in the world, into a bankrupted, slum-ridden, crimeridden dump.
And Margaret Thatcher? Well, ask any working-class person who, during her premiership, was suddenly able to buy their own council house.
Ask the liberated people of the Falkland Islands. Ask the peoples of Eastern Europe. They would say she was undoubtedly the greatest political leader Britain had after Winston Churchill.
Yet Hatton has delivered a verdict on Margaret Thatcher which reflects his own repulsive character far more than it tells us anything about her.
'The only problem I've got with her, with her mother, is that she never believed in abortion . . . It's a shame she was born,' he told a newspaper in Cyprus.
The image is a nasty one, isn't it? What is it about Margaret Thatcher which brings out not merely passionate political disagreement, but sheer nastiness of this kind from her Left-wing enemies?
Derek Hatton, and many on the Left, would like to believe it is because she, with her fervent belief in the free market, destroyed what was left of the dear old Britain we all loved.
'She more than anyone destroyed the world we knew in England,' he said.
'And she created a situation which actually produced the financial problems we have now. She is responsible for the current mess.'
So, we are to forget more than a decade in which Gordon Brown has been plundering pension funds and veering from a position of supposed 'prudence' to one where he wants to bail out any dud bank which calls for his help.
Are we to forget, too, the disastrous lending policies of U.S. mortgage companies? Are we to forget the scarcely glorious years of Norman Lamont's Chancellorship of the Exchequer under John Major when the Tory Party stubbornly clung to membership of the ERM - something Margaret Thatcher deplored from the beginning?
The person we are to blame for the downturn in the world economy, apparently, is a little old lady aged 84...