Source: The Economist– Former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

“ONLY a handful of peacetime politicians can claim to have changed the world. Margaret Thatcher was one. She transformed not just her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Her enthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingness to stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “-ism”.

The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom—odd, since as a prim, upwardly mobile striver, she was in some ways the embodiment of conservatism. She thought nations could become great only if individuals were set free. Unlike Churchill’s famous pudding, her struggles had a theme: the right of individuals to run their own lives, as free as possible from micromanagement by the state…

From The Economist

“Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the controversial “Iron Lady” who shaped a generation of British politics, died following a stroke on Monday at the age of 87.

Al Jazeera’s Rob Matheson reports.

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Source:Al Jazeera– Vladimir Putin: President of the Russian Federation, speaking about the death of United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

From Al Jazeera 

If your definition of a Conservative is someone who believes in conserving the status-quo, then that wasn’t Margaret Thatcher. And I don’t say that to be insulting but to explain the situation and country that she inherited when she became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979 and the country that she wanted Britain to become in the future.

If you look at the developed countries in the West and their economies when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Britain had one of the worst. High unemployment, high interest rates, inflation, failing state-owned industries, poverty, rising deficits and debt. America that was going through the Great Deflation in the late 1970s, at least had solid economic and job growth and was moving forward. Britain looked like failed democratic socialist state that needed to be rebuilt.

Thatcher wanted Britain to become one of the leaders of the developed world again, if not the entire world and to do that they had to become an economic power. She was a Conservative, obviously, so she believed the best way to do that was to put people back to work and get the U.K. Government out of the economy and no longer running businesses in the country like airlines, banking, energy, and even transportation and put the power of the country into the hands of the people. And tell who were living off the British welfare state that they had to go to work and manage their own lives, because there were going to be real limits as far as how long Brits could live off of the state.

If your idea of a Conservative is someone who believes in conserving and defending freedom and that freedom is worth fighting for and even dying for, then I believe Margaret Thatcher is probably the greatest Conservative that Britain has ever had and one of the best Conservatives the world has ever had. Because she proved that socialism doesn’t work, at least in the sense that it can’t run people’s lives for them. That individual freedom and choice is actually needed because the government can’t take care of everybody for them. So in that sense Maggie Thatcher will always be missed by people who believe in individual freedom and responsibility.