Maggie the psychopath. Her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free. She was a psychopath whose pernicious influence spread through society, embodying the destructive principle from the top down. As for the ‘kinder, more cohesive face’ that succeeded her, Tony Blair was worse than Thatcher… Britain, like the U.S. and elsewhere, is truly in the death grip of a bunch of toxic psychopaths.
In the last analysis, though, her stock in trade was division. By instinct, inclination and effect she was a polariser. She glorified both individualism and the nation state, but lacked much feeling for the communities and bonds that knit them together. When she spoke, as she often did, about “our people”, she did not mean the people of Britain; she meant people who thought like her and shared her prejudices. She abhorred disorder, decadence and bad behaviour but she was the empress ruler of a process of social and cultural atomism that has fostered all of them, and still does.
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