Brexiteers Are The Bastard Children of Margaret Thatcher
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And we are all paying the price for their folly..
Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg are among the most prominent Brexiteers in the United Kingdom today.
And what isn’t talked about enough is the fact that these players are by definition, Thatcher’s children: players who came of age when Britain’s first female prime minister was elected in 1979.
And it is no hyperbole to state that Margaret Thatcher is arguably the most influential (and divisive) political figure in British history.
Some will argue compellingly for the likes of Duke of Wellington for his role in reining in Napoleon Bonaparte; Joseph Chamberlain for taking a clear position on Britain’s imperial expansion in Africa; while others will argue for Winston Churchill, given his heroics during the second world war, when Britain had its back to the wall.
Even for a country which has produced profoundly exceptional figures throughout history, Margaret Thatcher was an outlier.
And no, I am not referring to her gender but to the circumstances of her political rise and subsequent achievements.
Britain, in the 1970s was a basket case.
It was broke, inward looking and on the verge of total collapse.
The Tory grandies — Christopher Soames, Peter Carrington, Ian Gilmour, Francis Pym — figures whose ideas dominated the Tory party and men who were members of the landed gentry, had no solutions to the crippling economic and political problems of the late 1970s.
And nor did the Labour party led by Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
What Britain needed back then was an insurgent and a revolutionary to resuscitate its fortunes and it had one in Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher, as was her wont, wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of her economic, social and political reforms, thus setting the stage for the fights which took place between the government and the unions, with the Tories capitalizing on the division with the unions to implement their neoliberal reforms.
Her complete dominance of Britain did spawn admirers and enemies not only within the Conservatives but…
