This will be a short diary. I don't have time to write a long one.
I grew up in the south of England, and being born in 1977, for all of my childhood Thatcher was the only prime minister I knew. I remember being weirded out at the age of thirteen at the thought that a man would be prime minister.
I'm a proud Democrat and American citizen now, but I want to give some counterpoint to the gleeful reaction of some commenters in other diaries on Thatcher's death.
Some people think that Thatcher was just like Reagan, and oppose her for that reason. I disagree. Imagine, if you will, a Reagan who was ferociously intelligent. Imagine a woman whose scientific acumen led her to one of Britain's best universities and to research that helped invent soft-serve ice-cream. Imagine the Northern daughter of the owner of two corner stores, so nervous about making it in politics with a looked-down-on accent that she took elocution lessons in order to be accepted. Imagine her embarking in her twenties on a political career, two young children in tow, and fighting her way to the very top of what is still a deeply institutionally sexist political environment.
In the South, too, we saw a different Thatcher to the one that people saw in the North. People down South remembered the Winter of Discontent and the disastrous Callaghan government, when the state of British industrial production was so bad that the IMF was making emergency loans to Britain, there were actual bread lines in the streets, and dead people weren't being buried because undertakers were out on strike. In the miners' strike, we saw venomous apologist for Stalin Arthur Scargill as holding the country to ransom for the right of workers to produce coal at a cost far above what the world market would support, and defending a structure of unions that in the US would have been far to the left of FDR. In Thatcher, we saw a courageous leader who was willing to defend the British residents of the Falkland Islands from foreign invasion when a craven Foreign Office wanted only to talk terms. Her trust of Gorbachev, much more than any efforts by Reagan, helped to thaw out the Cold War and remove from over our heads the daily fear of nuclear annihilation that I still remember. In the business sphere, by privatizing telecommunications, she took a step that greatly improved services for everyone - it used to take over a year for a new phone line to be approved.
I myself benefited deeply from Thatcher's meritocratic inclinations, because as a result of her Assisted Places Scheme, I was able to get an exceptional education, even though my family was nearly penniless at that time.
I'm not excusing, and I do acknowledge, her support of the apartheid government and the Pinochet government, and her desire to quarantine people with HIV. But, I'm sorry to say, in those things she wasn't especially unusual at the time. Kindness and empathy, especially to those she thought of as communists, were absolutely not her strength. But she was determined, brave, opposed to the placid social elitism of British society, and often right when the people around her were wrong. Today, 50% of British people view her legacy positively (34% negatively).
So do not glory in her passing. Without her, Britain might have been a kinder place, but it would have been also less prosperous, less influential, and less open than it is today.