She shamed the Left and made them redundant. No wonder they hate her.

I am indebted to commenter Sodit at the Telegraph for his excellent summary (below) of Margaret Thatcher's brilliant career as Prime Minister of all the people of the United Kingdom.

Margaret Thatcher was this country's greatest peace-time Prime Minister of modern times. To call a Conservative a Thatcherite is to pay him or her the greatest possible compliment, political and personal. David Cameron is no Thatcherite.

She was removed from office against the will of the majority of the British people by a cabal of fanatic Europhiles whom she defied for as long as she could. They were and remain a vainglorious, shameful and shabby gang. Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine, not to mention the egregious Kenneth Clarke, could not hold a candle to her politically, much less as persons of courage, integrity and principle.

"The left hate Mrs. T. because she blew the gaff on their big lie. Their big lie is that they desire is a society in which everyone gets their fair share. They don’t. They want a society where insiders prosper at the expense of outsiders. 

Mrs. T. on the other hand was a meritocrat. She wanted the marketplace to be as unrigged as possible so that everyone had a fair go. She started reforming the country to remove restrictive practices, and government and private monopolies/oligopolies. In that sense she was, ironically, a Leninist, attacking vested interests wherever she found them. By doing this she became hated by all who benefited from restrictive practices, be they the Tory toffs (who eventually got rid of her), the trades unions, or even local government. 

She broke the cartel that ran the City, which you don’t hear socialists whining about for some reason. Well I haven’t heard them do it, ever, in the last 26 years. She ended solicitors’ monopoly on conveyancing, another achievement of hers that the left fail to mention, ever. It was her government who really got to grips with hospital consultants using NHS facilities for free when treating their private patients - the left are curiously quiet about that too. 

However, the left never cease to whine like an RB211 [remember those?] when it comes to trades union reform. There is a myth that Mrs. T. was anti trades unions. Again, it is not true. She was quite happy for trades unions to engage in legitimate trades union activities... that is, those that relate to representing the workforce to their management, and negotiating on the workforce’s behalf with management. When the steel workers went on strike in 1980, she stood back and declared that the government was not going to get involved (no beer and sandwiches at No. 10), and that management and unions had to sort out a settlement. 

She objected to trades unions engaging in abusive activities, such as threatening individual workers’ jobs (as with the closed shop), bullying and intimidation (both in the workplace and on the picket line), and picketing related industries (so workers who were not part of the dispute couldn’t earn their living). As I recall, my union the EETPU had no particular quarrel with Mrs. T.’s government. 

In this she championed the individual against the big battalions (something the left claim to do, but in fact they do the exact opposite). She wanted workers to be able to go to work and earn good money for the benefit of their families, rather than being laid off repeatedly because Red Robbo had staged another politically inspired strike in the body shop of British Leyland Motors, and the entire supply chain had had to shut down. 

She broke the monopoly that the huge NHS had on care of the elderly (for example) allowing the likes of Duncan Bannatyne to build his purpose built care homes, each room with an en-suite bathroom (what NHS ward had those?); and the monopoly which the BBC had on programme production (allowing the likes of Griff Rhys-Jones & Mel Smith and Jarvis & Ayres to create media production companies). Funnily enough we don’t hear much mention from the left about those either. 

The left hate her because she was the champion of the low paid. In the 23 years since the miners’ strike I have yet to hear an explanation of why the standard of living of the lowest paid in the country should have to be depressed to keep more highly paid miners in jobs where it was impossible for them to be economic. Why should the cleaner, the dustman, the security guard have to pay more in tax, so that a miner can toil in a pit with insurmountable geological problems? 

She sold off council houses on the cheap: redistribution of wealth on a massive scale, a policy that put the Labour party to shame. Labour’s response? They opposed it tooth and nail, for although the Labour party claim to want to better the lot of the poor, in reality they despise them, and think that they should live in homes that they cannot customise to suit their own needs; with front doors that are pillar box red, sky blue or Sahara yellow; and for which they should be pathetically grateful to their rulers in government. 

She aggressively raised the tax-free threshold, taking the poorest in society out of the income tax net altogether (as opposed to Gordon Brown who introduced a 10% rate of tax to keep them in). She introduced the PEP allowing those of modest means the ability to invest tax free, so that they could accumulate capital, imposing a limit so that the rich couldn’t abuse the scheme (a scheme which Gordon Brown changed into the stocks and shares ISA which has no practical benefit for basic rate taxpayers, but which still gives a tax break to higher rate ones – I wonder why a Labour government did that?). 

Although she was advised to tax pension funds, she chose not to, knowing that people rely on these savings in their declining years. She actually cared about the situation that faced individuals in old age (unlike the party who pretend to care, but whose mask slipped when they chose to destroy the pension system in the full knowledge of what they were doing). 

The Labour party (so called although they stopped representing the interests of labour over 30 years ago), its acolytes and its apologists hate her because she threatened to make the Labour party irrelevant. She lowered the ladder so that those at the bottom could get on by their own efforts. The Labour party requires that there be a bipolar society of “haves” and “have nots” with a large gap between them to justify its very existence. Without this condition there is no role for a party that claims to be the tribune of the poor and the disadvantaged. It is no coincidence that in the 13 years of a Labour government social mobility declined, Labour were pulling up the ladder."