Saturday, December 31, 2011

The Iron Lady - Verdict

The Iron Lady is a disappointing film, but not for all the reasons outlined in John Huxley's column today.

It wasn't merely "revisionism", and the long-term effect of Thatcher on Britain is something on which rational intelligent informed people could disagree. Far from being toned down "Thatcherism" it demonstrated how her downfall within her own party was determined by th excesses to which she took that with the poll tax.

But the film itself spends too long on an interpolated latter life Thatcher, and nowhere near enough on her formative years. For that read Wikipedia.

Interestingly at the time we observed similarities between Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Thatcher, and what they had most in common was a political philosophy derived from a rejection of totalitarianism and all forms of state control. To understand either read Hayek's The Road to Surfdom. The difference is that Fraser never lost his classic "liberalism" whereas thatcher seems to have lost hers - and the difference could be in the difference between the patrician and the grocer's girl fighting class and sexism.

Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

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