[dmix]

She was a bit nationalist towards the latter half of her career but hardly a fascist.

Fascist gets thrown around too liberally.

But Thatcher was far from authoritarian. She was actually fighting against large government authoritarianism when she gained power.

Although she had moments where she used excessive state force against citizens such as:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%80...

[handelaar]

"Far from authoritarian" ?

She put hundreds of thousands of UK citizens under secret service surveillance for the crime of disagreeing with her government's decisions.

I was one of them. Aged sixteen I walked out of our house on the way to school every morning and passed the fake BT engineer changing the tape in the green switch box outside the house next door, reattaching something to our house phone with crocodile clips.

Mail took weeks to arrive because it was intercepted and read en route. I was stopped for questioning at every border point I passed in Europe until I was in my late 20s.

All this because not being a Thatcherite in Britain in the 1980s made us "enemies of the state".

[hp50g]

Yep. I saw this with my own eyes once. I had a disreputable youth in the 1980s which involved trying to steal linesman sets (for phreaking) from those old yellow BT Bedford vans (anyone remember Busby?)

One of them turned out to be a spook wagon. This was in Islington in north London. Really nearly got in deep shit on that one.

People might think you are nuts but its spot on and its worse now than ever.

[herdrick]

Really? I'd take as given that this is happening now, as it's cheap. But back then? Can you link to some evidence of this?

[DanBC]

ECHELON was revealed by Duncan Campbell in 1988.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_(journalist)#E...)

He also wrote a book about the amount of police surveillance going on in the UK.

I hated Thatcher. I wouldn't put the surveillance down to just her. There were plenty of other people involved in making lists and monitoring people. (The building industry would use blacklists of agitators. This was so severe it was one of the drivers for the data protection act, and it was this list that caused the act to be extended to cover non-computerised information too.)

Certainly, it would be odd for people to blame Thatcher for the number of CCTV in the UK now. The UK has about 20% of all the world's CCTV! (I haven't checked this, it was a comment on a Radio 4 news programme so maybe it's nonsense).

[cs02rm0]

Cute story.

[dreamfactory]

She was highly corporatist - which is a hallmark of fascism.

[penny500]

This is like me saying Obama is a collectivist - which is a hallmark of communism.

It makes me ignorant, so let's not be ignorant.

[dreamfactory]

Well there was the collusion between the government, police, and courts during the miners strike and also the use of blacklisting.

Then there's the homophobia (another common strand with the kind of control freaks who are attracted to fascism) - guess who said: "children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay".

Then there was the support of war-criminal, torturer, and undisputed actual-Fascist Pinochet, whom she protected from trial and described as "bringing democracy to Chile". There's a reason they say you can tell a lot about a man from his friends.

A telling detail on the corporatocracy was when her economic advisor, Alan Walters, admitted in an interview that they had deliberately kept unemployment high to drive down wages.

I don't consider her explicitly a Fascist, (my own contrary view is that she was more a massive opportunist and somewhat a political fraud, which might even be amusing at some level if it hadn't involved so many deaths) - but some have sincere reasons to see her as having conducted a kind of fascism-lite. If it walks like a duck...

[dreamfactory]

On reflection for measure and balance, I guess I should also have mentioned her support of apartheid (describing Nelson Mandela as "a terrorist"), and her support of the Khmer Rouge :/

[lostlogin]

Where would you place Blair? I'm unsure what to think of his hidden religious side, but have strong views on his Murdoch ties, Bush pandering and subsequent obfuscating of his role in the Iraq debacle.

[dreamfactory]

In retrospect he looks something like a remixed but straight swap-out for John Major. (Gore Vidal had interesting views on Major.)