The Great Debate … Margaret Thatcher, an enlarger of British freedom … Maggie could be seductive in private conversation one on one, more so as she matured, the strident voice of the public halls giving way to a softer, more seductive style, hand on an arm, intent eye to eye in persuasion. She was afraid of nobody, respecter of no convention she considered archaic. – Reuters / Sir Harold Evans

Dominant Social Theme: Thank goodness for the Iron Lady; she really helped Britain regain its freedom.

Free-Market Analysis: Sir Harold Evans is married to Tina Brown, one of our bête noirs … a fabulously talented writer who long ago turned into a gunslinger for British imperial interests and globalism generally. Brown, editor these days of the Daily Beast and the just-folded print Newsweek, never met a "royal" she couldn't profile fulsomely or a US socialist-democrat she couldn't find a way to praise to the heavens.

Her husband, Sir Harold Evans, a talented, big league publisher, is to be seen as the slightly more conservative and lower profile person of the two. In reality, both Evans and his wife have apparently imbibed the entire noxious brew that has been specially concocted for British upper classes that are supposed to view everyone else as hoi polloi.

These people are very wealthy, very coddled, very witty and very arrogant. They believe they were born to lead and that the people they write for need leadership. Deep down, they believe it is the duty of "normal" people to fight and die for the causes they deem just and to pay taxes to the programs they believe are necessary.

Having Evans write a hagiography of just-departed Margaret Thatcher for Reuters is especially inapt. Evans – and especially his wife – never saw a bit of freedom that they couldn't temporize or a smidgen of free-market thinking that they couldn't criticize.

Reading this rancid evaluation of Thatcher's career, one is reminded that the bankers booted her out of office because she couldn't bring herself to endorse the European Union. That doesn't feature in Evans's cautious appraisal of Thatcher's life, which reads metaphorically speaking like a man composing on keys filled with dynamite.

My immediate and lasting memory of Mrs. Thatcher — Maggie as we called her — is sitting next to her in the late sixties at a dinner table as she scorched a bunch of City of London financial types. … Maggie pounded and pummeled them all by herself for an hour. I can't pretend this is verbatim but it went something like this: "All you people are interested in is moving paper around, making money not things. What are you doing for British industry? When are you going to help business stand up to the unions?"

They murmured, they shuffled, they were outclassed. British elections — six weeks to a vote and no paid television ads — have never been as corrupted by money as much as American, so she was not turning off a potential source of funding as an American candidate would fear to do. Still these were men — all men of course — who were influential and articulate and used to reverence not rebuke.

…The trade unions at the time were busy wreaking havoc on industry … The country was in dreadful shape, fearful and anxious during a winter of discontent in which trade union militants blocked cancer patients getting treatment and garbage piled up in the center of London.

… When she became Prime Minister I was editor of The Times. We backed her a hundred per cent on trade union reforms, on holding the line on pay, especially in the public sector and on advocating more competition in the banking industry, on free trade, on resisting terrorism in Northern Ireland. I told her I thought she moved too slowly against trade union anarchy, but she bided her time and planned well.

She won a famous victory against the coal miners, badly led by a firebrand who took money from Gaddafi, and it was thanks to her stalwart support of Rupert Murdoch, whom she admired as a free-booting entrepreneur , that he was able to win the battle of Wapping which ended the guerilla warfare of the print unions. Margaret Thatcher, whatever the missteps, will take her place in the pantheon of heroes – sorry, heroines – who enlarged British freedom.

You see how Evans defines freedom? The best he can muster is that Thatcher wanted a resurgence of BRITISH industry – the hell with the rest of the world. And as for her other accomplishments, he seems especially impressed with her crushing the unions and urging the mercantilist banking sector to take even more advantage of its privileged position.

Our view of Thatcher – like Ronald Reagan – is a bit more radical than that. It seems to us she really did believe in free markets, less regulation and more trade. And like Reagan, she soon found that her internal convictions were no match for the "controllers" of the position she had attained.

Unlike Reagan, who was shot and then ceased to provide resistance, Thatcher went out on her shield, hewn down by those in the City who could not stand a smidgen of resistance to the European project that was a steppingstone to further globalism.

A modern-day prime minister is supposed to pay lip service to the idea that Britain should leave the EU but in practice he is to do nothing to change Britain's stance on the matter. David Cameron is performing this job splendidly.

As for Thatcher, people like Evans and others far more powerful could not wait to sweep away the paltry dusting of libertarianism that Thatcher had scattered over government and society. She was viciously vilified and compared scandalously to the next towering British politico – Tony Blair.

Blair was everything Thatcher was not: unctuous, scheming, murderous and rapacious – he was exactly the kind of man Cecil Rhodes hoped to cultivate with his Rhodes Scholarships. When Blair was through (and he is far more hated in Britain than Thatcher ever was) there was literally nothing left of Thatcher's legacy but a disgruntled and muddled labor movement.

Today, Britain is involved in wars throughout the world; its banks – especially the Bank of England – are more powerful and corrupt than ever. The globalism that has as its locus the City of London is sowing the globe with chaos, maliciously advocating a variant of pre-World War II National Socialist fascism as the preferred socio-political and economic system.

After Thoughts

Evans writes that Ms. Thatcher "enlarged" freedom in Britain. Funny, we didn't notice.