George Rebane
Lady Margaret Thatcher was a world leader who warmed the cockles of my own and many a heart. With Ronald Reagan she was instrumental in bringing the USSR down to a soft landing. She also created enormous and beneficial change for Great Britain that had been on a dreadful socialist slide to oblivion since the end of WW2. But to accomplish all that she had to literally start at her country’s nadir. A tribute to her in the 8apr13 WSJ starts with –
In that dreary winter of 1979, the piles of uncollected trash in London’s Finsbury Park seemed to stretch for miles. The garbagemen were on strike. So too, at one time or another, were hospital workers, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, railwaymen. Also gravediggers: In Liverpool, corpses had to be warehoused as they awaited burial—yet another long queue that socialist Britain had arranged for its patient masses.
This was the “Winter of Discontent,” when Great Britain came about as close to economic collapse as at nearly any point in its peacetime history, and it was the country Margaret Thatcher inherited when, on May 3, she defeated the Labour government of James Callaghan to become Prime Minister—the first woman in the office and 49th in a line that includes some of the greatest figures of Western civilization: Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, the Duke of Wellington, William Pitt the Younger.
Thank you Lady Margaret and may you rest in peace.
[Addendum] One of the greatest living historians, Paul Johnson, notes that ‘Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman
of such consequence.” His essay on Lady Margaret includes a more comprehensive perspective on her accomplishment, especially how she managed to push through policies that cured her country of what was then known as the ‘English disease’ – rampant socialism and “over-weening trade-union power” – and its impact on a once great country.
rebanesruminations.com 
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