At the risk of going off on a tangent, I would dispute that ‘Thatcherism’ was in any way socially conservative. Closing down traditional industries, flogging off council houses, centralising power at number 10, Thatcher was anything but a social conservative. She was a radical.

Economically she was ultra-liberal. I have a lot of sympathy for that (I am a strange, conflicted mixture of social conservatism and economic liberalism) and I think she achieved a great deal. Take privatisation. Many sclerotic state-run industries became economic powerhouses (eg, British Airways, British Telecom) and transformed the British economy permanently for the better. Indeed the rest of the world copied and continues to copy her with much success. (There were of course exceptions, eg, utilities and railways.)

Interestingly, there are also some world-leading British chemical and manufacturing companies which you don’t hear about in the mainstream media (unless you’re sad like me and listen to lots of business programmes on the radio) which were spun off out of the likes of ICI. Thatcherism isn’t all about fat cats and inequality.

Which isn’t to say it was all to the good. A socially more conservative PM would have recognised that you can’t just let the market rip up traditional industries and not expect a massive social fall-out. She was either naïve or just indifferent to that bit.

If she was indifferent, then you might justifiably call her cruel and callous. Personally, I suspect she was more naïve than indifferent. She once expressed regret that charitable giving and volunteering didn’t increase as she cut taxes. Coming from a strict Methodist background, she just assumed that if you got government out of the way, then you’d free up space for people to look after each other. It wasn’t her fault that most of them chose only to look after themselves.

I’m interested by your comments on Capitalism. For me, capitalism is just a fact of life, like gravity. Of course you can *officially* banish market forces, but ask anyone who lived in East Germany, capitalism was at work there alright, albeit preferring those with access to political capital rather than the financial kind.

As for “working towards egalitarianism”: I’d say that ideology’s been responsible for even more damage than Thatcherism!