The body is gone, but you can still smell her...

Thatcher was a 'conviction' politician, but her conviction was based on the error that everyone else was just like her, but lacked her willpower. She began as a middle-class grocer's daughter in the east Midlands and  worked her way up the social ladder by hard work, perseverance and luck, she became a research chemist who worked on whippy ice cream (a 99 = iced Thatcherism) and then a barrister as she forayed into politics.
'There is no such thing as society,' she later quipped, to the outrage of the communitarian left.

This was a woman of iron will who was well networked. She had middle class upbringing. She married a wealthy businessman. She conveniently forgot these elements as she worked through her philosophy of personal industry and force-fed it to the British public in the 1980s. To Thatcher, it was only a lack of willpower that prevented mining towns from recasting themselves as hubs of entrepreneurship. This is the logic of a well-connected and highly mobile woman.

The Conservatives were voted in in '79 much the same way they were (albeit with the Liberals) in 2010 - on a promise to sort out the economy. And sort it out they did, as the hagiographers keep telling us. Catastrophic unbalancing of the economy would be another way of putting it. Scrapping industry because we can't compete with the Germans is nothing to be lauded. What filled the gap was the beginning of the pain: 1986's Big Bang, which revivified the City of London, helped keep the GDP figures handsome:

Unfortunately, it also provided a crack pipe for Westminster to smoke itself into the belief that there would be 'no return to boom and bust'. A 'shot in the arm', as the Americans would say, which kills the legs is no cure at all.

Thatcher's death gives us a glimpse of what is interesting in people's attitudes towards society. That she 'had to take on the unions', 'sort out the national debt', 'get inflation down' possesses the status of myth for the winners of Thatcher's policies. For the losers - those whom Thatcher believed lacked the willpower to be a part of her Britain - there was increasing meaninglessness, increasing poverty and increasing shame: in the North, Midlands and the West; in Scotland; in Wales; in Northern Ireland.

Thatcherism, for all its divisiveness, gave way to something much worse: Blairism. Blairism shared Thatcherism's credo of greed (they were intensely comfortable with people getting filthy rich), ramped up surveillance, tried to re-engineer the ethnic make-up of the country in a spectacular piece of gerrymandering the demos, but went to war dishonestly with Iraq, and then laughed off what was basically a war crime. Thatcher was an arrogant prig. Blair an insufferable eel.

Thatcher is dead, but her legacy is alive.

BBC: Should Britain let go of London

Link.

Britain - a call centre for London. London - a piece of 'real estate' for the global rich. It isn't healthy and it isn't good. It feasts on the nation. Like a vampire, it sucks the blood; like a zombie, it eats the brains. We at Burning Pyre believe that the provincialisation of the nation outside of the capital is the price to be paid for the destruction of industry, but better that than the collapse of the UK, thought the Tories in the 80s. It has a certain logic to it, but of course it's proved decisive to the growth of nationalism in Scotland and Wales.

The question is, how long before the regions bring a motion to Parliament to rename London Transylvania?

ONS report on regional economics here (March 2013).