Back in the 2000s many bloggers used the art of ‘Fisking’ as a way of explaining why a MSM newspaper columnist was wrong. The term emerged in the early 2000s blogosphere and is named after Robert Fisk, a well-known Middle East correspondent for The Independent. Bloggers began doing line-by-line critiques of his articles, quoting passages and then responding to each point. Someone started calling that practice “Fisking,” and the name stuck. Anyway, today I am going to revive the art by critiquing a column from the I Newspaper written by my good friend Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Yasmin and I have been friends for the best part of 25 years, despite the fact we agree on absolutely nothing.
This week, she wrote a column defenestrating the reputation of Margaret Thatcher, who I wrote a biography of last year. I’ve always known Yasmin loathed Thatcher, but I was a little disappointed when she declined an invitation to the book’s launch party last year. My book was far from a hagiography and many people on the Left of politics have told me how much they enjoyed it and that they learned a lot from it.
There is a lot of deliberate blinkeredness when it comes to Margaret Thatcher. There are few shades of grey, as Yasmin’s article this week shows. Instead of actually studying the evidence, prejudice against her masks any intention to see the other side of the argument. This is, to be fair, not unique to Yasmin. I may be regarded by many as one of the keepers of the Thatcher flame. But I am not blind to the fact that in her 11 and a half years as prime minister, she made errors. I mean, who wouldn’t?
I find it asbolsutley fascinating that the psyche of the Left is hell bent on blaming Thatcher for most of the ills afflicting Britain today. She left office 35 years ago, for goodness sake! You have to be 57 to have voted for (or against) her!
So when Yasmin describes her as ‘pitiless’ and the person ‘who broke Britain’, I shake my head in disbelief, not least because she’s buying into the Farage narrative that Britain is actually wholly broken. There are aspects of our country that are indeed broken – our politics, for example, and our public discourse. She can’t be blamed for either of those things, given that one of the reasons for the breakdown in discourse is social media. When she left office, no one had even heard of a thing called “The Internet”.
Anyway, on with the Fisking. My comments are in bold and italics.
Yasmin begins…
I saw Margaret Thatcher in the flesh for the first and last time on 31 January, 2008. It was at a grand Guild Hall dinner celebrating “Great Britons”. Artists, pop stars, Olympians, CEOs, politicians, and financiers mingled graciously. Thatcher, dressed to the nines and then 82, was getting a lifetime achievement award. Ecstatic, beatific faces lit up as she stood up. For her devotees she is Brittania, a saviour of the nation, whose trident and shield symbolised her indomitability.
Personally, I have despised Thatcher since January 1978.
‘Despised’ is a very strong word. It’s the kind of word which if I, as a man, would use against a female left wing politician, I would be held to account for. But this is typical. Dislike isn’t a strong enough word for the Left when it comes to Margaret Thatcher. It has to be more hateful.
Just hours after I had given birth to my son, she declared that people were afraid Britain might be “swamped by people with a different culture”.
I agree these words were clumsy and open to misinterpretation, but she wasn’t wrong, was she? These fears are far worse today. In the late 1970s the National Front was on the rise. She killed it off. It is a fact that when Thatcher was in power, she controlled immigration and the NF disappeared. No words of gratitude from Yasmin on that front.
In her glory years, my animosity intensified as her fundamentalist neoliberalism and punitive policies ripped the fabric of our society. But, escorted to the stage by David Cameron, she seemed frail and vulnerable. I felt a pang of pity. Which she would have hated.
Very true. The worst thing that can happen to a politician is when people pity them or feel sorry for them.
Because she never had any, for the weak, helpless, or needy.
Simply not true. There are countless examples (many detailed in my book MEMORIES OF MARGARET THATCHER) of her displaying acts of personal kindness to people in distress or less well off than herself. Having said that, especially in her early years she played up to her reputation as an Iron Lady, so unless you were prepared to look beneath the surface, it was easy to see her as hard hearted.
Her time in office was defined by arrogance and certitudes, self-belief and recklessness.
This falls into trap of gross generalisation. Name me a successful politician who has never displayed arrogance. This was certainly more evident in her final two years in office, that much I accept and make the same point in my book. Certitudes? She certainly appeared totally sure of herself and her policies, but as Charles Moore reveals in his magnificent biography, there were many moments of doubt and self-doubt. But of course Yasmin won’t have read Moore’s books, preferring instead to rely on her gut instinct, rather than the fully researched facts.
Margaret Thatcher broke Britain.
Er no, she didn’t. If anyone broke Britain in that era it was the trade unions through strikes, Spanish practices and utterly unsustainable pay claims.
The destruction was meticulously planned. The resulting follies, dust, scraps and shards are all still around us.
Easy, prejudiced words to write, but not backed up by the facts, as evidence by the fact that Yasmin doesn’t give any.
As are the get-rich predators who gorged on the deregulated capitalist system and underfunded welfare state.
A bit insulting to the millions of ordinary people who took advantage of the opportunity to become shareholders for the first time. What she calls ‘te deregulated capitalist system’, I would describe as an enterprise economy designed to encourage entrepreneurs to build businesses in an economy which rewarded risk takers, and thereby created economic growth. A concept alien to many on the Left, who seem to forget that it is the tax receipts from the wealthmakers who fund the welfare state.
There is an alternative view. Iain Dale, the conservative journalist and broadcaster, and author of a new biography of the former prime minister, told me: “Margaret Thatcher restored a sense of national pride and renewal after decades of decline. She transformed an economy beset by strikes and inefficient nationalised industries into one which embraced enterprise and entrepreneurship, something which this Government should learn from. There have been only three transformational prime ministers since 1945. [Clement] Attlee, Thatcher and [Tony] Blair. She was a signpost, not a weathervane.”
I do agree that she was steady and consistent and didn’t blow with the wind. Unlike, say, Keir Starmer who U-turns giddily. And several recent Tory leaders who were more flighty than flinty.
Actually, her reputation for not doing U-turns is not as factual as she might like. There are plenty of examples of her bending to her critics.
The public view of her is not what you might think. At the time of her resignation in November 1990, the majority view was that her government had been good for the country, though three in five people said they disliked her. But time passed. Those negative feelings subsided. Eleven years on, in another poll, more people said they found her more inspirational than Blair or the Pope, behind only Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson.
Enthusiasts today include Labour heavyweights. Starmer has praised the iron lady for seeking to drag Britain “out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. In 2024, Rachel Reeves, claimed her generation of women had been inspired by Thatcher. And David Lammy pronounced her “a visionary leader for the UK”. Who needs friends when you have such lovely foes?
Was the last comment really necessary? Margaret Thatcher broke a glass ceiling for women, so any woman would surely recognise the importance of that. My eight year old niece said to me in 1987: “Uncle Iain, can a man be prime minister?” That was the extent of her impact.
Though it was massively discomfiting, I did include Margaret Thatcher in my book, Ladies Who Punch, about females who reshaped the UK. I had to. She was the first elected female leader in the UK and Europe. As Meryl Streep, who played her in a biopic, acknowledged: “To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class-bound and gender-phobic as it was… was a formidable achievement.” And her feminine, magnetic forcefield awed many, including France’s François Mitterrand who famously declared, “She had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. But writing the chapter only rekindled my anti-Thatcher passions. I blame her for the state we’re in.
Of course you do. Right, let’s get into the serious rebuttal.
On this charge sheet I consider six items. There are more. First, the privatisation project. That did, admittedly, lead to modernisation and increased efficiency in the telecom industries.
Thank the Lord for small mercies for that small piece of recognition. But it wasn’t just BT. It was ABP, Britoil, National Freight, British Airways, Amersham International. British Airports Authority, British Aerospace, BNFL, British Waterways, Cable & Wireless… I could go on, but you get the picture. No one would suggest renationalising any of these privatisations.
But in most other sectors it was a disaster. Remember what that did to the railways.
Er, Margaret Thatcher never touched the railways. In fact, she rejected railway privatisation. It was John Major who privatised the railways. Furthermore, the Thatcher government doubled the rate of subsidies to the railways in the 1980s to the 1970s. That’s what she did to the railways.
And water. Many years of neglect and profiteering since has caused the avoidable pollution of our waterways. This is a real problem now. Two weeks ago, 30,000 people in Sussex and Kent had no water for almost a week. South East Water, the company responsible, issued the same old apologies and excuses.
This is far more complicated that Yasmin seems to think. The water industry was privatised primarily because the state could no longer afford to pay for the investment needed to update a Victorian system of waterpipes and sewers. The only way they could be repaired was to accept private sector investment. In the first decade of privatisation this worked like a dream. It was only when companies like the Australian banl McQuarrie started buying up water companies that things changed and the asset stripping and profiteering began. The Blair government could easily have given the regulator OFWAT new powers to stop what was happening in plain sight, but chose not to. As did the coalition and ensuing Conservative governments. This was a major failing of public policy, but it wasn’t privatisation that was the issue, it was the system of regulation.
Starmer has called the situation “totally unacceptable” and wants the water regulator Ofwat to review the company’s
licence. Yawn. Nothing can be done because the original deals conspicuously favoured the buyers and made it hard to hold them accountable. Energy companies are not dissimilar. Our money is going into the deep pockets of investors who can never have enough.
This is not capitalism as we once knew it. Before Thatcher, all political parties were committed to a balanced economy in which the NHS worked, industry and commerce thrived, and people had proper jobs, as well as affordable homes. National pride was built on real foundations – not imagined superiority.
Talk about looking back on the 1960s and 1970s through rose tinted glasses. There was no “balanced economy”. Mass unemployment was masked by industries which were only still in existence due to mass taxpayer funded subsidies, and many of them (Steel, coal, motor) had been driven into the ground by strikes, work to rule and general industrial blackmail. And to balance that, weak management let it all happen, both in the public and private sectors.
Second, the social housing shortage. The sale of council houses to tenants was a pivotal Thatcher strategy which created a whole new strata of homeowners and a swell of Tory supporting working-class voters. A good number of the purchased properties were then offloaded by the buyers at market prices. Fair enough, you might think. But these homes were part of the nation’s resources for people in need. Local authorities were effectively forbidden from replacing the stock. And so social housing shortages became an unsolvable crisis.
The sale of council houses was one of the greatest achievements of the Thatcher government, and even today, there are many thousands of families who remain grateful to her for the opportunity to own their own homes. Yes, it was a mistake not to allow new social housing to be built, and there is indeed a long-term overhang from this. But 35 years on, it remains a fact that Labour had 13 years in government to reverse this. And that government built fewer council houses than ever.
That too was intentional. Today’s frustrated homeseekers never impugn the architects of the current crisis. They blame migrants or each other when they should blame Thatcher.
Had we not had such high levels of immigration in recent years, and had we not had government that failed to build the infrastructure to cope with the extra numbers, things might be different. But that cannot be laid at the door of Margaret Thatcher, or at least most of it can’t.
Third, workers’ rights. Thatcher’s war on unions was relentless. Right-wing media outlets were her mercenaries. Union action was described as the “British disease”.
Miners had gone on strike in 1972 and 1974, and got what they demanded. Thatcher became the Tory leader and won the 1979 election. The miners’ strike between 1984 and 1985 gave her the opportunity to crush upstart trade unions and demonstrate her indomitability. Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, cared about the workers, but did not call a national ballot which would have conferred legitimacy on the strike. That was tactically injudicious. The strikers were violently suppressed. And impoverished. It was a dark chapter in British history.
Well that gave me a good laugh. Arthur Scargill “cared about the workers”. What a risible thing to say. The only thing Scargill cared about was using his members to overthrow the Thatcher government. His failure to call a national ballot was not just “tactically injudicious”, it divided his own workers down the middle. Let’s also remember that it wasn’t Thatcher who closed the most pits because they were uneconomic. It was Harold Wilson. In the 11 years of the Wilson and then Wilson/Callaghan governments 285 pits were closed. Between 1979 and 1984 the Thatcher government closed 47 pits. During the 11 years of the Thatcher government, 120 pits were closed. I rest my case.
In 1984, Orgreave, a mining town near Sheffield, experienced some of the worst clashes ever in British industrial history. Picketers were charged with riot and disorder – crimes punishable by life imprisonment. Evidence given by the police was deemed unreliable and the trials collapsed. An inquiry is continuing today.
Some past union bureaucrats overreached their roles and created chaos. That was self-defeating. They gave union-bashing media outlets the opportunity to turn public opinion against unionised workers. Thankfully, a new generation of union leaders – Mick Lynch, for example, and Sharon Graham of Unite – have regained respect. But union membership is still low. Zero-hour contracts, food banks and depleted towns are Thatcher’s legacies.
Fact. There were no foodbanks in Thatcher’s Britain. They started under Blair in 2000, ten years after Thatcher left office. Zero hours contracts didn’t really exist under Margaret Thatcher. They started becoming increasingly used in the 2000s under the then Labour government, but only 0.6% of employees were on them. In 2025 that figure had risen to 3 per cent. Yet from the way the Left talk, you’d imagine most people were on them. And let’s remember, many people like them because of their flexibility – students, single mothers, carers. And as for depleted towns? I am trying to fathom why the state of our high streets in 2025 is down to Margaret Thatcher. I still can’t work that one out.
Fourth, we can add the brutal curtailment of manufacturing sector – once the mainstay of the country. That was economic and societal vandalism. The collective spirit of factory workers of all backgrounds was shattered. They became poorer, more segregated.
Again, a myth. As I have argued above, some of these heavy industries were masters of their own decline. In 1979 we were the 6th or 7th largest manufacturing country in the world. In 1990 we were the 7th or 8th, so declining one place in the league table. Most people think we have plummeted since then, but this is not true. We remain the 11th largest manufacturing nation in the world by both output and value, but we have been overtaken by South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. We are one place below France.
Expansive social bonds were anathema to this PM. Remember her words: “Too many children and people have been given to understand, ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’, or, ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the government must house me!’, and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves”.
At least Yasmin has the decency to give the full quote. And in doing so demonstrates that Margaret Thatcher had a very good point, which has been utterly warped by her critics.
On to the fifth indictment. Progressive movements for equality and justice were besieged by Thatcher and her devotees. LGBT+ rights have now been mainstreamed. But in 1988, Section 28 in the Local Government Act banned the “promotion of homosexuality”.
“Besieged”, eh? Again, that gave me a good laugh. All Yasmin can do is quote one example to prove a massive allegation. I make no defence of Section 28, but Charles Moore argues in his biography that Thatcher was never personally in favour of it, but felt she owed a favour to its proponent, Dame Jill Knight. Perhaps Yasmin didn’t know that Margaret Thatcher was one of a handful of Tory MPs to vote for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.
Sixth, white nationalism. Thatcher’s exaltation of Britain’s imperial history was a ploy and a cover. It knowingly excluded Brits of colour with roots in the old colonies and duped patriots. For example, in September 1988, in a speech in Bruges, she said this: “From our perspective today surely what strikes us most is our common experience. For instance, the story of how Europeans explored and colonised — and yes, without apology — civilised much of the world is an extraordinary tale of talent, skill and courage.” Such evocations thrilled nostalgic natives. Distracted by Rule Britannia fantasies, they didn’t notice the country’s assets were being gobbled up by foreign-owned companies.
Oh dear. This is just a reiteration of the Left wing narrative that the British Empire was all bad and there was nothing positive about it at all. Yasmin’s phrase ‘white nationalism’ says it all. One of her first foreign policy achievements was the Lancaster House agreement bringing black majority rule to Zimbabwe. She allowed Lord Carrington to get on with it, but the achievement was in great part hers. Yasmin will deny this to her dying day, but in my book I detail how Margaret Thatcher was pivotal in helping bring about an end to Apartheid. It’s the one chapter I really wish Yasmin would read. Nelson Mandela also thanked her for assisting in his release, something Yasmin will presumably never acknowledge because it doesn’t suit the narrative.
In 1989, the late Hugo Young, an astute political observer wrote One of Us, a deeply researched biography of Thatcher, her upbringing, her domestic life, her mind, her prejudices, her insights and obstinacies, her successes and failures. It ends with these lines: “She had done so much. She was the scourge, the aversion therapist, the creative counterforce. But the nation remained the same nation. She succeeded in the end because she was not one of us. And she went for the same reason.”
Several close colleagues concluded she had to go, because she had alienated too many. While her acolytes mourned her departure, others felt, as do I, that our first female PM had damaged too many people and broke the nation she claimed to love. Under her, the United Kingdom felt disunited and unequal, its peoples hopelessly divided.
This conclusion is seen through the prism of equality being the be all and end all, which it undoubtedly is for those on the Left. For those of us on the right, equality of opportunity is far more important than equality of outcome. And there can be no doubt that she offered millions of people huge opportunities.
This is not an academic exercise looking at the distant past. An honest reckoning with the Thatcher era is necessary if the country is to be restored and renewed. Will the Labour Government find the courage to do that? Can it free us from her legacy and open up the future?
An honest reckoning is indeed, what is called for. I think I achieved that in my book, but I am afraid Yasmin does not achieve that in her article. Those with closed minds on a particular issue rarely can.
But Yasmin, I still love you and you’re aq great, loyal friend!
You can buy my biography of Margaret Thatcher HERE.
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