The death at a great age of Margaret Hilda Thatcher should provide the British people with a perfect opportunity to draw a line in the sand between the Iron’s Lady’s ruthless neo-fascism and the enlightened forms of government which, by some grace of God, might succeed the interregnum represented by the clueless and weak caretaker David Cameron. I am not optimistic.

Thatcher’s greatest crime was to transfer to the public consciousness her own entrenched hatred for the mores of decent society, for individualism, for respect of the privacy of individuals and all the ancient rites long stored in the British state such as the Runnymede Charter and the Statutes of Westminster.

Thatcher let rip the mania of destructive consumerism and debased capitalism which has led directly to the police state that is now steadily displacing the paternal welfare state.

Indeed ‘welfarism’ is now equated – particularly in bottom trawling (literally) rags such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Express – as the natural replacement for communism.

‘Welfare dependency’ is the new plague stalking the nation, while the crooked banksters and city trading types steal millions every day and park it in sunny South Seas islands.

That’s called prudent independency, and it was Thatcher who created that culture of greed and unbridled dishonesty with the famous Big Bang that transformed the City of London into one gigantic roulette wheel.

When Thatcher told a popular woman’s journal that there was no such thing as society, only individuals ‘striving’ for a better life she was thinking of her own warped, dystopian upbringing in a small and dull Lincolnshire town.

She never possessed sound political principals or instincts, except the endless ‘striving’ in which her glorious alderman-grocer father indulged behind his shop counter in Grantham, unremarkable capital of the Lincolnshire potato growing country.

His virtues of thrift and hard work were doubtless real enough, but revealingly throughout her life and career in politics she failed to indicate the same degree of devotion to her mother and sister. Her family life mirrored what had gone on in Grantham.

She idolized her largely witless son Mark, precisely because he was a son, while his clever and witty sister, Mark’s twin Carol, found herself, like her grandmother and aunt, consigned very much to the sidelines. Margaret Hilda Thatcher did not like women, to the extent that she considered she had been born in the wrong form.

Very early in her prime ministerial career, the word ‘conservative’ as applied to the party that she led (bullied and harangued) was replaced by ‘Thatcherism.’  This was a doggerel creed she picked up from her chief guru, Milton Friedman, and neocon backwoodsmen like the remote and icy John Boyd-Carpenter.

For all her idolizing of the old scoundrel Winston Churchill and the Monarch of the Grouse Moor, Harold Macmillan, she had nothing in common with either their thoughts or principles.  In fact she was not really a conservative at all in any meaningful sense.

She was, in fact, a socialist of the nationalist and corporatist hue which placed her very much in the line of pre-war national socialism and of course, Soviet corporatism. Truly, a creature of Hegel.

The Britain that she built shifted the scale of power away from individuals and their personal relationships to the state in favor of the power of big corporations who were allowed to grab the ‘family silver’ – as Macmillan, who despised her, called the nationalized industries – at knock down prizes.

Her great programme of flogging off the state enterprises – gas, water, electricity, airlines, telephones – was trumpeted as the ultimate freedom, whereas in fact the millions who came into the market for the first time were out again in two shakes of a dog’s tail.

On the back of this mass illusion she created profit hungry cartels that gleefully sodomised their customers, maximizing shareholder profits and gigantic boardroom rewards before investments, exactly as the Austrian-born thinker Peter Drucker prescribed as the new course of modern capitalism.

Of course behind the scenes, her millionaire oil baron husband Denis, a daguerreotype racist and all-round reactionary, egged her on to ever more extremes of daylight robbery.

Bewitched by this apparently mad woman, the perfect fountain of duplicity, the British public reacted like slaves who come to love their chains. The ‘prosperity’ she created was false and shallow, since inequality in British society widened to unprecedented levels. The Brits partied on and begged for more.

Like the ersatz shareholder democracy, the prosperity of the UK was constructed on the false foundations of soaring house prices and runaway IPOs in the City of London.

After the Bing Bang blew up the old medieval ways of open call, the City abandoned all pretence at acting as a store of investor value. Caution was thrown to the wind as one tin pot worthless outfit after another took a bucket to the magic well in search of flyaway fortunes.

It was bound to end badly and it did. Thatcher was the true grandmother of the great financial collapse which began in 2008.

Perpetually frustrated by her skirts, Thatcher loved any scrap she could wade into. In one of her famous demonstrations of respect for democracy, she entirely demolished the Greater London Authority because Londoners persistently voted for socialists to run it.

Greater London, home to eight million people, was thus Balkanized into a cabal of squabbling parish councils. She called denying Londoners the right to choose their governors a victory.

She itched for a good war and duly got one when the Argentineans invaded the Falklands, home to just about enough people to fill the average morning London commuter train and a lot of sheep.

In fact, her own Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington had quietly put the Argies up to it, by withdrawing the only naval patrolling vessel cruising the local waters.

No one in their maddest dreams thought the old bat would launch a counter-invasion, but she did and duly earned her Empire Strikes Back moment of fame. Yet the lasting scar of that affair was the lost lives of scores of British military personnel, taken from their families for the hubris of a woman who soaked the entire affair with her overbearing, outlandish pride.

She loved bashing garlicky foreigners. It was always difficult to get her to go on holiday, and on the rare occasions that she did venture across the great silvery ditch known as the English Channel (la Manche to the French) she chose Switzerland, because of the tinkle of the Alpine cow bells among the whizzing of the money markets.

Thatcher was the culmination of the steady transformation of the British political personality into a national socialist state.  Thatcher’s corporatism would have been recognizable to Mussolini. Her flattery and encouragement of great state champions shamelessly aped the Third Reich.

The Nazi programme was designed with tricks of mirrors and light to convince Middle Class Germans that they had at last discovered true salvation and security. This was the same elementary message of Thatcherism which – and this cannot be said too often – was intended as a permanent force. The rival Opposition was never intended to govern again and in reality, it never has.

Thatcher tore the unions to shreds, again exactly like Mussolini and Hitler. Organizations or combinations of any kind which stood up to the rolling juggernaut were ruthlessly crushed, the coal miners being a classic example. At the end of the crisis in the mines, an entire industry was wiped out in the twinkling of an eye, purely to satisfy Big Oil – perfectly represented by her tipsy consort, Denis Thatcher.

The British people were mesmerized by Thatcher because she was – in every meaning of the phrase – a class act.

She appeared to have arisen from a humble background, unlike the usual snobby Tory grouse moor toffocracy. She indeed went about describing this, that or the other person as ‘one of us’ – pure national socialist stereotyping.

She was a dictatress, who did not brook rebellions in cabinet and castrated the shrinking ‘wet’ faction in the party.

She was unique in Downing Street annals for her complete tone deafness to humor. She was literally witless.

She never failed to resort to screaming rants at those who disagreed with her, or simply annoyed her. We small band of brothers in the European Parliament were marked out for especial displays of scornful rebukes – and worse.

We were invited for drinks at an annual ritual cursing, but otherwise treated as lepers. She was eternally petty minded and could never shake off the absurdities and fancies which danced beneath her everlasting permanent waves.

She drank excessively and never stopped drawing attention to herself. Reagan said of her after one close encounter in Camp David: ‘Well I don’t know about anything else but she sure can talk.’ She was incapable of relaxing except with a large whisky.

Of course the ‘legacy’ word is now in full play. She certainly bequeathed one very impressive legacy. She has succeeded in eliminating the essential differences and normal spirit of political combat.

There is no longer any real divide or difference between MPs who call themselves conservatives, socialists or liberals. The United Kingdom is – pretty much like the United States – a one-party state.

The natural flowering of British national socialism is none other than Tony Blair. It was he who created the fiction of ‘New Labor’ out of the ruins of the old.

Peter Mandelson, his closest ally in this task, deserves the credit for noticing that Thatcherism could survive and indeed flourish without the Iron Maiden herself. Even more significantly, a party minus politics was exactly the right brand for the market.

Thatcher’s legacies are many: the grasping criminality of the financial markets, penalizing the poor at the expense of the rich and famous, the debased concept of prosperity expressed by the Plimsoll Line of house prices, the destruction of education, the extermination of the middle classes, and the appearance of an embedded culture of crime on the streets of the cities, which has percolated inevitably to the formerly peaceable rural pastures.

Thatcher’s national socialism appeared to collectively derange an entire nation formerly renowned for its sober pleasures of caution.

Of course the hangover of the Sixties, drugs, celebrity fetish, entertainments that insult the intellect and the general dumbing down of the media, are all part and parcel of remorseless change in the British Tescoland.

The sheer cleverness of Thatcher was to attune herself and her aims to the new feckless society. She judged correctly, as did Blair when he succeeded her, that shallow hollowed out intellects and minds made perfect gardening soil.

The manner of her exit from the political scene was instructive. She was ambushed by the Wets who at last raised the courage to stage an insurrection. But John Major’s strange orphaned government was the last afterglow of genuine conservatives. Then came Blair.

It no longer matters who comes next. The piper knows the tune. Fascism is resurgent wherever one looks in the contemporary political landscape. The phrase in the unofficial jingoist British national anthem Rule Britannia famously declares ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves.’

Well, now they are: slaves to secret courts and inquests, media censorship, the largest system of mass surveillance in Europe and possibly the world, police drones and the militarized police in general, and all the rest of it.

Old precautions such as habeas corpus are gone, probably forever. The Iron Maiden departs to her vault, secure in the fruits of victory.

Edited by Madison Ruppert

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is now available fromProgressive Press. You may order it using the link below (or by clicking here – Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis):