According to an article in BBC History Magazine today, Margaret Thatcher is officially the best Prime Minister of the 20th Century based on an assessment of their impact. The agrument put forward is that she "took one sort of society, and turned it into another sort of society.... Today few people under 40 remember a time when trade unions were a real force in the land; when the public sector controlled large swathes of the economy; when local councils controlled education and other local services; when benefits were considered rights of citizenship."
Unsuprisingly, I entirely concur with that assessment. It is quite interesting really how Thatcher became such a hate figure for so many, and yet the condition that many of those people now find themselves exist primarily because she was brave enough to break the Atlee consensus which was causing the gradual decline of Britain.
Churchill was pipped in the poll into joint third, mainly because whilst he had a incredibly important and significant period in office during the war, he did go on to lose in 1945 and was not the same man when he retruned to office in 1951. No doubt the Labour rank and file will be outraged that Thatcher has been according the honour.
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I think you might enjoy this take on the story, at24dash.com
It headlines 'Outcry after Thatcher selected as Britain's best Prime Minister', and then fails to quote anyone in outcry.....
And very bizarrely, Edward Heath was also joint third!
This piece of research is sadly flawed. It rates Attlee highly, a PM who imposed a generation of socialism, forced rationing on the country for longer than in defeated Germany, 'gave' us the NHS, a model of health care no other country in the world has emulated etc.etc.
Asquith was the greatest. If he hadn't been pushed out by Lloyd George and Lord Nothcliffe, the Press baron, he would have won WW1 more quickly, as well as avoiding the need for WW2. He was against reparations, which paved the way for Hitler, but LG banned him from Versailles.
His modest honest highly effective style of government was destroyed by spin, and the abuse of media power. We need exactly such a return to modest competent government, and an end to the tyranny of media domination.
The internet and the blogs could assist in dismantling the dominance of media which started in 1916 when Asquith was removed, and has continued to this day. Bring back Asquith's ways. The world is ready for it.
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