In Europe

her party's election slogan – and she offered a clear alternative, not only to Labour but also to the old-school Conservatives and those floating in the middle of the road.
    When Thatcher entered office on 4 May, 1979, the country was in disrepair. Great Britain, at the start of the century the most powerful empire on earth, the victor in two world wars, had been reduced in the 1970s to an economic disaster area. The statistics resembled those of a Third World country: economic growth lagged far behind other Western European countries, inflation fluctuated between fifteen and twenty-five per cent, the country was regularly crippled by strikes, Rolls-Royce was bankrupt and, in 1976, Britain became the first Western power to appeal for aid from the International Monetary Fund.
    What Great Britain saw as its decline was, in fact, the result of the rapid modernisation of the rest of Europe. The country's traditional heavyindustry – textiles, coal, iron – could not keep up with the changes, and so, on the heels of the British Empire, the British ‘Workshop of the World’ collapsed as well. The crisis applied to Europe as a whole, it was only that the abrupt end of the golden years was felt first and most painfully by the British. Three years later, for example, when the new Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers began on his ‘chore’ in 1982, the economy of the Netherlands had been stagnating for years as well: it had a budget deficit of ten per cent, annual inflation of more than six per cent, and half a million unemployed.
    Margaret Thatcher got to work hard and fast. She announced a strict regimen of cuts, she raised VAT, and lowered income tax – particularly for the highest incomes. Many utility companies – rail, water, gas and electricity – were privatised, the system of inexpensive public housing was dismantled, and public rental properties were sold.
    Thatcher's tough-minded reorganisation seemed successful. Great Britain climbed – at least statistically – out of its dip. Traditional industries were quickly and rigorously taken apart and new high-tech firms were given fresh opportunities, albeit with a change of personnel and in other parts of the country. British production was brought back into line with the European average, the country's enormous rate of inflation was tamed, and from 1983 the average household income rose by an annual three per cent.
    Still, the Iron Lady never completely lived up to what she proclaimed from the mountaintop. Public spending, which she had promised to cut as never before, had barely decreased by the end of her time in office; from 42.5 per cent (in 1977–8) to 41.7 per cent (in 1987–8), to be precise. Her neoliberalism was combined with a strikingly authoritarian system of government: local bodies, universities and other institutions lost much of their autonomy, centralised power was consolidated everywhere and – thanks to the Official Secrets Act – her intelligence services were granted unparalleled power. Within Thatcher's neoliberalism, in other words, civil liberties were limited.
    After ten years under Thatcher, Great Britain was ‘the most right-wing country in Europe’. In no other member state were there such great disparities between ranks, classes and regions. A small portion of the population had profited greatly from the privatisations and tax cuts. Atthe same time – according to Eurostat figures – almost a quarter of British families were living below the poverty line (a figure exceeded only in Greece and Portugal). London was thriving, but Liverpool, Scotland and Wales were in dire straits. The privatised railway and postal systems had degenerated into prohibitively expensive chaos. (All the talk at the Wern Inn that evening in 1999 was of the big train crash at Paddington, which had almost certainly been caused by negligence.) A quarter of the male working population was jobless. The celebrated National Health Service was falling apart: those who could afford to do so were turning to private clinics. The same thing was happening in education. It was the vulnerable parts of the population – the poorly educated, the elderly, the chronically ill and single mothers – who particularly suffered.
    Thatcher's way of doing things clashed loudly with the German ‘organic harmony’, the French, Belgian and Italian patronage system, and the Dutch polder model. Yet it would be a mistake to view the significance of Thatcherism only in terms of