No one has told me about Thatcher I lived through her terms as prime minister and saw first hand the damage she did to my country. Probably her worst fault was promoting an ethos of greed and self interest, dividing those who have and making it more acceptable to disregard and even condemn those without political and financial influence.
Although saying that she was against apartheid, Thatcher stood resolutely against the sanctions imposed on South Africa by the Commonwealth, the UN and the EC. She attempted to preserve trade with South Africa while persuading the regime there to abandon apartheid. This included "[c]asting herself as President Botha's candid friend", and inviting him to visit the UK in June 1984, in spite of the "inevitable demonstrations" against his regime. Thatcher, on the other hand, was no friend of the African National Congress (ANC), with her dismissing the ANC as late as October 1987 as "a typical terrorist organisation".
In the 1980's she vetoed the imposition of UN economic sanctions on South Africa, in 1987 her spokesman, Bernard Ingham, famously said that anyone who believed that the ANC would ever form the government of South Africa was "living in cloud cuckoo land".
To suggest that Thatcher was responsible for the fall of the Berlin wall is nonsense,
Under Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe abolished Britain's exchange controls in 1979, allowing more capital to be invested in foreign markets, and the Big Bang of 1986 removed many restrictions on the London Stock Exchange. This allowed the financiers and banks to behave in ways which are directly to blame for the current recession
Thatcher was a war criminal, during the Falklands war she ordered the sinking of an Argentinian ship which was outside of her own proclaimed "exclusion zone" and actually sailing away from the Fallands with the resulting loss of 323 lives, half of those Argentinians killed during the conflict.
She introduced cash limits on public spending, and reduced expenditures on social services such as education and housing. Her cuts in higher education spending resulted in her being the first Oxford-educated post-war Prime Minister not to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford.
She started the selling of our social housing stock, so we now have five million people on waiting lists for social housing just in England because of a shortage of council homes.
As well as selling of much of our nations housing stock she was also responsible for selling off our essential industries such as water, gas, electricity and public transport were the property of the British people. She instigated the selling of them at knock down prices now they are owned and run by multi nationals who's only interest is how much in bonuses they can pay themselves and their shareholders.
That she was a woman is irrelevant if you are talking in terms of the feminist movement, she did nothing to promote women's rights. There was only one other female Cabinet minister during the Thatcher years in Downing Street, with talented figures such as Lynda Chalker left languishing in lesser posts.
Having become the UK's first women prime minister, she did so much to undermine the position of women in society.
She damaged woman's place in the workplace, undermined families and communities and did nothing for women in public life, it was a wasted opportunity on a huge scale. About the only thing Thatcher did for mothers was freeze child benefit, while at the same time castigating them for leaving their children in the "chaos of workplace creches".
Thatcher betrayed her own assessment of what made a woman - she was a social conservative, against single mothers, working mothers, women in general. She just made an exception for herself. The lack of social conscience, the underfunding of socially beneficial institutions, the rejection of state responsibility to its poorest members, the emphasis on "helping oneself" in absurdly difficult circumstances: these were the cornerstones of Thatcher's governance, and of her contribution to society's image of women.