MSNBC Host Martin Bashir: Thatcher Embodied "Selfishness"
BASHIR: At the same time, she was developing this notion, economically, that regulation was a problem. And so, many city banker and individuals in the financial community felt completely unleashed to do what they wanted. And the result was a kind of flagrant excessive and ostentatious pursuit of cash. Which ended with a number of comedians, one particular comedian had a skit called "Loads of Money." Basically, he would throw pound notes, five pound notes, in the faces of the poor. This is an indication of what they felt, what many people in Britain felt she was doing. Gordon Brown wrote a book, I remember called Where There Is Greed, which was basically a critique of the kind of selfishness she seemed to embody.
If you'll remember, Chuck, in 1987, about 8 years after she won that first election, she said at a party conference: "There is no such thing as Society, there are only individual men and women and their families." And that actually defined what she felt about domestic policy.
So I think the way we can look at Margaret Thatcher is that she was incredibly effective at partnering with Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in terms of breaking the Soviet Union. At the same time, in domestic terms, she was incredibly decisive.
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