Thatcher

On the death of Margaret Thatcher. Others will write on her relationship with Pinochet, on the Falklands, on the ideological similarities between the model she implemented in Britain and what Chile went through.

My view is that there is one area where Thatcher was decades ahead of the Chilean right. She took on the establishment, and kicked it in what the brits would call an arse. Even though the target of her reforms was principally the labour unions and the obsolete and often state-run industries of post-war Britain, it seems to me that what she really did, probably intentionally, was put the final nail in the coffin of the old fashioned, Upstairs-Downstairs, Downton Abbey British right. Her model was one where hard work mattered and was rewarded. It was about opportunity, not Oxford. The high-flying, champagne-drinking, espresso-sipping, Michelin-starred London of today's City may be crass and overpriced and less quaint than the Hyde Park that Mary Poppins used to take Jane and Michael to, but it is, at the end of the day, a city of the twenty-first century. That was Thatcher.

More on this in my column in La Tercera.