Brought Down

"If Margaret Thatcher had not been brought down," Norman Tebbit told the Any Questions audience, "then she might have turned her attentions from economic to social questions."

Well, just how long did she need? And anyway, this is simply not true. Thatcher introduced GCSEs instead of O-levels, the NHS internal market (which Labour promised in 1997 that it would abolish - whatever happened to that?), the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service, the Children Act, and numerous other major social changes, all the while presiding over the rise of Political Correctness and the economic entrenchment of 1960s social permissiveness by means of a "free" market ideology which cannot brook any restriction on anything for which a market might be said to exist, not even drugs, prostitution or pornography.

As for Tebbit's bemoaning of the disappearance of the grammar schools, some people's necks are so brass that the sun shines off them.