AR

This is MensaMag, the award-winning journal of award-winning Mensa Calgary.

Care for interesting books to read? Treat yourself to our Arts Report, and the next Book Club meeting is May 3rd. We get together on the Second Tuesday (which this month takes place May 14th). You might also enjoy our special Book Club Group on Facebook.

Try your hand at our puzzles. This month we repeat a favorite pair from last year that requires a few minutes of application. You might also need a pencil.

Find our events for May right here. And talk to us on Facebook . Read further in this newsletter for great ways to spend your time.

Renew your membership at www.canada.mensa.org.

Piqued your interest in Mensa? The next test will be conducted by Marie Wildenborg, our Proctor. Don’t miss this opportunity. Contact Marie for further information at mensa.proctor@shaw.ca . And share this invitation with anyone else who may want to join.

Margaret Thatcher received what resembled a state funeral in April. But was her reputation as an iron warrior well founded? See whether her three victories at the polls in the UK are thought a good thing for that island nation. And see how central bankers are viewed by a national CBC correspondent. Does he have an opinion, or is this too daunting a task in Harper’s nation? Read further in our newsletter and see. Our Review this month tackles Death by a Thousand Cuts, a study of the misunderstandings that separate ourselves from China. CampaignScape, the novel, continues with episode 27, and a Recipe for Gibsons is our treat of the month. All this and more in May’s MensaMag.

This book is fascinating. It is history with a difference. Apart from its ostensible subject matter, the text brings the difficulty of forming historical judgments into sharp relief. In short, it asks how much we can genuinely know about the past, and by extension about the very times in which we live.

For an individual, “know thyself” makes sense, but “see yourself as others see you” is problematic. Others don’t know you. They can’t. They misinterpret your gestures and plainest speech. Walk past a dozen strangers and they’ll describe someone who is taller or shorter, fatter or thinner. When you’re angry, they’ll think you’re happy. Feel anxious and they’ll believe you’re at ease. How much greater the misinterpretation when we talk about something as fraught as methods of execution and what they mean, in times past, where language is a profound barrier and the historian sits in a culture with different foundations, steeped in legends of imperialist glory and assumptions about life after death. The peril is that defensiveness will override accuracy. Perhaps, if we work hard, apples will resemble oranges. More often, the viewer will imagine something that isn’t there or fail to see the fruit at all.

This observational gap is what Death by a Thousand Cuts is about.

And it does a magnificent job.

There was no death by a thousand cuts. Its very existence was a fabrication. The term is an abbreviation of “put to death by erosion of a hillock” (lingchi chusi). The etymology is obscure and likely an import from a northern invader. Its purpose had nothing to do with torture. Our beliefs are remote from the truth. What westerners consider to be typical of the Chinese people, embedded in Chinese tradition or genes, a sign that something vital is missing in their humanity, proof that they are profoundly alien, disappears like a puff of smoke when we look closely.

The trouble is that the west’s distorted image of China extends far beyond lingchi. This book compels us to face facts: China is neither Dante’s Inferno nor a tranquil realm where Buddha meets inventive genius. It manifests a long and steady history of civil wars and invasion, oppression, slavery and oligarchic privilege. Moreover, the Chinese aren’t a single entity by any means. The country contains dozens of languages and dialects, most incomprehensible to the others. Nor are the nation’s composite peoples mysteriously of the same mind about anything. The history of Chinese government is rife with factions and internal struggle. This book about lingchi shows the folly of the popular images of China. If death by a thousand cuts is largely a figment of the west’s imagination, we may reasonably wonder what else we’ve swallowed uncritically about the most populous land on the planet. Death by a Thousand Cuts guides us to the root of our misunderstandings about China, the whys and the hows of our incomprehension. Some of the lessons are disturbing to say the least.

Lingchi was a punishment for a handful of offences, and not often imposed even for those. It was listed formally in the country’s criminal codes over the centuries. Informally, however, you could buy your way out by paying a ransom. Or you might evade the penalty through social class and friends in high places. The goal wasn’t torture to extract information or suffering to purify the spirit, but philosophical: a person’s body which isn’t whole at death creates problems for the person in the afterlife. The offender was usually heavily sedated. One slice at the forehead, two at chest and thighs, maybe a slice at each arm, then the executioner pierced the heart. Or so the pattern went for the lingchi of which we have the best knowledge, those that took place in the early 20th century before reformers removed the penalty from the criminal code. The process took seconds, but the crucial element of lingchi followed death. The essence was the dismemberment. There is nothing to suggest any ceremony about any part of lingchi, nor any great pain in the victim.

There were other forms of death penalty, namely strangulation and decapitation. But these weren’t considered as serious as dismemberment. It was the separation of body parts after death that defined lingchi for the Chinese. The goal wasn’t suffering. Moreover, Chinese scholars opposed the punishment for many centuries. Set this punishment in context. While Europe partially hanged, then disemboweled and pulled apart offenders in civilized London, Chinese treated most criminals with simple beatings. Chinese officials argued against capital punishment long before this notion entered western thought. Rome saw an Emperor’s enemies forced to climb into the hollow, bronze statue of a cow, which was then heated up until the victims perished. The Emperor appeared to enjoy the groans of the victim, because they sounded like the noise made by cattle. Early 19th century England retained the death penalty for pickpockets. The United States attends executions with a ceremony that mocks both the medical profession that is enlisted to perform the act and the religions that parade alongside. And yet the image persists that China is cruel and inhumane compared to our noble selves. Death by a Thousand Cuts puts a dent in this pretence.

The book raises disturbing facts for contemplation. For example, Chinese arts have left few representations of executions or even suffering, while the west is filled with canvasses and literary portraits of the subject. In addition, the dominant Christian landscape focuses squarely on the suffering Christ. Christianity might have chosen to emphasize redemption or resurrection, or dwelt on a vast assortment of other themes. But no, our iconographic heritage consists of suffering. Visually and emotionally, it is everywhere. Impossible to escape the fusion of agony and our highest ideals. The book touches lightly on some approaches to this puzzle. Have we eroticized pain? The Marquis de Sade had sharp observations about this. Or have we blended it into an exotic cocktail, and made it alluring through novelty, transforming death into something imported from “places where no man has gone before”?

The book doesn’t mention what happens when lingchi enters the repertoire of state-sanctioned death in a culture. Chinese citizens and their state availed themselves of it when they suffered insurrection and invasion in the early 1640s. Liu Shangyou tells us that bandit leaders in Beijing suffered “death by slow slicing” during the turmoil (see Lynn Struve’s Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm), We don’t know what slow means here, because “death by slow slicing” is an alternative translation of lingchi, nor whether opiates were administered. The impression from the text is that no mercies were afforded the leaders. Time was at a premium, and accordingly opiates were unlikely. The tone suggests that vengeance was arrived at through pain, but the text itself is silent on this point.

This reviewer would have to reread the present Brooks-Bourgon-Blue book carefully to see whether the authors allow that lingchi was used sometimes to create suffering and other times not. The impression is heavily weighted towards the negative. But what are we to do when a respected historian such as Frederic Wakeman Jr. describes an “agonizing death by ‘ten thousand slices’”, and goes on to describe such punishments as “horrifying”? We can take refuge in the fact that Brooks, Bourgon and Blue investigated the subject in detail, while Wakeman makes his observation in passing. In addition, Wakeman wrote 20 years before the new research. We cannot fault Wakeman for failing to note studies that hadn’t yet been carried out, but we may note that history is a project constantly in the making, and the reader should be aware that new studies may qualify what Brooks, Bourgon and Blue have said. Which returns us to the impossibility of knowing others.

Before we comment again on this distance from the “other”, however, let us ask whether the infliction of pain in the 17th century differentiates China from Europe during the same period. The answer is firmly negative. There is no need to itemize the techniques for bringing an end to life during the muddle of religious and dynastic wars that haunted Europe including the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War,

What fascinates us about death by a thousand cuts? Cameras had been invented by the late 19th century. There weren’t many westerners in China at the time, but there were diplomats, the press, trade representatives, and travellers seeking adventure. A few brought cameras. What caused such people to press into the crowd the street corners where a lingchi was taking place? Why did they take photos, write up the occasion, and strive to publish articles and photos about the deaths? What was it about the phenomenon that caused newspapers to print the articles and photos? We know far too little about the impulses behind our fascination with the subject, and this book goes a long way to helping us to understand by presenting facts, exploring the Chinese and European contexts, and examining cultural reference points..

The bandwagon effect plays a role. For centuries, strong groups in the west have struggled to paint China as a nation to condemn. Some of the roots of this enterprise lay with the colonialist project. We invaded China and exploiting her wealth. There was need first to arouse, then sustain, public support for Europe’s armed adventures. Any excuse such as barbaric practices or uncivilized behavior fed the public appetite for titillation at the same time as it garnered support for governments to spend taxes on the wars that buttressed profitable trade.

The book explores its subject with breadth and depth. There have been profound errors in the stories emanating from travellers about what they saw in China. Lingchi is but one example, and these mistakes have largely gone uncorrected. There seems to be no hurry to amend the demonizing of China. The reader is moved to ask why.

When you look in a mirror, you superficially see flesh and blood. Emotionally, you see a cascade of images from your wishes and fears, past and present. Most of the time, you don’t see even those clearly. You recreate parts of yourself as you want others to see you. There’s no whole in the mirror, no self embraced by the name you call yourself. Just a splash of hair and rectangle of cheek redolent – you hope or fear – of a rock and roll star or retired CEO. Attitude and drama, that’s what one tends to see. Perhaps that’s all we are, though we fervently wish this isn’t true. There’s substance to the notion that flesh and blood have no meaning except what we project into them. How unknowable then is a stranger, who carries attitudes and a past of which we understand nothing. And how much more remote are the stranger’s cultural past and present. The “other” truly is located across a distant bridge.

Death by a Thousand Cuts is partly a history of a tiny segment of China’s judicial history. It is also an adventure into how misunderstandings occur and endure. Beneath it all lies a journey to the heart of darkness in which we see only what we want to see, too often being the qualities in ourselves we love least and therefore project most strongly into others, and then condemn others for possessing.

This is a book worth reading for what it teaches us about China, but also about ourselves.

AR

In May, we feature our monthly sushi dinner, book club, plus the excitement and events that mark Calgary’s springtime. Enjoy our Second Tuesday. Keep your eyes fixed on the Calendar. Stay healthy and treasure the opportunities for leisure.

2) Our first question involved the triangular numbers, which are 1, 1+2, 1+2+3, 1+2+3+4, etc. What digits can never appear at the end of a triangular number? What is the only triangular number that is a prime? Can you find a natural number that can’t be represented as the sum of 3 or less triangular numbers?

The answers to last month’s puzzles were supplied last month.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) Gauss gave us the answer, which is (x/2)(y + z), where x is the number of numbers being added, y is the first number, and z is the last. The usual story is that Gauss discovered this method while solving a problem set by his teacher in elementary school, and that the numbers were 1 through 100. Gauss himself, however, said that his teacher had given the class a particular five-digit number and asked the students to add a particular three-digit number to it 100 times in succession, then find the sum of that series. Does the above method work if the story is changed as we’ve suggested?

2) The digits that can never appear at the end of a triangular number are 2, 4, 7, or 9. The only triangular number that is a prime is 3. All natural numbers can be represented as the sum of 3 or fewer triangular numbers (discovered by our friend Gauss).

[This month’s puzzles are adapted from Posamentier and Lehmann’s Mathematical Amazements and Surprises]

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”

She’s all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

(For more love and sensual poetry, look at Elsa’s web sites, for example Elsa’s Wild Poetry. Also dive into Elsa’s mind and heart at Elsa’s Love Poetry or Elsa’s General Page.)

There was nothing to keep Brendan in his apartment. He tossed and turned, had a dream that he was suffocating, and ended up bleary-eyed back at police headquarters by 6 in the morning. He’d stopped on the way for a bag of donuts.

A good lawyer had turned up during the night. She, it was a she, took Des and Al in front of a Judge at the crack of dawn and had them released on bail twenty minutes later. Des and Al couldn’t afford the lady’s services. The question for Brendan was who paid. If he knew the answer to that, he might get somewhere with the case.

“Yo, lieutenant” said the duty detective. Brendan had once shared a desk with him. “Telephone company got its finger out. Des got a call five minutes before they stopped for coffee.”

“And?” Brendan’s face sagged like a torn punching bag. His hair was mussed and it looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week.

“You look like shit. Did you sleep in those clothes?” said the duty detective.

Brendan looked down. He wore the same loose tie and rolled up shirt as yesterday. “I did sleep in them. Saves time. What did the phone company say?”

“The other cell was a newbie. Straight from the box. Connected a few minutes before the call. We tracked the owner though.”

“And?”

“Deceased. Three years ago. Natural causes. A pen-pusher at Niemann Marcus.”

“Dead man, dead end,” said Brendan.

“What tree you want us to climb next, brother?”

“Tell me what you think.” Brendan examined his nails like he was seeing them for the first time. They weren’t any cleaner than yesterday.

“The deceased had a daughter.” The officer pawed through the mess on his desk. “I found a picture of the funeral. A dynamite blonde. Thought I’d look her up. See where her old dad’s cell went.”

“After three years?”

“Really good looking.”

Brendan looked askance.

“I mean really.”

“Get back here by noon.”

The duty officer found an empty desk, snagged the telephone, and put his feet up. He dialed the operator and made notes, tried a number and another and a third. With the fourth, he mouthed the word Bingo. Soon after he left the station, humming softly to himself.

A burly detective stopped beside Brendan’s desk. Brendan was examining his nails. “You’ve got to clean them now and then. Haven’t you heard?” the detective cleared his throat. “Des and Al are dead ends. They’re ordinary working joes. That’s why they were picked.”

“I agree. They’re a waste of time.”

“Drop the charges?”

Brendan nodded.

“Where do we go from here?”

Brendan ran his hand through his non-existent hair. “I don’t have a clue.”

His comment was reported to the press. Cops Clueless was the headline next day.

William Boothby’s 1908 Gibson RecipeOther pre-prohibition recipes for the Gibson exist. They all omit bitters and none of them garnishes with an onion. Some garnish with citrus twists. Others use no garniture at all. No known recipe for the Gibson garnishes with an onion before 1922. Some sources persist in using other garniture than the onion into the 1930s and beyond, but still none use bitters. According to pre-prohibition sources, the ‘classic’ Martini of today without any bitters is actually the Gibson. However, modern terminology favors reserving the Gibson name for the same drink only when garnished with an onion.

The drink is traditionally made with gin but the Vodka Gibson is also common.

Ingredients:
•2 & 1/2 oz gin
•1/2 oz dry vermouth
•1 or 3 cocktail onions for garnish

Preparation:
1.Pour the ingredients into a mixing glass with ice cubes.
2.Stir well.
3.Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
4.Garnish with the cocktail onion.

The onion garnish also goes well with vodka in a Vodka Martini.

Quietly, without much public fuss or discussion, a new ruling class has risen in the richer nations.

These men and women are unelected and tend to shun the publicity hogged by the politicians with whom they co-exist.

They are the world’s central bankers. Every six weeks or so, they gather in Basel, Switzerland, for secret discussions and, to an extent at least, they act in concert.

The decisions that emerge from those meetings affect the entire world. And yet the broad public has a dim understanding, if any, of the job they do.

In fact, these individuals now wield at least as much influence over the lives of ordinary citizens as prime ministers and presidents.

The tool they have used to change the world so profoundly is one they alone possess: creating money out of thin air.

There is an economic term for this: quantitative easing. More colloquially, it’s called printing money.

Since the great economic meltdown in 2008, these central bankers have probably saved the world’s economy from collapse, and dragged it into the unknown at the same time.

The amounts they have created are so vast as to be almost incomprehensible — trillions of dollars in pounds and euros, among other currencies.

At the end of 2012, the balance sheets of the world’s largest central banks, those of the G20 nations and the eurozone, including Sweden and Switzerland, totalled $17.4 trillion US, according to Bank of Canada calculations from publicly available data.

That is nearly a quarter of global GDP, and slightly more than double the $8.5 trillion these same institutions were holding at the end of 2007, before the financial crisis hit.

Stock markets have risen on this tide of cheap money. So has real estate. So, arguably, has everything else.

But there are two big concerns with what this new central banker elite has done.

One is that no one really understands the consequences of pumping such vast amounts of money into the world economy. It’s already distorted the prices of certain assets, and some fear hyperinflation or market crashes are inevitable (the subject of tomorrow’s column).

The other is that it’s caused a massive shift in wealth, from savers to borrowers, and is taking money out of the pockets of almost everyone approaching or at retirement age.

Probably the most painful of the consequences of quantitative easing has been borne by the elderly.

Most of that generation grew up believing that if you save and exercise prudence that you will earn at least a modest return on your hard-earned money to keep you comfortable in your old age, perhaps along with a pension.

But the money-printing orgy of the last five years looks to have shot that notion to smithereens.

Very deliberately, the central bankers have punished savers, pushing interest rates so low that any truly safe investment — and older people are always advised to play it safe — yields a negative return when inflation is factored in.

British pensioners Judy White and her husband Alan, at their home in Teddington, south of London: ‘I now have 50 per cent less.’ (CBC )The policy has savaged pension and savings returns worldwide, but particularly in Britain, a nation of savers and pensioners.

There is more money in British pension funds than in the rest of Europe combined, and now that money is just sitting, “dead,” as some call it, not working for its owners.

Ask Judy White, a retiree in her late 60s who lives in Teddington, south of London, with her husband, Alan.

This year, the Bank of England shattered her retirement. Her pension benefit was effectively slashed by half.

“I don’t understand what quantitative easing is, except that it’s printing money,” she says. “But I do understand that I now have 50 per cent less.

“What they have done is take money from people who have been really careful all their lives.”

Actually, by the Bank of England’s own reckoning, the £375 billion of quantitative easing it has carried out since 2008 has cost British savers and pensioners about £70 billion, roughly $100 billion. (At the same time, the richest 10 per cent of British households saw the value of their assets increase over the same period, the bank reported.)

That cost to the elderly is largely because pension payouts in the U.K. are pegged to the yields on government bonds, and quantitative easing has forced those yields down to almost nothing.

Speaking for the Bank of England, Paul Fisher acknowledges that the bank has created a paradox: It does want people to save and be prudent — just not right now.

“We try,” he says, “to get people to do things now to get out of this mess, which in the long run we prefer not to do.”

In other words, might we please have some more of the wild consumer spending and borrowing that helped get us all into this situation, at least for a while?

The plain fact, though, is that central bank- and government-imposed solutions to disasters caused by irresponsible, greedy, foolish behaviour are almost always carried out on the backs of the virtuous.

So it was with the bank rescues in 2008, and so it is with quantitative easing.

As Ros Altmann, a longtime pension manager and director of the London School of Economics, puts it, quantitative easing has amounted to a “monumental social experiment” — a large-scale transfer of wealth from older people to younger people.

“Anybody who was a saver and has got some accumulated savings will have had a reduction in their income,” she says.

While “anyone who had a big debt, particularly mortgage debts, would have had improvement in their income because their interest payments have gone down.”

As stupid as it might sound, older people everywhere would probably be better off if they’d abandoned prudence and borrowed more.

That is obviously not what the central bankers or our political leaders want. But that’s the situation they’ve created.

What’s the alternative?
This transfer from savers to borrowers has also been taking place here in the U.S. and in Canada, to varying degrees.

Some U.S. pension funds are in danger of default, at least partially because of these artificially low interest rates, and Canadian pension funds that are heavily invested in safer debt have been injured, too.

In an interview in his Ottawa office, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney defends quantitative easing elsewhere, and his own low-interest rate policy, though he does acknowledge that it has been hard on pensioners and savers.

Like all central bankers, he argues the (impossible to prove) negative: There have been consequences, yes, but if we hadn’t done this, things would be far, far worse.

As for carrying out these solutions on the backs of the virtuous: “I don’t see a world where the virtuous are rewarded if we suffered a second Depression,” he says. “These are the stakes.”

Carney would prefer not to talk about the enormous power central bankers have gained since 2008, saying only: “We have a tremendous responsibility … because of a series of mistakes that were made in the private sector and the public sector.”

As Canada has performed better than most Western nations, Carney has not ordered any new money printing.

But he has kept interest rates down, and that has fed the real estate booms over the last few years in Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary and elsewhere.

He scoffs at the suggestion that “the party” will end at some point. “I am not sure we are having a party right now,” he says. “It doesn’t feel like a party.”

And, in fact, he has repeatedly expressed concern at the huge debt levels Canadians are accruing, at least partly because of his low-rate policies.

But surely he understands the anger of an older person watching their savings being eroded, I ask him.

Carney smiles grimly. That question is clearly a sore point. He gets a lot of mail on the topic.

Canadians, he says, must understand that the alternative is massive unemployment and thousands of businesses going under, and “my experience with Canadians is that they tend to think about their neighbours and their children and more broadly … they care a little bit more than just about themselves.”

Asked whether central bankers are not in fact enabling irresponsible behaviour by speculators enamoured of cheap money, not to mention politicians who can’t curb their borrowing and spending, Carney merely remarks that voters in a democracy get the governments they choose.

(Neil Macdonald, CBC, 29 April 2013)

Two former prime ministers will be buried this week. One was a gloriously battling heroine of freedom, Boadicea in pearls, who put the Great back into Great Britain and won the Cold War with a little assistance from Ronald Reagan. The other was the empress of evil, Cruella de Vil in a twinset, who smashed her country to bits. Then there is a third Margaret Thatcher, the real one masked by all the myths with which she has been embalmed since her death. This woman was a much more complex personality with a much more paradoxical legacy than either the eulogists or the haters can allow.

It is undeniable that she was a huge figure: the first and only woman to occupy Number 10, and the first person to win three elections in a row under universal suffrage. It is also unarguable that she was a transformative leader. She changed her country, her own party and their principal Labour opponents. The largest British prime minister on the global stage since Winston Churchill, she played a significant role in changing the world too.

Then we enter the land of legends. The most potent of those propagated in recent days is that she was the last “conviction politician”, a superwoman of self-will who has been followed by pathetic pygmies of compromise. This is very destabilising for today’s leaders as they shiver in the shadow of this myth. If only, sigh Tories dissatisfied with their current management, David Cameron would display the steely resolve of Mrs T. If only, cry some Labour people, we roared our socialist convictions with the same zeal as she did hers.

There’s no argument but that she had a solid bedrock of beliefs. It is true, too, that she wasn’t much bothered whether or not she was loved, preferring to be respected and prepared to settle for being feared. By the end of her time in power, she was so utterly impervious – even Trafalgar Square ablaze could not persuade her to rethink the poll tax – that she brought about her downfall. But it is not true to say, as worshippers and detractors have alike suggested, that she never cared about public opinion. Someone who didn’t would not have won a hat-trick of elections. The early, signature policy, the sale of council houses to their tenants, was consciously designed to turn working-class voters into Tories. She repeatedly vetoed policy proposals that might hurt what she called “our people”. The memoirs of colleagues attest to her nerves before calling elections. Far from disdaining modern campaign tools, she pioneered their use in Britain. With the Saatchis, she introduced American-style political advertising. She was the first British leader to employ image consultants and did cosmetic surgery to herself – changing her clothes, lowering her voice – to be more voter-attractive.

Her radicalism was largely concealed from the electorate – and not fully formed within herself – before she came to power. She fought a cautious campaign in 1979, bargaining that national impatience with the trade unions and Labour’s failure to control them would be enough to get her into office. Her first manifesto was fairly clear on direction, but light on specifics. She initially put industrial relations reform into the hands of the Tory wet, Jim Prior, who proceeded slowly. She ran frit from a battle with the miners in 1981 – so much for never U-turning – because she was not ready to take them on. The single riskiest decision was to send the task force to the south Atlantic to take the Falklands back from the Argentinians. That was certainly high in peril. Had General Galtieri’s airforce been more proficient – had it managed to sink the aircraft carrier – it could have ended in a colossal humiliation for Britain. But for her, it was not so much a gamble as unavoidable. The alternative was resignation.

Only after her landslide victory of 1983 against a divided left did Thatcherism really take flight. The top rate of tax was slashed to 40%. The privatisation of state industries was a world-leading revolution. But it did not really lead to the “share-owning democracy” that she aspired to create. Most of the “Sids” quickly pocketed their profits and the bulk of the shares ended up in the hands of financial institutions. Something had to be done about the failing state industries, but it is arguable that there were better answers than turning them into virtual private monopolies supervised by anonymous regulators. It was also in her second term that she finally felt strong enough for the epic confrontation with the miners that shattered them and broke union power more generally. The unions had effectively destroyed the premierships of two of her recent predecessors, Jim Callaghan and Ted Heath. Battle could not have been avoided, but did it have to be quite so brutal? Almost certainly yes when the adversary was Arthur Scargill and there was so much at stake on both sides. Could the consequences have been handled better? Absolutely yes. With or without Mrs Thatcher, globalisation would have forced a painful shake-up of Britain’s traditional heavy industries. The very black mark on her record, even Norman Tebbit acknowledges this, was to neglect the communities wrecked by deindustrialisation. Whether it was ideological myopia or plain indifference, the casualties were left to rot on benefit, fostering the dependency culture to which she was supposed to be so opposed. For all her rhetoric about reforming the welfare state, the public sector consumed almost the same proportion of national wealth when she left power as when she came to it. That was a signal failure of her ambition to roll back the state or maybe an indication that there is a fairly settled ratio between public and private that not even a Margaret Thatcher can buck.

One area of the economy did begin an explosive growth during her reign: financial services. Some argue that her 1986 “Big Bang”, which deregulated the City, set in motion the forces that eventually led to the Great Crash. In her defence, it should be said that she left office nearly 20 years before 2007. The more potent charge is that she was the progenitor of a culture, one New Labour was too intellectually intimidated to challenge, in which finance capital held the world in its thrall and profit was elevated above everything else. This is one of the paradoxes of her legacy. The woman who preached the virtues of thrift, modesty and hard work learned at the knee of her devoutly Methodist father became the midwife to a Mammon cult of debt-sozzled avarice. Here’s another. The personification of upward mobility – born over a corner shop, died in a suite at the Ritz – presided over widening inequalities in both opportunity and outcomes.

She was a champion of liberty. Well, yes and no. When much of the rest of Europe was wobbling, the implacable Cold Warrior was on the right side in the confrontation with the Soviet Union, which she correctly saw as a fundamental struggle between freedom and tyranny. She was a heroine to liberated eastern Europe. The pragmatic side of her was also able to spot Mikhail Gorbachev as a man that she “could do business with”. She was on utterly the wrong side in the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. She handed Hong Kong to the Chinese without a squeak.

She was no friend of plurality at home and become a worse enemy as she grew increasingly imperious. She responded to the opposition of Labour councils by abolishing the GLC and sucking so much power to Whitehall and the quangocracy that Britain became the most centralised state in Europe. “Is he one of us?” became the famous question about colleagues. She would not listen to reason over the poll tax, as the more pragmatic, earlier Thatcher would have done. She fell out with Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, once two of her most loyal lieutenants. By the end – a fact about which the Conservative party has had collective amnesia these past few days – her own cabinet told her she had to go.

She was the true-blue Tory who handbagged her own tribe’s future prospects while celebrating Tony Blair as her proudest achievement. With the unions humbled and his colleagues prepared to accept almost anything to get back to power, he was given space to adapt his party to her successes, profit from her failures and usher in an unprecedented 13 years of Labour rule. That was a disaster for the Conservatives. So ultimately was the way in which she changed them from a generally centrist, pragmatic organisation, focused above all else on power, to an outfit driven by often self-destructive ideological passions. She won her three elections, but in a fashion that made it hard for the Tories to win any more so long as Labour was competitive.

The Tories ceased to be a national party, largely shrinking into the affluent south that had benefited most from her reign. To this day, there are many major northern cities that do not have a single Tory councillor. Thanks, above all, to this stout defender of the Union, Scotland now has just one Tory MP and will soon be voting on independence.

The Iron Lady? Yes, she was that sometimes. But more, she was the Ironic Lady.

(Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, 14 April 2013)