Hello readers, after several weeks of trashing British pop culture figures I’ve grown weary. I mean while I’m kind of a nerd and into anything pop culture, there are only so many British pop culture people who I can find a reason to hate. 

That’s why, this week I will be shifting the focus on Margaret Thatcher, the so-called “Iron Lady” of the West, and an awful politician and person. 

I mean it’s super easy to hate on Thatcher, she hated schools, workers and people of color. She was best friends with Ronald Reagan and was a supporter of apartheid South Africa. 

Don’t worry, it’s my journalistic duty to elaborate further on these claims, so stick around and get ready to learn some things about a long-dead politician from the United Kingdom. 

Thatcher was Prime Minister of the UK from 1979-1990. That’s about 11 years too many. 

In 1984, she brutally stamped out the UK’s mining industry. A year-long strike by laborers was met with increasing violence from the police and for all the strikers’ efforts, they were to no avail. 

According to the BBC, there were over 170 coal mines operating in the UK. Today, there are only a handful still in operation. 

I mean this could be a weak example of Thatcher’s coldness, but hear me out. 

While the coal industry was in decline at the time, Thatcher’s inability to back down ended up completely killing the industry and leaving over a hundred thousand workers without jobs far sooner than was necessary. 

That’s a hundred thousand families who had their livelihood robbed of them, the workers who went on strike had to survive a year without wages to support themselves and all of it was for nought. 

Another thing I’d like to point out is how Thatcher hated education. She was most infamously known for taking away free milk for students aged 7-11 according to the Guardian. 

She’s quite the heartless person. She also completely upended education in the UK and turned it into an almost commercial market. 

She took away tenure from professors and turned funding for schools into a competition for bodies. Each student enrolled in a school and that student represented a specific money amount for the school. 

Before you say that seems like a swell idea, how were rural schools supposed to compete with urban schools? Additionally, private schools flourished under Thatcher due to her policies. 

As a product of a private school in the American education system, I can confidently say that public schools are better than private schools just flat out. 

Killing public education in favor of private education should be a crime. 

Finally, and I promise I’m almost done, Thatcher supported apartheid South Africa. I mean should that be a surprise? The leader of one of the most egregious colonizing countries supports an apartheid country. 

When talking about the African National Congress, an organization committed to ending apartheid in South Africa, Thatcher called them “a typical terrorist organisation.”

This was before the post 9/11 period of using terrorist as a thinly-veiled racist accusation but it doesn’t excuse it. 

Readers I apologize for all the information and not enough jokes, I felt obligated to give you my interpretation of why Margaret Thatcher is a bad Brit. 

If you made it this far though, an honor that both former president Ronald Reagan and Thatcher hold is creating some of the first gender-neutral bathrooms according to Twitter users. 

Until next time though, have a good week and remember to spit on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. Adams can be reached at [email protected].