Is Maggie Turning in Her Grave? The Ghost of Neoliberalism in a Fractured World

More than a decade after her death (12 years this month), one wonders: is Margaret Thatcher—she of handbag diplomacy and Hayekian orthodoxy—spinning in her grave as today’s world retreats from the free-market fundamentals she so fervently championed? In a global economy lurching toward state intervention, techno-mercantilism, and a geopolitical chessboard reshuffled beyond her Cold War comprehension, the Iron Lady’s ideological compass seems to be swinging wildly off-course.

From Deregulation to De-Globalisation
Thatcher’s vision was clear: privatise, deregulate, and liberate the invisible hand from the clutches of bureaucracy. It was a gospel exported gleefully across the Atlantic by Reagan and mimicked in various shades from Canberra to Santiago. Yet here we are, in 2025, with tariffs rising, multilateralism fraying, and governments pouring billions into industrial policy.

Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, Trump’s tariff tantrums (renewed in his second act), and Europe’s green subsidies all reek of dirigisme Thatcher would have detested. She sold off British Telecom and British Gas; today, governments are scrambling to renationalise energy infrastructure and subsidise semiconductor fabs. Even Britain, the laboratory of Thatcherism, is now hooked on state support—from furlough schemes to massive cost-of-living bailouts.

Inflation? Borrow. Growth? Pray.
“Sound money” was Thatcher’s mantra, one she repeated even as it cost her public favour. Today’s leaders, in contrast, spend like drunken Keynesians at a disco. Central banks oscillate between rate hikes and liquidity injections like unsure teens on a seesaw. Fiscal rectitude has been sacrificed at the altar of political expediency. The Iron Lady, who once warned “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” might shudder at the new breed of conservative populists whose economic playbooks are a paradox of tax cuts, tariffs, and trillion-dollar deficits.

Geopolitics: The Atlantic Drift and Beyond
Thatcher’s foreign policy was unapologetically Atlanticist. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Reagan, stared down the Soviets, and waged war to protect the Falklands. Today, however, the so-called “Special Relationship” is more “Situational Relationship.” The U.S. lurches between isolationism and interventionism, while Britain struggles to find post-Brexit relevance.

NATO is no longer a Cold War monolith but a coalition of the frayed and the fretful. China’s assertive rise presents a challenge Thatcher never directly faced, though one suspects she would have confronted it with her trademark mix of moral absolutism and economic self-interest. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine might have drawn her ire—but would she recognise today’s hesitant, disjointed Western response?

Meanwhile, the Global South has emerged as a confident bloc, playing the U.S. and China off against each other. Thatcher’s binary Cold War worldview—East vs. West—has given way to a multipolar theatre where India, Brazil, and ASEAN nations script their own lines.

The Rise of Techno-Statism and Surveillance Capital
She deregulated the telephone exchange. Today, data is the new oil, and governments now kneel at the altar of algorithmic monopolies she helped unleash. The power once wielded by Whitehall or Washington now resides in cloud servers and proprietary algorithms. The very deregulation that birthed Silicon Valley has evolved into a digital panopticon she would have neither foreseen nor sanctioned.

Economic statecraft has also changed form. Soft power today is weaponised through spreadsheets and supply chains. Thatcher believed in deterrence through strength—2025 believes in deterrence through spreadsheets. The rise of sanctions, rare earth nationalism, and semiconductors-as-leverage would have been alien to her militaristic instincts.

Culture Wars and Social Fragmentation
Thatcher’s tenure prefigured many of today’s culture war debates. The miners’ strikes were skirmishes in a broader battle over national identity. But today’s socio-political tribalism—fuelled by social media, identity politics, and algorithmic echo chambers—may even exceed the divisions of her era. Ironically, the very individualism she celebrated has spiralled into performative rage and digital Balkanisation.

Crypto, Central Banks, and Digital Confusion
Thatcher was a hard money advocate. She stood with Volcker in the fight against inflation. What would she make of Bitcoin maximalists preaching financial liberation through code, or governments experimenting with central bank digital currencies? The Iron Lady once fought inflation with monetary resolve; today, Bitcoiners claim to do the same—with memes and mining rigs.

Legacy: A Mild Rotational Turn
Yet before we declare a full spiritual somersault in her grave, let’s not forget: many of Thatcher’s reforms remain embedded in global economic DNA. Labour market flexibility, an independent central bank, and the ethos of privatisation persist. Even the EU, which she famously sparred with, adopted budgetary discipline and liberal market rules in her mould—until, of course, reality intervened.

But her fiercest critics—and they are legion—might argue that the social dislocation her policies accelerated laid the groundwork for today’s populist backlash. Deindustrialisation, inequality, and alienation have fed the very protectionism and nationalism she so loathed.

Conclusion: Is She Turning?
Is she turning in her grave? Perhaps—but only slightly. A sharp, disapproving tilt rather than a full pirouette. The global order has not so much rejected Thatcherism as it has mutated it—into something she would barely recognise: a neoliberalism wrapped in nationalist garb, practiced by leaders who quote Milton Friedman and then subsidise steel mills.

Were she alive today, Thatcher might look around and, in clipped tones, proclaim, “No, no, no”—not to Europe this time, but to the abandonment of economic discipline and strategic clarity. Then again, perhaps she’d see the chaos and whisper, with uncharacteristic resignation: this is the price of unfinished revolutions. Ironically, the lady’s not for turning! 

[https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/21/the-ladys-not-for-turning-oct-10-1980/]