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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Last of my "4 Favs" is gone, shame. May, Merkel, Ardern and Sturgeon.

I agree that women have seemed relatively impressive at the top when they have stuck compared to their male counterparts; again, I don't know if that is coincidental, or representative of something we should learn from.

Theresa May is certainly the exception on that list. She's widely regarded (next to Liz Truss) as one of the most ineffectual Prime Ministers of the last fifty years.

As terrible as May was, it does seem that a lot of the derision toward her is rooted in either scapegoating (from the Conservative side) or - more commonly - misogyny (from all sides).

She certainly was not competent, and did a lot of damage, but she doesn't compare to the incompetence of either her predecessor or successor. It's also worth noting that she was handed a poison chalice: the Brexit mandate, which she had been opposed to during the original referendum, and subsequently blamed for every predictable misstep in implementation (mostly by Johnson, who had shied away from the leadership role in the immediate wake of the referendum, despite being an instigator).

Either way you look at it, she was saddled with a lot of blame for problems that predated her office.

I think the disdain for her was less misogyny (the ghost of Margaret Thatcher still excites the conservatives in a way only directly comparable to the Republican worship of Regan) and more her utter unlikability.

A politician can be unlikable and effective, or likeable and ineffective. Once in a very great while they combine efficacy and electability. But to combine such utter ineffectuality with a total lack of charisma is to ensure destain.

But I agree, she didn't create the environment that led to Brexit like Cameron, nor did she help push it through like Johnson. Whatever her legacy, it's as nothing next to theirs.

Merkel made very serious strategic mistakes that have cost Germany and Europe a lot and are still costing a lot. Russia, energy policy, open door policy on immigrants (which has played a part in precipitating Brexit), she got pretty much every important, strategic issue wrong.

Was Merkel responsible for the movement of refugees within europe? I don't think it is that simple. The structure of power within Germany is also such that she simply was not able to allow or disallow the moevement of refugees into Germany...

The Syrian migrant crisis was deliberately created by Putin to damage the European project. So... No. What Merkel did was morally necessary. Brexit was the culmination of literally decades of Tory 'Eurosceptic' scare mongering. I grew up listening to it daily on every British news programme. Topped off by a very British style of xenophobia that has feared the 'influx' of 'foreigners' since at least the time of Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech. The British working class and lower middle class, especially outside of London, have been crushed economically since the Winter of Discontent. They've been taught to blame outsiders for their economic precarity. The same narrative is now repeating in Ireland. It's just as untrue there...

In terms of energy it's more ambiguous, certainly the move away from nuclear was short term a bad call. Long term that's a big discussion involving externalities like decommissioning. More topically, the energy crisis last Winter wasn't a result of Russian brinkmanship but the American destruction of Nord Stream. Hard to blame Merkel for not having anticipated the war.

The list makes no sense - revealing your motives.

I wouldn't include May (see my reply to a sibling comment), but otherwise the only other person that seems slightly odd in that list is Merkel for being a christian conservative, but - even as a leftist - she's still one of the only one leaders I can think of that I would actually respect the integrity of (individual political stances aside). So the list seems relatively sound.

I presume you're seeing gender when you say "motives" & otherwise ignoring any actual substance of these leaderships?

I'm genuinely struggling to think of any male leaders I would add to the list - Hollande is a contender but there's a lot of issues there. Open to any suggestions for the list...

Margaret Thatcher? I personally don't agree with all her ideas, but she has rescued the UK out of the mess they were in in the early '80s, and she managed to do it in an extremely hostile environment.

If you're having a discussion with people who like Sturgeon & Ardern, who have some issues with Merkel & May, raising one of the most hated women in recent history seems an unusual take.

Thatcher (& Reagan) are rightly recognised today as being responsible for untold suffering. Even the UK Conservative party (Hague) have since spoken out against her approach.

She didn't "rescue" the UK from anything, unless when you say "UK" you exclusively mean "UK shareholders". Her policies caused skyrocketing unemployment & poverty, the only positives anyone has cited were macroeconomic & even Blair thought those changes resulted from societal shifts rather than from Thatcher's political interventions.

The environment was reactively hostile - the hostilities more than justified.

That's nonsense, there are lots of people in the UK who rate Thatcher as one of the best PMs ever. The UK finished the 80s in a drastically better position than at the start in terms of poverty and employment, the latter of which only skyrocketed at the start of her first term because the previous government was socialist, and had been manipulating the economy to prioritize people putting in jobs even if those jobs were useless. The USSR also had low unemployment, but that doesn't mean they had a good economy.

> there are lots of people in the UK who rate Thatcher

Very true. Too many. I did say "most", which doesn't mean "universally". Thankfully the (far too large) set of fans in the UK don't represent any kind of global majority.

> The UK finished the 80s in a drastically better position than at the start in terms of poverty and employment

This... isn't remotely true.

Poverty went from 13% before Thatcher to over 22% after. You acknowledge unemployment skyrocketed, but the reduction at the end of her term was minor - overall rate finished much higher than before she was in office.

> The USSR also had low unemployment, but that doesn't mean they had a good economy.

Bringing the USSR in here is a strawman because any rebuttal from me can come across as being in support of the USSR, of I'm not - I strongly believe the stats here are not representative of reality. But Soviets aside, the fact you don't think people having income is inherently "good" but instead prioritise something abstract called "the economy" says a lot about your priorities.

Can I ask what exactly is "good" about a "good economy" if more people are in poverty?

I personally think that she laid the groundwork for some of the problems we're seeing today. She 'sold the family silver' which creates short-term gains, but in the end you've damaged long-term foundations of the economy: housing, industrial capability, investment in infrastructure etc.

Despite the conservative party publicly acknowledging the errors of her ways in the late 90s, she had already moved the UK overton window far enough to pave the way for New Labour. I doubt Brexit would've been possible without two right-wing parties dominating the political sphere. Even Old-Labour-Corbyn's resistance to "take sides" post-referendum says so much about how much public perception of the political spectrum had shifted in the UK.

If the list makes no sense or follow a pattern, how does it reveal a motive?

It has a pattern: all women. So I guess the motive might be "women = good".

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