A couple of weeks ago, in an interview to the daily Corriere della Sera, Mr Agnelli said something he probably always thought but that he had never dared say in such an incontrovertible way: “Italy's real problem is that it lacked ten years of Thatcher's government”.  
Thatcher's government here stands for the great liberal revolution, or “blue revolution”, that turned Great Britain upside down between 1979 - the year of the Iron Lady's first electoral victory - and 1990 - when her party forced her to retire after three legislatures.  
With her revolution a sick Great Britain turned into the most dynamic and freest country with the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union. It wasn't a transient miracle, but rather a deep metamorphosis that not only changed economic and social structures but also people's way of thinking.  
When the Labour Party decided to go back in office after 17 years of an often humiliating opposition, in fact, it had to rely on Tony Blair who can be considered as a post litteram Thatcherian under every respect. Instead of turning back history's time, as a left-wing premier should have done and many of his supporters would have loved to, he vigorously resumed the liberalisation and reorganisation programme of the welfare state that the Iron Lady had left unfinished and that her successor and conservative John Major had not backed with enough conviction. Rather, Blair pushed even further because not even Thatcher had ever dared touch the subsidies to single mothers and to the handicapped, the last target of the Labour government's offensive.  
In a historical prospective. With her reforms, “Maggie” paved the way for one of the most important turning-points in the economical history of the West: that of the victory of the private sector over the public one, of individualism over pantrade-unionism, of meritocracy over egalitarianism.  
When she began her work she was alone against everybody.  
When she started the privatisation process that was later imitated all around the world she was mocked by the ruling culture of the left.  
When she fought her historical battle against the miners' trade union in order to downsize their excessive power, she was scorned as the working classes' number one enemy.  
When she decided to sell all the public-owned houses to their respective tenants, she was accused of squandering the wealth of the nation.  
Today, however, fewer than twenty years later, those some policies are already being applied almost universally by the post-Communists of the East, by Latin America's populists, by the Italian Olive  
Tree alliance as well as by the Spanish Partido Popular with a larger or smaller determination.  
Furthermore, when political intervention in the economy was rampant,  she was the first to claim that the functions of the state in a modern democratic and liberal society had to be drastically reduced and this principle is now precisely being repeated by almost every government.  
Besides, her success can also be measured by the diffusion of the term “Thatcherism” to indicate Liberalism: only few statesmen in the second half of this century - Stalin, De Gaulle, Reagan - had had the honour to see an “ism” being permanently added to their surname.  
Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocer who laboriously strove to go to Oxford, was neither a Nobel-prize winner for economics, nor a financial genius, but she was incredibly tough, had much common sense and had an extraordinary political insight.  
When everybody was already taking Great Britain's decline for granted, she took up arms and made her people feel proud of being English again, and even employed them in an improbable war against Argentina to defend the Falkland Islands. She also reawoke their sense of individual responsibility, ending the vagaries of the welfare state whose goal, since its birth, had been to look after everyone “from the cradle to the tomb”.  
Her first great clash was against the trade unions, then inseparably tied to the Labour Party, that were the relentless and dull watchdogs of anachronistic privileges and the leading responsible for Great Britain's industrial decline.  
Striking was the rule, as it was more or less in Italy in the same period: people struck for the wage, the working hours, for solidarity with other categories, to solve the clashes between the unions: in the sixties, for example, all naval dockyards were stopped for weeks because of a clash between smiths and carpenters about who had to make the holes for the screws connecting the ships' metal and wooden parts.  
Margaret Thatcher put an end to it with a law stating that strikes were illegal if they were not previously approved with a secret ballot by the majority of the workers and also made the union leaders civilly responsible for the damage caused by the strikes that did not comply with the rules. She showed her determination especially in the dispute pertaining the closing of the coal mines that had been working at a loss for a long time and that had turned from a huge resource, back in 1950, into a hindrance for the economy.  
The leader of the minors' union Arthur Scargill, an old-fashioned Marxist demagogue, jumped on the barricades and intimated that he would have never tolerated such an abuse in the name of the market.  
The fight had no holds barred; the government imposed strict nation-wide restrictions on coal consumption for over an year and the union did not hesitate (although this was revealed only much later) to be financed by Libya in order to continue paying a subsidy to the strikers. Even within the Conservative Party some supported the miners, a category made popular by Cronin's novels and that, after all, had honestly contributed to the United Kingdom's wealth.  
Maggie, however, knew that the strike was extremely risky for her and was inflexible: in the end the strikers throughout the nation began to give up, and the rule stating that the state would have stopped subsidising incurable companies was claimed once and for all. Since then not only was the trade unions' power on company reduced, but the new generations of workers have begun to realise that the union lost and consequently most of them stopped joining it.  
After reforming the industrial relations by considerably strengthening the management, Thatcher started the first wide European programme of privatisations with the sale of British Telecom in 1984. The privatisation of British Telecom was rapidly followed by British Gas, British Airways, Jaguar, Rover and a large number of public service enterprises, including the railways (and except the postal service that in the United Kingdom works very well and also achieves considerable profits). With that blitz, performed with the skilful contribution of the City's best brains, the Conservative government achieved three extremely important results at the same time:  

1) it considerably reduced the national debt that, since then, has continued to comply with Maastricht's standards. Thus, it is no longer a problem for the United Kingdom, not even now when interest rates on the pound are higher than on other competing currents.  
2) It gave efficiency and competitiveness back to enterprises that accounted for over 10% of the GDP, gave a job to one million and a half people and ruled over vital sectors such as transports, energy, communications, steel and the ship-building industry.  
Before the arrival of cyclone Maggie, those enterprises were afflicted by the germs of public parasiticism and its lack of incentives to work hard, to apply the last technological breakthroughs and to increase productivity.  
Today British Telecom and British Airways, freed from the dead-weight of hundreds of executives lacking all initiatives and tens of thousands of useless employees, are among the world's most efficient companies in their respective fields, and are also becoming a reference point for their competitors.  
Clearly, privatisations were not painless and also caused many legal, personnel and functionality problems.  
One of the Iron Lady's merits was her pioneer work on a basically then-unknown field (the first thirty years after the war had in fact been marked by an opposing wide nationalisation trend) that showed other countries that followed her example in later years the easiest way to do things.  
The relatively fast privatisation of state-owned industries performed by the East's most efficient governments following the fall of the Berlin wall was also due to the available “English model” they could be inspired by.  
3) It created a new class of minor shareholders interested in their companies' as well as in the entire market economy's excellent achievable performances.  
To start the operation properly, the government fixed relatively low prices for the placing of the shares, thus allowing citizens rather than the national revenue to benefit, in order to help savers to understand the advantages of the securities market and to persuade them to participate in the following privatisations as well. Privatisations, in fact, were successful not only for the government but for the Stock Exchange too.  
This led to a real psychological change of the mass: it made people forget the “masters” and “workers” division and gave them a considerable sense of participation. If now the English are no longer notoriously considered as cynical loafers as they were in the sixties and seventies, the years of the great decline, is also due to popular shareholding that made them participate in the economical issues more than all previous reforms.  
The whole work was then completed with the transfer, at very advantageous conditions in this case too, of millions of council houses to their tenants who decided to progressively deliver entire areas from degradation.  
4) It was decided to prepare the country for the pre-industrial era in a scientific way.  
Thus, less productive industries (such as mines, steel-works, the Midlands' textile works) were progressively eliminated and the tertiary sector was developed as much as possible.  
Within such context, the so-called Big Bang of the City, that is the total liberalisation of financial markets that gave London the utmost edge with respect to the other markets, proved fundamental.  

Margaret Thatcher was accused of having “reduced the country's industrial apparatus” and of having paved the way for its collapse because her policies were adverse to any kind of disguised protectionism or state subsidies that, for example, led to the actual disappearance of the British car industry (the surviving brands are now owned by foreign multinationals). Facts proved exactly the opposite.  
It is true that at first the shutting down of many bankrupt companies made production drop but, according to a genuine logic of the market, new activities replaced those who had disappeared very rapidly and today the United Kingdom - faithful to Thatcherism despite the Labour Party's return to power - is, as we said, the European country that best managed to tackle the scourge of unemployment.  
Another essential element of the Thatcherian's renaissance was the tax reform. With the Labour Party that founded the welfare state, taxation had reached intolerable levels, discouraging economical activities and seriously preventing savings from being formed.  
Just as the United States' Republican administration, the Iron Lady lowered the highest rates and stopped, so to speak, the “press”, although she slipped on the poll tax that resulted unacceptable for the people.  
Today the fiscal system clearly represents a model, both for its shrewd distribution of the taxation among the various categories and for its efficiency as far as the collection is concerned.  
Clearly, there is another side of the Thatcher coin that her countless opponents have always striven to highlight.  
He obsession for the balancing of accounts, for example, led her to cut excessively the funds for education, consequently lowering the young generations' level of training. Not even her constancy, for example, managed to lower the costs of the welfare state although she succeeded in reducing the quantity of milk for kindergartens that earned her the unpleasant nickname of milk-snatcher.  
Her congenital Euro-scepticism and importance she wanted to give to national interests, for example, often led to the isolation of the United Kingdom from the European Union and, parallely, to a considerably lower influence in Brussels.  
As far as the war of the Falklands is concerned, on the other hand, opinions quite disagree.  
Many thought it was an anachronistic and excessively expensive operation.  
However, after fifteen years, it is clear that it had some positive repercussions both for Great Britain and for the international community as a whole: it sent, long before the Gulf War, a very important signal to all kinds of dictators stating that the western world, although being permissive in many questions with developing countries, would have not tolerated any armed attacks; it ultimately contributed to the fall of a military regime in Argentina and to the return of democracy in Buenos Aires as well as in the whole Latin America.  
As far as the English were concerned, it gave them the will to fight and much self-confidence so that, despite the war-related casualties and financial problems, Thatcher gained the most overwhelming majority in the history of the House of Commons in the elections that followed.  
Today Margaret Thatcher, who has now become a Baroness, looks at the British political scenario from the House of Lords with a mixture of satisfaction and bitterness. She looks at the Labour premier Blair unscrupulously applying the programme she had not had the time to complete and at a shattered Conservative Party who sent her away from Downing Street.  
From time to time, someone in Europe half-jokingly suggests to “borrow” her to apply the English cure to their own countries.  
Even if that were technically possible, Maggie would refuse it because she is too imbued with her “being British”.  
But she knows perfectly well that she started something that will influence the world's course of events for at least a generation.