By the late 1990s cable TV and the proliferation of media venues meant an oversupply of programs and platforms, all competing for the same audiences and facing an under supply of content. Then you add the Internet on the now the public was demanding content 24/7 all the time, not just in the morning and the evening like in the old days. Within this context, standards for content dramatically dropped. For example, the History Channel morphed into the Hitler channel and now basically the nut case channel a large portion of the time with all kinds of garbage like ancient aliens and UFO shows proliferating the schedule. The result is that there's just a huge demand for conspiracy theorists because whatever the value of the content, it fills up a news Platform schedule. The Diana conspiracy thing emerge just as this media transformation was really happening and taking off, and that's his argument and I agree with it up to a point. But I think that any analysis of Diana conspiracy theories has to account for the appearance of another woman on the British political and social seen, her name being Margaret Thatcher. Take a look at these pictures of people in the street in the United Kingdom, on the day that Margaret Thatcher died, April 8th, 2013. This was a person about whom few Britons were neutral. Born in a sleepy your provincial town in Lincolnshire County, England. Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a Methodist coupled who ran a grocery store and she instantly became a voice for the Far-right of the UK Conservative Party. She rose in the ranks of the party, she made her first mark as Minister of Education in Edward Heath's conservative government by abolishing the distribution of free milk in schools. Maggie Thatcher Milk snatchers went the protests crime. But Thatcher's your response became her trademark. "Ask me if I give a bleep" she insisted, and it rather quickly made her Prime Minister. Where she won the silver k of Iron Lady. An insult that she turned into a complement. Thatcher became prime minister not because the Conservative Party was strong, but because the Labor Party, the opposition to the conservatives, was weak, divided between old-school trade unionists who obstinately launched national strikes against profit lists sectors like the coal industry, which had been devastated by Europe's reliance on oil. A younger generation of progressives who knew that the left had to respond more flexibly to globalization. But Thatcher didn't care that a large portion of the country didn't support her agenda. As Prime Minister from 1979 through 1990, she privatized the United Kingdom, she denationalized industries like coal and telecommunications. She ended state subsidies on industries like textiles, steel, and ship building. She privatized vast swaths of the UK transportation, public housing, energy utilities. As a result, she created an arguably more efficient economy but at great social cost. She started her job as Prime Minister calling the unemployment total of 1.6 million British workers a "Scandalously high figure. " By 1985, that number had doubled to 3.25 million unemployed, one of the highest in Europe. The result ironically was that the actual share of money the British welfare state paid for its citizens stayed more or less the same. The UK still took 42 percent of the UK's gross domestic product and taxes and spent it on some form of public subsidy. That's because under her tenure millions of citizens lost their jobs and now privatized or denationalized industries and consequently lived on unemployment benefits otherwise known as the dole. The bottom line was that before Thatcher, the government had subsidized Britons to be middle-class, now it's subsidized them to be poor. Thatcherism created a more, "Efficient economy" but also a much poorer society, to which Thatcher amazingly replied and I quote "There's no such thing as society. There are families and their children." Thatcher stepped down in 1990 and was replaced by John Major who continued her agenda privatizing the nation's railroad system. In 1997, the year that Diana died, the Conservative Party stood on the verge of being voted out by Tony Blair's new version of the Labor Party. But the whole of British society was really in a state of shock. Tony Judt, a historian of post-World War II Europe writes of the Thatcher years. "To anyone who had fallen asleep in England in 1978 and awoken 20 years later, their country would have seemed unfamiliar indeed quite unlike its old self and markedly different from the rest of Europe and much more like Ronald Reagan's United States." European male leaders found Thatcher intriguing and of course made sexist cracks about her, such as French President Francois Mitterrand's famous description of Thatcher as having "The eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe." But if there's one thing that Thatcher did not have was Marilyn Monroe's heart. Here's another signature Monroe quote "I don't understand why people aren't just a little bit more generous with each other." By 1997 the people of the United Kingdom were desperately hungry for somebody, anybody in government or national leadership, who seemed willing to offer what Thatcher proudly insisted that she would never offer under any circumstances, generosity, compassion, and vulnerability. Princess Diana was open and honest with the world about her bulimia, her relationship with her husband, the importance of her children, the tensions within her family. She often said, every one of us needs to show how much we care for each other and in the process care for ourselves. Now, she was gone and the outpouring of sympathy and mourning for her that ensued, may be reasonably interpreted as an outpouring of sympathy and mourning for a lost Briton. If the new Briton was willing to kill off, so much of its former caring self, why, wondered so many people out loud, would it not kill off Diana, Princess of Wales? But before we leave this subject, we need to visit the strangest interpretation of all, the interpretations of Diana's death.
