what was that about zeitgeists again

Warren Ellis, in Planetary #7, January 2000:

Jack always said it was difficult for us Americans to understand what it was really like [in Britain] in the darkest parts of the eighties.

We had a doddery old president who talked about the end of the world a little too often and was being run by the wrong people.

But they had a prime minister who was genuinely mad. [...] She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote ... ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years ... England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.

England during the Thatcher years vs. the US under Bush II, and/or Falklands vs. Iraq: compare and contrast?