Maggie's Farm no more

[shewhomust]

If this were fiction, there'd be so much significance to be extracted from the fact that Margaret Thatcher died at the Ritz Hotel. For one thing, hotels very rarely admit that they are places where people die: the polite fiction is that guests die "on the way to hospital". In this, too, Margaret Thatcher was exceptional. For another thing, the woman who told us that our national dream was to own our own homes did not die in hers; she said "... who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families..." - and when you can no longer manage the stairs at home, there's the Ritz Hotel. The glory days of the Iron Lady are long dead: so long that this morning's Guardian leads on a ten-year old article by Hugo Young.

desperance points out that the refrain "Ding-dong, the witch is dead" which is currently echoing around the internet was also pressed into service twenty-three years ago, when Thatcher's own party had just forced her out of office. "That was the right time to rejoice," he says, "and so we did." I'm not so sure. When the manager in the office where I then worked passed on that news, I was the only person in the room who wasn't delighted. I wanted her to stay on as leader and lose the election: not just for the pleasure of seeing her lose, though it would have been a pleasure indeed, but because I thought, as her party did, that her leadership made it more likely that they would lose. Ah, well...

Her legacy is - well, the radio has been talking non-stop about how she made Britain the country it is today (though they say it as though this were a good thing). The dream of home ownership for all brought a shortage of council houses to rent, property bubbles and negative equity. The destruction of British industry delivered us into the hands of the bankers. She took us into a stupid and unnecessary war. She sold us shares in things we already owned, and told us that we had no stake in the general well-being, that only our private interests mattered. As rozk says, for all that, it is impossible to pity her, impossible to forgive.

I don't pity her, and I don't forgive. But I can't summon up the venom for Thatcher that I feel for Blair. I expect nothing from the Conservative party but greed and stupidity, but I expect (or used to) the Labour Party to oppose them, to criticise, to explain why There Is An Alternative and, when they get the chance, to put right what the Tories have put wrong. You may quote Hilaire Belloc on Thatcher's not-a-state-funeral-honest:

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept : for I had longed to see him hanged.

(You can even sing it.) I'll save it for Blair, the worst part of Thatcher's legacy.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Blair as her worst creation? Perhaps.

As the conservative-with-a-small-'c' that I am, I look to her effect on the nation's morals: she was the champion and the cheerleader for the new morality, or moral degradation, that aspires to be the biggest predator, the victor, beating down and devouring all to be the final crocodile…

…As the lake dries out to be a swamp, and then a wallow, then a desert full of bones.

I remember, as a boy, playing in the roofless bones of factories; and that is how we should remember Thatcher.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes, this: the champion of Daily Mail values, self-interested and self-righteous, the stridency disguised by voice coaches into that dreadful honeyed cooing...

Thatcher was never a conservative-with-a-small-'c', of course.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I wanted her to stay on as leader and lose the election: not just for the pleasure of seeing her lose, though it would have been a pleasure indeed, but because I thought, as her party did, that her leadership made it more likely that they would lose.

Actually I'd have preferred that too, for much the same reasons, and I said so at the time. But we didn't get that, and hey: she was gone, so we rejoiced anyway. And every political life notoriously ends in disappointment of one kind or another; she would always have been prepared to lose an election; I don't think she was ever prepared to be flung out by her own kind. I cherish the hope that betrayal bit deeper and longer than defeat ever would.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I cherish the hope that betrayal bit deeper and longer than defeat ever would.

This is some consolation, of course. But I'd rather have had a Labour victory under Kinnock, and avoided the rise of Blair, and New Labour.

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

John V-W has drawn this to my attention, via email:
Sometime after Castlereagh's death, Lord Byron wrote a savage quip about his grave:

Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.