10th April 2013
The queen is dead. Long live the Queen.
Yes, Mrs T, the Iron Lady, Maggie (Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out!) is no more, having rather oddly slipped from this realm while in a room at the Ritz hotel, in lieu of a care home, a most fitting tribute to one of the fruits of her 11 years in government: care in the community. Her community was, for the last two decades of her life, rather small, select, and often foreign. The prophet and practitioner had been largely rejected in her own land, only not quite. She was rejected for most of the period since she was deposed by her former colleagues and servants immediately before the Gulf War in 1991, but her ideas, principles, and the word that has been so often revived in her obituaries “convictions”, have been absorbed by the environment and leeched into the water supply, and the socio-political marrow of the nation. Thereby the Labour government of 1997-2010 extolled Thatcherite economics and conviction politics, and the Con-Dem coalition since then has taken the revival even further, beyond Thatcher, to attempt to cast a post-Thatcher society of austerity for the lower orders and audacity for the uppers. If such a perspective may strike readers as perpetuation of class war this is certainly not the intention, but the aims of the present government are clearly to cut public spending far further than Maggie did, although with less prospects of glory and electoral revival in foreign wars.
In the televised and printed accounts of Thatcher’s life, the Falklands War stands out in them all. This is both natural and odd, for while the ‘Falklands Factor’ did more for the electoral fortunes of the Tory Party than any policy, the obituaries fail to mention another important aspect. The Tory cabinet, specifically Defence Secretary John Nott, made plans for defence cuts, and for changes of defence priorities, while the Foreign Office was continuing previous prodigious efforts to reduce its workload by passing the islands and islanders off to anyone else that would take them, to tidy up this ragged edge of Britain’s colonial cloth. Thus, apart from General Galtieri and his Argentine junta chums, the leaders of the Tory cabinet were the most responsible and culpable for the unnecessarily terrible cost in blood and treasure for such a barren land. BBC news reports have also been deeply misleading, that the armed forces advised against an effort to retake the islands, but were steeled by Mrs T, whereas in fact the most senior officer of the Royal Navy staff was the one who charged round to 10 Downing Street and made sure that the absence of army and RAF colleagues was utilised in the first dya of the crisis to promote the sending of a naval task force.
She lied to Parliament about the sinking of the cruiser Belgrano, and yet she networked quietly, and very smoothly (considering) with her European allies whom weeks before she had been happy to be seen ‘handbagging’ and deriding, to prevent arms being shipped to Argentina. She similarly worked on President Regan, who was being advised by his State Department and most of his cabinet to play the role of kindly neutral to both sides, and in concert with Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger managed to change US policy. Weinberger was eventually given an honorary knighthood. Regan was given a grand state visit to Britain. But while the Falklands Factor worked in her favour, her glorification in victory, even rather bloody victory, repelled many others, an effect soon amplified by Thatcher’s continuation of war by other means, turning against trade unions, the mentally ill, football supporters, and those resisting the later poll tax. It was the latter policy that led to her ultimate demise, but it was the cumulative effect that, like Churchill, although she had proven a decent war-time leader, she tended to see too much of peacetime in combative terms, with the enemy among her own nationals. Indeed, she referred to striking coal miners in 1984 as ‘the enemy within’, and those protesting the destruction of heavy industry in Britain as ‘moaning minnies’. Everyone who disagreed was not only wrong, but seriously flawed as her conviction politics made enemies of all dissenters, and eventually the British became sick and tired of being told what was right and wrong, particularly as the idea that a street cleaner would pay the same local tax as a city banker, or Prime Minister, was for most people patently not right.
The eulogies on the day of her death were astonishing. Hardly a critical word was to be heard in mainstream media in Britain, yet those that found her objectionable hadn’t all vanished or changed their tunes, even if their views had mellowed and moderated. However, the most stark gap in perception was provided by the BBC. Glorious, imperious, convicted (!), regal, the epithets flowed to like a sickening stream of molten syrup and chocolate all day long. Until 6:35pm. Then the regional BBC news began. In the north-east of England this was provided by Look North (which is also the name for the BBC local news from Leeds, but which is a completely different show), and the opening lines? “Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dies. But did she devastate this region? We’ll get a range of views.” That range was from ‘yes’ to ‘of course she bloody well did!’, with only a very minor diversion through ‘well, she divided opinion, but managed to bring Nissan to Sunderland’. In fact, the most apt eulogy I heard from anyone in the region (encompassing rather conservative rural parts, such as North Yorkshire and Cumbria, as well as the hard, once-heavy industrial areas of Teesside, Wearside, and Tyneside), was the comment that the only way news of her demise could have been more welcome was if she had been kicked to death by a retired Durham pit pony. The lack of comprehension of such views by mainstream national (meaning, London) media is indicative of the effect Thatcher had on the land. The south, with many notable inner-city exceptions, experienced a mild recession, and a major boom, and largely embraced her get-rich-quick view of life, and her look-out-for-number-one social philosophy. The north, and parts of Kent and Wales, had been devastated by the miners’ strike (driven on by an equally ideologically fixated union leadership without the sense to pick its battles carefully) and its consequences, as well as the mass closure of shipyards, steel mills, and other centres of industrial (and coincidentally union) power. Hence the status of her as a reviled figure, and therefore the street party scenes, and popularity of “Ding-Dong The Witch is Dead” in Scotland and northern England, even while they weep in Sevenoaks and Grantham. Indeed, she did more than any other individual since Bonnie Prince Charlie or Butcher Cumberland to promote Scottish nationalism, as her party enjoyed a comfortable majority in Parliament while losing every seat in Scotland. The auld kingdom would prove the test ground for the poll tax, and the catalyst for her eventual downfall.
Maggie won her battles. Almost every one of them. But she was still deposed in tears by her own cabinet, ravaged in Parliament by her supposed friends and colleagues who returned her own brand of brutal regalism upon her. The biographical film The Iron Lady was so poignant for it portrayed the former leader and axis of power as a frail, sad, disappointed spectre of her former self. Like seeing Miss Havisham, not only as the jilted bride, but also as the young beauty full of such lustre and desirability, the before and after, with and without. Her convictions no longer convinced.
Her funeral on Wednesday 17th April will be an interesting occasion, with street parties planned in parallel with the non-state funeral in London with full military honours. The tastelessness of celebrations is obviousness, as she was a mother, a person, a woman of rare achievements, many of them of enormous utility. Thatcher cut threw the cloying, controlling, negative atmosphere that was the default setting of Britain in the 1970s, and the under-performing economy was dogged by restrictive union practices and amateur management culture, both of which she wanted to sweep away. Sadly, she tried to reform management, but declared war upon organised workers. Her legacy should have been liberal reformer, but she got a taste for the blood, realizing that conflict sold better than conciliation, and was the easiest route to proliferating her convictions. The only problems with this tendency were that it accumulated resentment and resulted in the erosion of her social sensibilities, so that she could neither consent to nor even comprehend opposition to her ideas and policies.
How many other retired politicians could generate such extreme emotions? Nixon? Possibly, but without the irreverence and real aggressive dislike. There are no equivalents for Thatcher, not even Blair, for he took aspects of her philosophy, but provided extreme contrast by aiming to unite the nation, to create consensus, even where none existed. That is how he generated resentment, as well as allying with a United States’ leadership intent upon war at any cost.
This is another point of commonality. Thatcher aligned herself with Regan, and then Bush, despite the US invading Grenada, backing Pol Pot and Latin American murderous dictators, and all manner of other nonsense, but cursed and blighted the efforts of the Commonwealth to censure South African apartheid, deriding the intent of those efforts. That is until 1987, when the US changed its policy and imposed sanctions, and then she was instantly converted. Only she wasn’t. Her convictions were clear. Money and the accumulation of national wealth were her convictions, and she fought everything that got in her way. Only she had another conviction, that Britain, which she extolled as reborn and strong was actually weak and in need of propping up by the ‘special relationship’ (more special for us than for them).
So the Iron Lady saw the weakness, while extolling strength, preached peace and harmony upon assuming power in 1979, while personifying conflict and strife throughout her premiership, and being characterised as the woman who broke the glass ceiling, while doing little or nothing for women in politics, work, or broader society. She will be a subject of fascination for decades, for the British and non-British alike, and thus is a major figure in history, but not a great British politician. Greatness requires transcending opposition, and leaving a legacy of respect. The iconic photo of her immediate demise will be the graffiti on a Belfast wall: “Iron Lady, Rust in Peace.” She deserves better, but couldn’t expect any better.
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