Why Margaret Thatcher is hard to mourn

[cali]

"It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. She was a gentle and peaceable woman – my mother, that is – and said few hard words about anyone, but in certain parts of the United Kingdom, and among certain social classes, Mrs T was detested, and not just for what people thought were her policies but for her persona – for what she was. At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity.

<snip>

Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. There had been Churchill and his defiance; there had been Kipling and his If; there had been her father in his grocer's shop in Grantham. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. Keith Joseph was her guru. Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield – one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. The economic crisis that Britain faced had been created not by the working class itself, these wholesome people that Sir Keith remembered from his vac weeks in Barnsley, but by a working-class leadership that was determined to bring the whole system crashing down.

Mrs T shared the same reductionism. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. Not the loss of imperial markets, not lazy management, not the education system, not the decline of the industrial ethic: bitter men standing on platforms and asking for a show of hands to down tools were solely to blame.

<snip>

We can't blame (or credit) her for all of this, of course. But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive.

<snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-hard-to-mourn

[Katashi_itto]

1. What I don't get is it's ok to say bad things about Her Nibs. But we arent allowed to say anything

bad when any Republican pol snuffs it.

[BeyondGeography]

2. Perceptive article, but nobody can say she didn't know her target audience

Last edited Tue Apr 9, 2013, 12:39 PM - Edit history (1)

There is a strong "get on with it" strain in Britain, which invented the phrase after all. The most nihilistic and brutal (and most darkly funny and intelligent) bosses and colleagues I've ever worked with have been English. She understood those people perfectly, and there was more than enough scared and fed up voters willing to go along for a steerage ride with the powerful. But the article makes the point; mourning people who are expert in catering to the worst in people is hard.