So, secondly, I always thought it curious as a nipper how none of the caricatures looked like her. She didn't have a nose like a scythe. She had a high, wonky forehead. But when I came to caricature her in my visual notebook - along with the rest of the cabinet, many of whom I'd never seen outside of Spitting Image or Steve Bell - I went along with it.
The exception. Note: normal sized nose.
Thirdly, I found it odd to have a government whose message so flatly contradicted the basic demarcations of right and wrong being instilled in me as a future adult, to have a PM so boldly mean and incurious. I don't know what I thought a government was for, but when they started privatising the utilities it reminded me of Tom Sawyer charging kids to paint his fence.
Fourthly, it also bugged me when I was being driven into school to hear politicians on the radio say "We can't just wave a magic wand." Nobody was proposing that. They're doing it again and it's still annoying, which leads me to -
Fifthly, I was educated in a Church of England school in Tory Wandsworth, then Westmister Prep and Public Schools - I know, lucky me - and in every one of those conservative establishments nobody liked her... Nobody... Actually by the time I was fifteen that's probably not true. There were of course a few vocal Tory children whose arguments remain unchanged over twenty years later, "fully-formed" as some describe Michael Gove, or just ungrown-up, and it's possibly a fault of my upbringing but I couldn't begin to understand where they were coming from. I still don't. I do try. It's something to do with ninety-five per cent of capital being invested in property or something, yes? Anyway my point is when she was finally ousted - just round the corner from us - the glee resounded up and down our toast-scented corridors pretty much unopposed.
Sixthly... and yet, somehow nowadays "being taken serious politically" seems to mean operating on her terms. So she can't have started the fire (self-interest isn't transmitted from above). But don't tell me in your obituaries she didn't know the meaning of the word "can't". For many she embodied "can't". Her talent was for recognising strength and siding with it, and I'd say sticking to those kind of principles is pretty easy. She served her idea of justice by doing everything within her power to sell this country to her heroes, and that idea hasn't really gone away, this is still the eighties and Thatcher's passing seems like just another of those endlessly replicating shadows cast by street lamps as you walk home, hence perhaps the feeling of "Ah. Oh." And her heroes were dicks.
Seventhly, her funeral procession from Westminster to Saint Paul's via St. Clement Danes - the procession we can definitely afford because in spite of my sixth point we can afford anything we like if there is the political will, of course we can - will follow exactly the route of the Ghost Bus Tours. Tickets here.
Finally, I keep thinking of something Clive James wrote in 1975: "In real life, Mrs Thatcher either believes that everybody can help himself without anybody getting hurt, which means she is unhinged; or else believes that everybody who can help himself ought to do so no manner who gets hurt, which means she is a villain; a sinister prospect either way." I don't know if he still stands by this remark, but I can't see why he wouldn't.
This is also good.
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ReplyDeleteThis is one of those moments when I wish I could reach through space and drag two people together, because my dad would be thrilled to a)meet you and b)explain to a new person why neoliberalism is the inherently superior mode of socioeconomic organisation. Perhaps you would also be thrilled (in, perhaps, the word's less positive sense) to have someone so happy to be plumbed for details on the subject, until things got heated, at which time I, at least, would have to leave the room.
ReplyDeleteIt is fascinating to hear from people who grew up here during the Thatcher years and see just how much of the country rejected her ideas at the time, and has continued rejecting them. In North America it seems as though everyone swallowed the neoliberal pill uncritically; even if you're a liberal, you start from a place of acknowledging that the market-driven worldview is of course factually correct, but maybe we can mitigate it with a few new policies. (Although, interesting to note, even in the US, utilities are still publicly owned. How do private utilities make any sense at all?)
I really wonder sometimes if the appeal of socialism to the younger generations is a direct response to growing up in an environment of neoliberal fundamentalism – not only have we seen what it's done to society and the planet, but at least some of us have seen what happens when you apply neoliberal values to the family (and if you think they're the basic truth of reality, then why wouldn't you?) and thereby know how fundamentally rotten they are. It'll be interesting to see where this all goes.
(Sorry about the doubled-up version of this – really no idea what happened there!)