Greasy Pole: Thatcher and Thatcherism – A Long Time Dying

Hardly a day goes by without our being reminded that 2012 was a wonderful year. Not because of the weather which was lousy. Especially when it poured down on that flotilla of jubilee boats scudding along the Thames with their cargo of the royal family and that female chorus defiantly bellowing Rule Britannia through their sopping wet fringes. It was, we were regularly instructed, a time to shove into forgetfulness all that turgid stuff about the economy drowning in deficit as a result of a horde of idle scroungers sucking at the scandalously luxuriant system of services such as care for the redundant elderly or the vulnerably sick or the unreasonably injured. Whatever the difficulties, the royals and the leaders would see us through. Of course there were a few people unreasonably stubborn enough to refuse to partake of the popular exhilaration but they could be pinched out by reminders that this was some glorious time to be alive and in poverty.

Iron Lady

And now in 2013 it will be the sixtieth anniversary of Elizabeth walking into Westminster Abbey to get the crown on her royal head – which promises to be as sickening and pointless as last year’s events. But that will not be for a month or so; meanwhile the plans are for us to be consoled by another female providing a virile incentive to prod our British pride into life. Not a female standing on a boat in the rain or waving to us from a remote balcony but one who has obligingly fulfilled several months’ predictions by dying. Margaret Thatcher – she who was the Iron Lady, the one Not For Turning, the pitiless Snatcher of the Children’s’ Milk, who rasped No!No!No! from the Commons at the meddlers over the English Channel, the implacable enemy of any trade union threatening to bring the nation to a standstill. Her death has focussed attention on the controversies immovably associated with her very name; in some cases she is the subject of mindless worship and in others of intense hatred. She died, cosseted in London’s most luxurious hotel, on 8th April. Was anyone bothered? Consider the response of one socially conscious young woman whose caring and industrious mother, some years ago dying of cancer, instructed that a bottle of expensive wine be laid down for drinking on the day Thatcher died – which was exactly what happened, in a gathering of joyful friends.

Commons Grovelling

Remarkable as Thatcher had been when alive, in death she was even more so. Her long drawn-out decline had given all parties– the government and the Labour Party led by Gordon Brown, the media, the security forces – plenty of time to prepare. First with their share of hysteria was the gutter press who, as expected, slavered over her memory and lovingly crafted headline warnings to any protestors (perhaps like that woman with her mother’s wine) about the reception they might get from the vengeful hordes of Thatcher idolisers. But the red tops were not alone in this; the day after the death the Guardian gave over 35 pages to her. Then there was the decision to recall Parliament so that toadying promotion-seekers could demonstrate their talent for obsequious grovelling. This was requested by David Cameron regardless of the fact that he was in breach of that thing beloved of Parliament – precedent – because such events are by tradition only for matters of national emergency (which might have been more appropriate on the day of Thatcher’s birth). There was a predictably robust attempt by Speaker Bercow to frustrate this manoeuvre by Cameron but he eventually gave way to the weight of the Prime Minister’s authority in arguing that there should be a proper response to the ‘strength of feeling’ over the death. And – perhaps just to rub in the point – the Commons were timed to spend seven and a half hours on their Thatcher toadying, as against the 45 minutes devoted to the end of Winston Churchill. Consistent with the fact that they had been involved from the beginning with planning this monster of hypocrisy, there were Labour MPs who joined in the ‘debate‘ to be washed along in the torrent of adulation. It was no surprise that their contributions were so widely impoverished of any original or perceptive comment.

Apartheid

For someone who allegedly didn’t believe in state subsidies, it is interesting that Thatcher’s funeral is costed at between £8 and £10 million pounds. Some might think this is a bit steep for dragging a corpse through London except that there had to be all those other people in military uniform and others in a different style of uniform –  like dark suits – making long and meandering speeches on the threadbare theme of how historically wonderful she was. Like Cameron: ‘…a great leader, a great prime minister, a great Briton’; like Miliband: ‘we…greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength’; like Clegg: ‘…she left a unique and lasting imprint on the country she served.’ Well, she herself was responsible for much of this rubbish because she also was involved from the beginning in planning the funeral; she had no difficulty in forgetting that all the preoccupation with pomp and diversion was not in accord with her self-constructed reputation for being fearlessly frank in cutting unceremoniously to the core of any situation. She claimed to be a staunch defender of human freedom, which she said was particularly under threat whenever a trade union defended the interests of its members from her government’s attacks on their conditions. But the flexibility of her notions about freedom was demonstrated in her support for the vicious apartheid system in South Africa which, along with the suppression, readily tortured and murdered its opponents. The crime, poverty and tensions of that country continue to bear witness to that gruesome time.

Baronetcy

None of this affected the devotees of the myths that Thatcher was meticulously careful in all that she did, leaving nothing to chance. This was not borne out in her obstinacy over the poll tax and her many disastrous choices as ministers. It did however apply when in her Retirement Honours List she made her husband Denis a baronet. This was no ordinary baronetcy, which almost always applies just for the life of the holder; for Sir Denis was pointedly ennobled with one of the rare – hereditary –  honours so that when he died their son, in tune with her indulgence of him, became Sir Mark. Mark had been a forgettable pupil at the expensive, exclusive Harrow School (where Winston Churchill and John Profumo, among others, were also ‘educated’) he scraped through three O Levels before being delivered to a place at a posh firm of accountants but this did not last long and in any case he managed to fail his accountancy exams no less than three times. So he set himself up in business as a rally driver; however he turned out to be navigationally challenged and soon lost his way during a rally which went through the Sahara Desert, causing an expensive operation to bring him to safety. He then turned his talents to a number of suspicious ventures, one of which earned him a suspended prison sentence and, for a time, a ban on entering the United States. Through all such tests of character Mark Thatcher was fondly watched over by his mother who, while abroad on official business, proved her solicitude for him by corruptly influencing an arms deal he was involved in, between the British Firm BAE and the rulers of Saudi Arabia, which set him up with a £12 million pay-off. When Thatcher was under attack for this she contemptuously disposed of the matter by claiming that, like any properly patriotic citizen she had only been ‘batting for Britain.’

World Ratings

In this defence she was pretty safe, since she had won for herself the title of a Prime Minister who had ‘made Britain Great Again.’ The harvest of this is being reaped now in the economic woes and the attendant depression in the living standards and expectations of the most needy people and the fact that in the ratings of the world’s economy British capitalism stands some way below the leaders. In terms of Gross Domestic Product the IMF placed it in 2011 it at 8th and in 2012 the Centre for Economics and Business Research placed it at 6th – only just above Brazil. But never mind reality; at her end Thatcher was lavishly robed and looked after while a horde of compliant acolytes were eager to pay their last, well financed, respects to her.

Political leaders are remembered in a variety of styles and intensity, from blind adulation on one hand to seething hatred on the other, with a no-mans-land of apathy or ignorance stretching between the two. It is a gloomy fact that whatever the reaction it is seldom a natural response to what any particular politician has done or failed to do – which all too often has encouraged them to regard themselves as immune from dismissal by the voters. In Thatcher’s case the flagrant pomp of her funeral was the work of her adorers – or the simply ambitious. The bitterness of the haters was so tense as to need relief through some kind of demonstration such as turning their backs on the funeral procession or playing the children warbling The Wicked Witch Is Dead. However incandescent the rage about Thatcher, however cynical the manipulation of her funeral, the crucial fact is that she was simply replaced by a succession of other leaders with nothing more to offer. Some twenty years after she was deposed, the working class are subject to the continuing problems of social humiliation.

Nazi Olympics

A parallel to this situation was in the 1936 Berlin Olympics –  when the black American sprinter Jesse Owens won three gold medals. This was not just a superlative achievement for it also went a long way to dismantling the carefully erected self-image of Hitler’s Germany as a free, tolerant, sports-loving country when in fact it was a murderous, racist, anti-semitic dictatorship. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 the Games had already been awarded to Berlin so one of the new government’s concerns had to be to set up the event to gain the maximum possible credit for them as a country newly risen from the terror, the grief and the waste of 1914-18. They built a vast new stadium complex in Berlin and arranged for devoted crowds to flock there confident that German athletes would justify their leaders’ insistence on their national, racial superiority. And since then there have been many examples in other countries of the application of the same distorting technique. One case was in Britain last summer when there was a massive governmental campaign to use any success on the track or in the pool or wherever to detract attention from the damage being done to the living conditions, the health and the expectations of masses of needy people.

Choice For Change

And Thatcher’s death and her funeral, deliberately planned over a long period, are for the same objective – to obliterate any awareness of what is actually happening to us in this system of human misery .The Iron Lady? She who was not for turning? The scourge of interfering continentals? Take your pick, then consider the diversion from any progressive forethought about our lives and society. Consider how futile and damaging is the assumption that we must forever choose between the hairline differences of competing leaders. In terms of our security and well-being, what choice was there between Thatcher’s repressive abrasion and Major’s emollient manipulation? Then what benefit was there when the ruling party changed to put us under the blood-spilling Blair? In reality we do not have a choice, other than for radically applying out own talents to free the world of capitalism’s continually chaotic deceptions.