Being accused of turning rampant and reckless greed into a virtue, declaring war on entire communities and engineering mass unemployment, not to mention denying the kids their daily dose of milk, is surely enough to warrant at least a pat on the head from Satan?
Yet when your reputation is such that your very name continues to bring out he worse in people from all walks of life even when you’re dead and gone, then perhaps you weren’t just one of Lucifer’s lieutenants but the devil’s daughter herself?
Despite what large swathes of finger-pointing witchfinder generals would have you believe, Margaret Thatcher was no anti-christ. Nor for that matter was she Boudicca, the reincarnation of Queen Elizabeth, or the best thing that ever happened to Britain. She was a human being who had ideas and opinions, and made both a lot of decisions and mistakes which effected Britain hugely over 20 years ago.
A lot has happened in the two decades since the Tory turn coats did a Brutus on old Maggie and threw her out of 10 Downing Street like a discarded rag doll for Tony Blair to pick up and receive special instructions from. Yet it seems judging by the fierce and frantic furore surrounding the Iron Lady’s recent demise, that what Britain has really lacked in the two decades since Maggie last sat on her terrible throne of miner’s skulls and empty milk bottles is a public figure who inspires the sort of religious hate and love that modern politicians have wet dreams about.
Thatcher stepped down as British Prime Minister on November 28, 1990 and she died on April 8, 2013. In the last years of her life she had become a frail old lady who suffered from ill health and dementia. Yet judging by the mixed reaction which greeted the news of her death, you would have thought that either Britain’s best and brightest hope had disappeared into the great beyond, or that the ice Queen had finally been slain by the reaper and Britain would be transformed once again into a mythical hand of milk and honey.
In the immediate wake of her death, a cloying and collective amnesia seemed to take control of large parts of the British mainstream media, and Thatcher was suddenly hailed, honoured and lionised as a saintly figure who inherited a bankrupt country cancerous with high taxes and held to ransom by the unions, and singlehandedly picked it up of its knees and made it great again by pumping the economy full of special steroids and igniting the spark of initiative in potential entrepreneurs everywhere. Not just Tory, but Labour politicians queued up like well behaved schoolboys to spout their fawning tributes to the mother figure who had spawned, or perhaps cloned them all from her iron testicles of tenacity and fortitude.
In other parts of the media, particularly the no holds barred gladiatorial arenas of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, Maggie was vilified as perhaps the most hideous and evil monster ever spat into God’s good creation. Comrades everywhere stood shoulder to shoulder at the trough and fought for their right to tell a little old lady to ‘rot in hell’ and express their ‘sheer joy’ at another human being’s demise. In sickening examples of the sort of self-righteous behavior usually the sole prerogative of the religiously insane, people slapped themselves and one another on the back for showing no compassion or empathy to a woman they demonised as having none. Like a pack of wild wolves these noble freedom fighters sought out anyone on the internet who had dared say the Iron Lady wasn’t so bad and proceeded to relentlessly persecute any perceived protector of the grandest persecutor of them all.
Elsewhere, Thatcherites everywhere lined up like knights in shining armour to defend their lady and condemn these plebeian scum who dared dishonour her name so. Nodding their heads sternly whilst clenching their buttocks and gritting their teeth, these warriors of old lamented that their lady of iron had not done enough to put these benefit leeching low lifes firmly in their place when she had the opportunity.
Meanwhile, privileged revellers, many of whom were but babies and a glint in the milkman’s eye when Thatcher was in power, took to the street to drink and celebrate and dance on the grave of a Greengrocer’s daughter from Grantham, all because rich celebrities and attention starved radicals on Twitter had told them that a long time ago she had stolen people’s jobs and turned them into drug addicts and criminals because she was evil incarnate.
As these happy and badly dressed idiots danced and held up their hastily put together banners telling us how evil an old woman called Maggie had been before burning pictures of her, we were subjected to hysterical cries of, ‘mass Unemployment’, ‘factory and pit closures’, ‘communities destroyed’, ‘de-regulated finance and banking’, ‘privitisation’, ‘tax cuts’, or at least we would have been if these hapless half-wits busily absorbed in their smug and attention seeking antics had any interest in anything more substantial than a good old fashioned witch hunt and the giddy intoxication of a mob with the scent of fresh blood in its nostrils and a hang-rope in its hands.
As it was, after a night of celebrating Britain’s blessed liberation from the old witch, the sun rose the next day on a world which remained unchanged in every way. Politicians remained untrustworthy, bankers still called the shots, celebrities appeared just as vacuous, society’s vulnerable remained vulnerable, the abused were still abused, the broken weren’t fixed, the poor were still poor, the rich were still rich, the corrupt were a little more corrupt and there were still an abundance of very real monsters at large in this green and pleasant land. The only thing that had changed was the amount of people who were constantly at one another’s throats because they couldn’t agree on the real legacy of an old woman called Maggie.
Not only that, but they couldn’t disagree amicably, they had to disagree aggressively and resort to personal insults and judgments of another person’s complete moral make-up dependent on if they hated Maggie with an irrational and burning intensity or loved her with the mindless obsessiveness of a besotted sycophant.
Some insisted that she was the scourge of the working class and saw the common folk as the ‘enemy within,’ who were not that much different from wild animals who needed to be reined in and brought to heel. Others saw her as the great liberator of those who wanted to get ahead and smash through the glass ceiling. They called her a true leader during a time when the role involved a little more than winning popularity contests and not shying away from making the difficult decisions. Some took the view that she closed the mines because they were heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and hemorrhaging money. Others adhere to the idea that Maggie never forgave the unions for bringing the Tory government down in 1974 and perpetually holding the country to ransom. They said she declared open war upon the unions and hammered her rule home by smashing the miners and seeking to forever eradicate the power of collective action that once was synonymous with a way of life she destroyed. And in it’s place many argued, this woman created rampant individualism and a dog eat dog mentality where compassion was viewed as a weakness and might truly did made right.
Others will cite her biggest crime as the big bang of 1986, which freed the bankers from the shackles of supervision and regulation and paved the way for the rich to rule free of the constraints of the law and the poor to be labelled as abject failures in a world that anything done in the name of the greater good rather than just to turn a profit was undervalued and dismissed as worthless.
Many will associate her name with the council home they bought and the opportunity to finally get ahead after suffering a never ending grind of three day weeks, powercuts, rubbish strewn streets, and babies being born by candlelight. Yet others will remember fondly the days before everything was privitised and the rich didn’t own the air that you breathe, and perhaps others will remember being one of the three million unemployed who saw both their unions and bones broke as the boot boys in blue moved in to do their Iron Lady’s bidding.
Whatever people remember and blame Maggie for, the simple fact is it’s all become just as redundant as the mines she closed down. She’s hasn’t been in power for decades and now she’s dead. So the question shouldn’t be what Thatcher did or didn’t do for this country, but how long can you blame any one person for the collective problems we face as a society today. A blame obsessed society breeds negativity and lack of accountability. If there was a little more personal responsibility and a lot less pitiful whining and gleeful scapegoating then just maybe we’d finally find something a little more productive and helpful to do with our time than send ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead’ into the top ten.
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