Despite having asked Citizen Sane for permission to cross post this piece – which I did because I thought it was very good – I felt Brownie had a point when, in the comments, he asked where was the criticism of Thatcher, as opposed to the criticism of those dancing on her grave.
I certainly didn’t feel very measured back in the early 1980s – Ken Livingstone, at the time, represented my political ideal. I attended, in a spirit of prurient hostility, the Young Conservative rally in 1983 – though I was almost turned away because of my CND badge. This was the notorious event when Kenny Everett shouted ‘Let’s bomb Russia, let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away.’
I may not be a Ken Livingstone fan any more, but here, albeit belatedly, is a round up of critiques of Thatcher from around the blogosphere.
A Very Public Sociologist is on trenchant form:
Appropriately, the most divisive of politicians gifted us a divided society. The Britain she found was cut across by class. The Britain she left is scarred by dog-eat-dog paranoia, scapegoating, the twins of fear and despair, and crucially, insecurity. Overt class warfare has given way to the multiplication of points of conflict. Class against class was replaced by all against all. The strangest kind of Tory, she ushered in the era of market fundamentalism at the expense of people’s sense of place in the established order. By strategically defeating the labour movement, and, perversely, shackling it in the name of “flexibility”, millions upon millions of working people live in a permanent state of insecurity. Short term work, part-time work, low pay, the obscenity of the zero hour contract, all of these are the real children of Thatcher.
Anna Turley focuses on Thatcher’s role in exacerbating a north-south divide.
Her economic legacy is a north-south divide which is now engrained in the DNA of our national economic and political structures; an economy dependent on the financial sector and service industries, dominated by London and the south east; an economy with its industrial and manufacturing base across the north devastated; a highly centralised state driven from Westminster with denuded and comparatively impotent local governance; a legacy of benefit dependency and low skills clustered in former industrial areas where private enterprise still struggles to flourish.
She saw the stagflation and poor GDP of the seventies as a direct result of excessive state intervention, over-wieldy union power, and did not see a role for government in easing the challenges facing certain industries such as mining, ship-building and manufacturing.
Here’s part of Soupy One’s take on her legacy:
Thatcherism has had a profound political influence in Britain, all major political parties eventually succumb to its ideas, one way or the other. The notion that the market could fix everything, or nearly everything, has been adopted by both Conservative and Labour Party. Tony Blair, was obviously from the outset an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, brought those maligned policies into the Labour Party. This can be seen by the fool hardly and dangerous changes to the NHS over the past 16 years.
But the adoption of manic pro-market politics cannot be blamed solely on Thatcher. While she was a vehicle and obvious face of those wretched ideas, others chose to pick up the policies and articulate them, with the resultant mess that we see in Britain today: scarcely any manufacturing, poor public services, poorer infrastructure and a seriously divided society.
And here is Mehdi Hasan challenging the view that Thatcher was a champion of freedom and democracy:
Forget the row over who gets credit for the fall of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev or Reagan and Thatcher. If (wo)man is judged by the company (s)he keeps, then Thatcher – self-professed friend to generals Pinochet, Suharto and Zia, ally of Saddam Hussein, admirer of the Saudi royals, soft on apartheid – must be judged a champion of despotism and dictatorship, not of freedom or liberty. The historical record is so clear and indisputable that to believe otherwise is wilful blindness.
Finally, Steve Hynd initially received a lot of stick for criticizing some overly gleeful responses to Thatcher’s death, and here he tries to synthesize that disapproval with an urgent reminder of the real issues at stake today:
In principle we must let people morn but we cannot forget the harm her policies have caused.
Pragmatically though we should be focusing our energies on the neo-cons who now sit around the cabinet table implementing her legacy with terrifying efficiency. Celebrating the death of an 87 year old moves us no closer to tackling this blight.
In fact the opposite, it alienates us from everyone who looks on disgusted that people could be rejoicing at another human’s death. It put’s in that unpalatable category of Galloway and the Socialist Workers.
If this discussion was about the death of Thatcherism I would be the first one in the streets. But it is not, Thatcherism lives on more powerful and more accepted than ever before.
All that has changed is that an old lady is now no longer with us.
If people want to celebrate that it is their right to do so, but I think it is wrong and ultimately not useful.
I now feel rather apologetic towards my teenage self for wondering whether there is some absence of ideal nuance in the Tom Robinson song I quote in my post’s title.
