For those of us lefties who were adults during that grete angur and unhappe of the Thatcher years the News has been a no-go area for the past week, swamped as it has been by accounts of her time in office, reports of international reaction to her death and hagiographic tributes from former colleagues. And all this will be capped by - in all but name - a state funeral next Wednesday.
I wondered why the demise of this elderly semi-alcoholic alzheimer sufferer should engender quite so much attention. Her death changes nothing: we may have lost the woman but her legacy is all around us in a de-industrialised Britain, an unregulated City, a rapidly disappearing NHS, under-financed public services, the yawning chasm between the income of ordinary, honest workers and that of the tax-avoiding incompetents who help themselves to massive unwarranted bonuses and pensions paid for by the taxpayer, and the xenophobia remorselessly drip-fed into their readers by the Sun and the Mail. An article by Jonathan Freedland in Tuesday's Guardian enlightened me:
'The wider Tory tribe seems determined to use the nine-day limbo between her passing and her funeral to define Thatcher in death in a way that would have seemed impossible, if not outright absurd, in life: as above and beyond politics, as a national rather than partisan figure, as an incontestable and uncontested part of our collective inheritance.'
Freedland also reports Lord Powell's claim that Thatcher would have been disappointed if there hadn't been people figuratively dancing on her grave. And one can understand why. Channelling people's anger into self-satisfying but futile protests is a classic diversionary tactic. As Mark Antony said apropos of Caesar: "The evil that men do lives after them ..." It's Thatcher's evil legacy that people need to fight not the woman herself.
I have always had some sympathy for apokatastasis, the heresy commonly - though possibly erroneously - associated with Origen. It teaches that everyone, including Satan himself, will ultimately be saved. One could argue that no one is totally bad - Hitler was very fond of his dog Blondi. Hardly outweighs murdering six million Jews, but could be something to build on. Thatcher, despite her euroscepticism, did physically reconnect Britain with the mainland for the first time since the last ice-age. Though she may have been more concerned with its oil-fields than with its people's liberty, she was quite right to defend the Falklands. The islands may be nearer to the Argentine than to the UK, but 1521.39 kilometres is still a heck of a long way. If the Argentinian criterion for exercising sovereignty were universally applied we'd have instant European political unity. The Italians could claim that the Angles, Saxons, Germans, Goths, Vandals etc are all illegally occupying the territory of the Roman Empire and should subject themselves to the Pax Romana forthwith.
Sadly, whilst slightly more creditable than liking a dog, Thatcher's two positive achievements hardly counterbalance the enormous harm her legacy continues to inflict. As Romano Prodi commented last Tuesday she:
'cambiato il mondo', ma la sua rivoluzione liberista ha portato 'all'aumento delle differenze fra ricchi e poveri' ed ha 'certamente aiutato e forse provocato' la crisi economica mondiale [changed the world, but her revolutionary introduction of economic Liberalism has brought about an increase in the gap between the rich and poor and has certainly helped, and possibly provoked, the global economic crisis].
Unfortunately, not only did Prodi's remarks attract a lot of negative comment from the Twitter-sphere - the refuge of those who, incapable of formulating an argument, imagine a badly expressed opinion is an acceptable alternative - but the Corriere della Sera, Italy's equivalent of the Guardian, has carried articles broadly supportive of her policies. That does worry me. The German dog-lover's legacy was destroyed by the Red Army and the western allies. His ideals only live on in the minds of a tiny minority of brutish morons. Would that the same could be said for those of the Iron Lady.
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