It should come as no surprise
that the news of Margaret
Thatcher’s death at the Ritz Hotel yesterday has provoked such a huge reaction across the
world. The difference in the types of reaction shows that she is as polarising
in death as she was in life – at one end of the spectrum people are figuratively
dancing on her grave; at the other end is a call to respect the dead and remember
that, even if we didn’t like her policies, her children and grandchildren have
lost a mother and a grandmother.
It smacks of hypocrisy to have
respect for somebody in death for whom one held little respect when she was
alive. Thatcher may have died, but the effects of her policies live on today,
both in terms of the aftermath of her decisions all those years ago, which have
made a lasting impression, and the policies of the current ConDem coalition
which should leave nobody in any doubt that Thatcherism is alive and well.
Thatcher’s Conservative
government’s policy of selling
the country’s council housing stock, while prohibiting local authorities from
using the revenue generated to replace them, has left a generation without access
to affordable homes.
Her anti-unionism
decimated whole communities centred around the manufacturing and mining
industries, many of which have still not recovered today. Even civil
servants at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham were
prohibited from joining trade unions. But Thatcher’s anti-unionism wasn’t
restricted to employees of the civil service and nationalised industries – her support
of Rupert Murdoch’s controversial
move of News International from Fleet Street to Wapping kyboshed the
careers of not only of those printers who worked for the Sun, but those of every other Fleet Street newspaper, which swiftly
followed suit.
The privatisation of our railways
has left Britain with the
most expensive train fares in Europe, with many of today’s ‘private’
rail franchisees being European state-owned operators, and one by a company
which, despite receiving millions in public subsidy, has its head
office domiciled in a tax haven. The privatised water
companies have also been found to have engaged in tax avoidance, and the
privatised gas and electricity firms have put
consumers at the mercy of swings in wholesale prices.
The
atrocious decision to cut free milk from children over seven in schools won’t
have led to her own children going without – she could afford it – but how many
children whose families weren’t so fortunate had to forego vital calcium so
essential for growing teeth and bones?
Her decision to axe the metropolitan
county councils almost certainly had far less to do with their efficiency
than the fact that the heavily industrialised areas of Tyne & Wear,
Merseyside, Greater Manchester, South and West Yorkshire, and the West Midlands
had an ideology incompatible with her own. It was an affront to democracy.
Sadly, the consequences of
Thatcher’s actions weren’t confined to these shores. Her refusal
to implement economic sanctions on South Africa allowed the appalling
Apartheid regime to continue, causing untold unnecessary suffering and death in
the country. One person died yesterday. How many died as a result of her inaction?
Margaret Thatcher's is not a life I think that we should celebrate, but I will not be dancing on her grave either. We cannot pretend in death that the actions of a the Iron Lady when she was alive did not happen, and I can honestly say that there is no love lost. I
certainly don’t think she should be given a ceremonial funeral,
which is to all intents and purposes a state funeral without the hassle of
obtaining parliamentary consent. I hope that her policies rust with her.
