crabbit curmudgeon

What is the value of a death?

We learnt this week past of a death. Actually several of them – juxtaposed in the normal run of things. There was presaged death – that of Iain M Banks of which I wrote earlier and which will be rightly mourned as the loss of so much potential. We only have one more book to anticipate, a light will, indeed, go out in our lives. The most recent death – that of Professor Sir Robert Edwards, the ‘father’ of in vitro fertilization – invokes a deep sadness but also a celebration of a man who, by dint of his spirit, humanity, and intelligence provided the means for many millions of people to realize the goal of giving birth to a child. Lauded by his peers and worshiped by those his work helped, he set out to do something that would benefit all humanity, and achieved greatness thereby. Not that he profited particularly his reward was doing something that could not be done before. The last one (of the many thousands) was that of a politician – Margaret Thatcher, of whom many words will be spoken by many people. I was surprised by my lack of reaction – so she is dead, I had forgotten she was alive, it was probably a mercy, given her advanced dementia. So far so blah, no dancing on graves, no burning of effigies, no searing rage, definitely no sorrow. What I find now is a slow burn as the rich stench of hypocrisy drifts northwards from Westminster. A timely death is turned into a political football – will Cameron be able to invoke the spirit of Thatcher to rally his revolting backbenchers? Will Milliband be sucked into an unseemly misery of spirit as he fails to respect the dead of who one should never speak ill? Can Osborne let loose another fart of revulsion as hooligans in Glasgow, Bristol, Liverpool, Yorkshire, Newcastle, everywhere except the Home Counties, crack the champagne and sing of the dead witch? Parliament is summarily recalled for 7 hours (Christ on a bike, they don’t debate welfare reform for so long) posturing to see who gets the most mileage out of the corpse before it falls to bits? Then there is £8 (or 10) million for the funeral through the streets of London with full military escort. How would food banks love to have that sort of money?

What this whole sorry affair has done is to bring back the true horror of the Thatcher revolution. Set aside as open to debate the civil war waged against the miners; the splurge of profit from North sea oil to pay unemployment benefit to the millions of miners, steel workers, railmen, dockers, shipbuilders, car manufacturers whose jobs were evaporated by the Thatcher gimlet glare; the shameless deregulation of the banks and privatization of water, electricity, gas; the rank stupidity of the poll tax and the decision to trial it on Scotland; and the near destruction of the science research base (after all, it was the Thatcher cuts which drove me to emigrate to Canada). Perhaps we can also forget the grandiose posturing of England as a world superpower slavering at the boots of the USA. The underlying flavor is that of her total lack of empathy (contrast with Prof Edwards and Iain Banks who are full of empathy) for her fellow man. The famous quote is that ‘there is no such thing as society, just individuals and families’ – what is shattering is that she meant it. She did not consider the suffering generated by her policies and actions – these people were individually responsible for the mess in which they now found themselves. She turned her back on whole swaths of the country, from Scotland to Wales via Northern Ireland and the North East of England and thence back to the Midlands. She would cheerfully have permitted Liverpool to sink into the Mersey, and she is openly on record as having said that. Consider also her comportment during the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster. 96 football fans dead as a result of police and management stupidity, and Thatcher sanctimoniously promulgated the official line of lies seeking to turn the blame back on the fans. That was truly a sorry tale and represents the essence of the Thatcher legacy, the Little Englander mentality.

I am tempted to suggest that she should rot in hell, but I hold no truck with that sort of thing. Instead, I hope that the Iron Lady rusts in the obscurity she so richly deserves.