The death of Margaret Thatcher: a cause for celebration?

On 8 April 2013, after over a decade suffering from dementia, Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister (in office 1979-90) died.

I have always felt it wrong to take Schadenfreude in a death. Nevertheless, news of the passing of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 filled me with a sudden rush of satisfaction, contentment and even pleasure. The fact is human beings can control up to a point what they do, but never how they feel.

On a May morning in 1979, I was seventeen years old - and shattered after listening to the radio throughout the night - when Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative party won a forty-four seat majority in the House of Commons. Dad was glum, but optimistic that it might be a one term government - after all, there had been three changes of government in the 1970s, so one further change seemed distinctly possible. But it was Fred Coombs, the chairman of local Liberals, who on one of his regular Saturday morning visits to our house was nearer the mark with his pessimistic comment: “These bastards will be in for a generation.”

Worse, though, was to follow. Not only did Thatcher and her Tory successor, John Major, go on to win three more general elections, but such was the transformation in British society that Thatcherism was able to cause the remoulding of the Labour Party in her own image. That was the fate of Labour in the hands of Blair and his New Labour careerists and disciples in the mid 1990s.

However, back in the early days of the 1980s, the newness of Thatcherism and the personality of Thatcher herself divided the country into bitter hostile camps. While Thatcher asked, “Is he one of us?” we asked the reverse question, “Is he or she one of them?” and if so, we seldom had much to do with them. Culturally and socially we lived an anti-Tory existence and, until the mid 1980s, we had a Labour Party which had the purpose of reversing the market fundamentalism and petty-minded bigotry of the Tory Government.

Thatcher, her legacy and her successors beat us. She destroyed the mild gains of social democracy in post-war Britain, and her ideas, with only slight modification, were adopted by Labour under Blair after 1994. I despised her for who she was and everything she did. But I still think it is wrong to celebrate someone's death.

Thatcher’s death: Miliband's betrayal

It’s Labour and Ed Miliband's collaboration in the pomp of Thatcher’s funeral that has robbed ordinary people of a voice.

It is obvious that socialists and other progressives want to make their feeling felt about the death of Margaret Thatcher, the Tory Prime Minister who led and symbolised the political programme which did did so much to wreck or worsen the lives of ordinary working people.

Against a British state which is doing everything to aggrandise Thatcher’s memory (plans incidentally drawn up by Gordon Brown in 2008), ordinary people are powerless. Demonstrators resort to tactics which can seem to be puerile and pathetic: they buy the Ding Dong song and chant “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Dead, Dead, Dead." They lack a voice to represent them, and are left shouting from the sidelines - and become merely a bothersome element for the police to mop up.

The main culprit for this humiliation of ordinary people is the ineffectual Labour leader Ed Miliband, who rather than give working people a voice has echoed the establishment narrative on Thatcher. Parliament would never have been recalled to honour Thatcher had the Labour leader not gone along with the proposal, for Cameron would have been foolish to push ahead with a debate with all the opposition benches empty. And in terms of the funeral itself, it is doubtful whether such a pompous military affair could have been envisaged, if backed only by the Tories and the Blairs.

So what Miliband has done is to fail the represent the feelings of the left and centre-left in Britain. He could, at the very minimum, have said something like this:

“I was saddened to hear of the death of Margaret Thatcher. It is a personal loss for her family and friends to whom I convey my condolences. However the political legacy of the recently deceased is not something that Labour can mourn. The funeral arrangements for Margaret Thatcher should be a matter for her relatives, friends and the Conservative Party.”

But of course that is not what he said.

Finefine mortis Thatcher

13-an de marto 2013, post pli ol jardeko suferante pro demenco, Margaret Thatcher, brita ĉefministro (1979-90) mortis.

Laǔmorale mi opinias, ke ĉiam estas malbona konduto ĝui novaĵo, ke homo mortis. Tamen kiam mi lernis, ke Margaret Thatcher, la ekzĉefiminstro de Britio (1979-90) estis mortita, mi tuj sentis min kontenta. Oni povas kontroli tion, kion oni faris, sed neniam tion, kion oni sentas.

Mi estis deksepjara junulo – kaj lacega pro tio, ke dumnokte mi aǔdis iom post iom per radio la rezultojn de la 1979-a parlamenta elekto. Thatcher kaj siaj konservatuloj gajnis absolutan plimulon de la mandatoj en la Parlamento. Mia patro tristis, sed ankaǔ optimismis, ĉar li esperis, ke eble Thatcher regus nur dum kvin jaroj – en la 70-aj jaroj jam ŝanĝiĝis la registaro triforje. Tamen estis Fred Coombes – estro de la lokala Liberal Party, dum sabota vizito en nia familia domo kiu pravis, kiam li asertis, “Tiuj anusuloj regos dum generacio.”

Sekvis malplibonaĵoj. Ne nur Thatcher kaj siaj posteuloj gajnis tri pluajn parlamentajn elektojn, sed tiom ŝanĝis la socio kaj politiko en Britio, ke thatcherismaj ideoj povas regis per Blair la Labour Party-on post la mezo de la 90-aj jaroj.

Tamen en la fruaj 80-aj jaroj, la noveco de thatcherismo kaj la personeco de Thatcher mem dupartigis la landon. Dum Thatcher demandis de ĉiu, “ĉu li estas unu el ni?” ni demandis la reciprokan demandon, “ĉu li estas unu el ili?” – kaj se jes ni ne amikiĝis kun li. Amikare kaj kulture ni faris kontraǔ-thatcherisman ekziston kaj ĝis la mezo de la 1980-aj jaroj ni posedis Labour Party-on, kiu volus haltigi la unbridan merkatismon kaj la malliberalan politikon.

Tamen Thatcher kaj sia posteuloj venkis nin. Ŝi rompis la molajn gajnojn de la postmilita socialdemokratio en Britio – kaj eĉ sia idearo post 1994 plejparte adoptis la Labour Party-on kaj Blair. Mi malamis Thatcher-on kaj ŝiajn farojn.

Why are the middle-aged middle class so apathetic in the crisis?

The Cameron Government is pursuing an economic policy which will impoverish and wreck the lives of huge numbers of people. The pain is every bit as bad as that inflicted by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s. But contrasting now with then reveals two political differences.

First, the Cameron-led coalition of millionaires has avoided the public gloating sadism associated with men like Norman Tebbit, who were so prominent under Thatcher. While “Tebbitism” no doubt appealed to the ranks of Daily Mail readers (then and now), opposing his brand of narrow-mindedness and authoritarianism united the left at a cultural level in the 1980s.

Second, in the 1980s – even as it moved to the right – the Labour Party provided a rallying point through its propagation of a social democratic alternative for Britain. Today the Labour Party is hogtied in its opposition, for on nearly every issue from rampant inequality to tuition fees, the coalition government is proceeding further along a track previous trodden by New Labour.

Yet the middle-aged middle class left which was so anti-Thatcher two decades ago has not just lost a discernable enemy icon and a friend in the Labour Party, it has also been hobbled by its own experience. Let me explain how.

In the 1970s and early 1980s the educated young reacted in horror at the demise of the achievements of the Post War consensus. As politics polarised, much of the educated young attached itself to the left with more ardour than did those in their adulthood in the 1960s. Yet history played a trick. Although the young middle-class left lost politically, at the person level it prospered – and this bred in many a political cynicism and disengagement from politics. That cynicism was fed further as the generation passively witnessed the immorality and betrayals of New Labour; so when the economic turn came at the end of the 2000s, it could respond with nothing but sarcasm and jokes.

One can just hope that the younger generation can do better.

Thatcher is to blame for the current crisis

Undoubtedly the political impasse of the 1970s characterised by intensified class and other conflict did not represent the ideal society. Neither left nor right claimed that it did. What was unfortunate was that Thatcherism emerged as the so-called solution to this crisis.

In essence, Thatcherism was about centralised authoritarianism which was used to weaken democracy and smash working class power. Inequality and poverty soared in the new framework of unbridled capitalism; and it was this model that has been continued and deepened by New Labour.

Thatcher gave birth to a socio-economic regime which both pulled apart the social fabric and which has now failed in its own economic terms. Blaming Thatcherism is fully justified. Had the miners won in 1984-5 she would have been stopped in her tracks; the rest is the what-ifs of history.