A.N. WILSON takes up a page of the Daily Mail today to ask: ’So why, 30 years on, do the Left still hate Maggie so?’ Hmmm, tough question, that. Where to start?
Occasion for this polemic is an outburst from Derek Hatton, deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the 1980s while ‘a supporter of the ideas of the Militant newspaper’, but long since transmogrified into a millionaire property developer in Cyprus.
In an interview with a Cypriot newspaper, he tastelessly quipped that Margaret Thatcher’s mum should have had an abortion, blamed Maggie for today’s financial crisis, and concluded: 'She more than anyone destroyed the world we knew in England.'
As Wilson will be well aware, Hatton severed all ties with the left many years ago. It is therefore somewhat sneaky to hold him up as in any sense an authoritative spokesman for our political positions, and we are not obliged to defend the detail of his remarks.
But on this occasion, forget such quibbles. Because make no mistake, the left does hate Maggie. Really, truly and completely. It openly despises and excoriates her, not because of any qualities she may or may not have possessed as an individual, but because of the brand of politics she once exemplified and still embodies as an icon.
Peter Mandelson may have remarked seven years ago that ‘we are all Thatcherites now’, but I am still trying to work out exactly who is included in that ‘we’. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a sentiment more grotesquely offensive to Labour Party members of my generation.
Wilson – seemingly just as clueless as Mandy on this one - rehearses the traditional catalogue of the former prime minister’s ‘achievements’. Go to Nottinghamshire and ask miners who refused to join the strike of 1984-85 their opinion of Thatcher, he suggests.
I have a counter-suggestion, sir. Go to a pit village in Durham or Yorkshire and put precisely the same question to the many men who lost their jobs in the Tories’ pit closure programme and have never worked again, and whose children and grandchildren may also be unemployed. You might just find the response enlightening.
The Falklands War is held up as a glorious moment in British history, which could not have been won ‘without her personal courage’. The reality is that Thatcher actually wanted this pointless conflict, which could easily have been circumvented by diplomatic means.
Her emasculation of trade unions made possible a climate of bullying and intimidation in many workplaces, leaving British workers with the lowest level of employment rights in any country in western Europe. Welcome to UK plc, a place where the employees can be sacked by text message.
Wilson even has the chutzpah to hail the supposed economic competence of a government that started by deliberately engineering a recession to destroy Britain’s manufacturing base and put three million people out of work, before launching into an artificially-generated boom that inevitably triggered a second serious recession.
But just as telling are all some of the things his encomium signally fails to talk about. Might I just mention here a certain Thatcher-sponsored reform of local government finance that went by the unofficial name of the Poll Tax?
This vindictive piece of class-based legislation was purposely designed to load most of the burden onto those least able to afford to foot the bill, and was so widely loathed that it had to be trialled in a part of the United Kingdom where the Conservatives enjoyed nugatory support.
Nor does the blatantly anti-democratic decision to scrap the Greater London Council and the other Metropolitan County Councils, simply because they kept electing inconvenient Labour administrations, rate a mention. Section 28 – a measure that adversely impacted on the lives of many gay and lesbian people – doesn’t get a look in, either.
These are just the points that occur to me off the top of my head. I’m sure if I sat down and thought about it, I could come up with dozens more reasons to remain an irreconcilable anti-Thatcherite. Sorry to go on, A.N. But you did ask.
Posted at 14:28, 15 January 2009
Comments (15)
Do you think how much the left hates her is linked to age ? I mean do younger people hate her in quite the way you and I do as we became adults and politicised during the Thatcher years and were personally affected?
I idly wonder to myself sometimes what the former scab mining areas think of Thatcher these days.
At the time they were reassured their pits were economical, they would have decent wages and jobs protected, etc etc. Many NUM people warned them not to believe it, and sure enough most of their pits only lasted a couple of years longer than the striking pits.
I wonder if any of them now regret their actions.
I can't believe that you have really ever studied
the build-up to the Falklands conflict in any depth. Otherwise you must be being disingenuous, perhaps? That is not to say that being opposed to the war itself was - or even now is - wrong; but
to believe Maggie wanted the war or to insinuate that she somehow accelerated the crisis is completely delusional. The chances were - as she was continually warned by the military - that the retaking of the islands was operationally a complete long shot; and that, therefore, political career would be over in the event of failure. It fits in with the mindset and opinions of the far left I know, yet it would surely be better to argue your case (one which is just as much a valid value judgement as Wilson's) on the basis of things you know to be true rather than pander to entrenched leftist doctrine.
I don't mean to be rude and I do value your blog and your apparently encyclopedic knowledge of left-wing theory but I can't go with you on this one.
As I said before - You really are an 80's dinosaur, oh and, of course, a stuck up rich kid leftie ponce.
Now you're proving it! Go away and listen to your Crass Lp's - they were stuck up rich kid leftie ponces as well.
KB
I'll cite chapter and verse when I get back home to my book collection. I was recently rereading some of Tony Benn's speeches at the time, which more than make the point.
But the essential point is that she knew it was coming, and rather than defuse the situation, saw it through because she perceived the political advantage in doing so.
Sean needs some bromide in his tea. He's a tad obsessive when it comes to Dave.
Regarding the "scab" areas, I think that the election statistics for the Mansfield Constintuency might shed some light. In 1987 Labour held the seat by the skin of their teeth, with a majority of only 56 votes. In 1992, after it was clear that the Torys were going to close the profitable Notts. pits regardless, Labour regained a majority of over 10,000.
The U.D.M. miners (who had several legitimate grievances with the N.U.M) were betrayed by the Tories as much as anyone else. The attitudes in those areas to some extent reflect this.
For those who are interested, there is an interview with Neil Greatrex of the U.D.M. on the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2008/05/09/neil_greatrex_interview_feature.shtml - where the issues that people have raised are discussed.
Oi Osler you never told me you were rich, right expensive pressies from now on :-)
darren, Dave does seem to attract some obsessive or batshit people, he is like marmite, love him or hate him . btw im not batshit!
I'm 53, still hate Thatcher but I now loathe Blair as much, so you can see i'm not stuck in the past! Oh, and I feel really sorry for the UDM. HAH BLOODY HAH.
Ha Ha! Yeah obsessive - must come across like that! No, I remember Dave from many years ago when I was in a band and we used to think of him as a "public school punk". Some people on the left get offended by posh kids re-inventing themselves as working class heroes - me being one.
Just a bit of fun though!
A.N. Wilson is a queer sort of chap. I used to read his column in the Evening Standard ( I used to buy it for Modesty Blaise and Brian Sewell) for years, and he was usually quite humane and even left - he was consistently critical of Israel, calling it an apartheid state, even 20 years ago. I suspect he has been insulated from the economic realities of the average Joe, and might actually believe that the Tories really did improve everyone's living standards - part of being such a good and learned writer may be that he just spends too much time with his head buried in books.
As to hating Thatcher - I just can't take her seriously enough, sorry. She's just a mad biddy. I feel more a deep shame that this nation had such low self esteem, and so little communal will, that such an imbecile with her grocer-shop homilies could fill an empty space at the top. I've felt since Thatcher that this country doesn't deserve to survive, and I'm not sure it's going to be lucky much longer. Pity, because I'm stuck with it.
Her son, though - I would dearly love to get medieval on his ass.
The Thatcher days - when squatting was legal; DNA and fingerprints were not held on those not convicted of crime and truncheons fitted in a special trouser pocket; rents were controlled (for a while) and councils ran their housing stock and their schools; when claimants weren't forced into jobs like now and only one short war outside the UK was undertaken - and when the Tory manifesto read like something that Compass would write now.
I hate Thatcher, I hate Major, I hate Blair, I hate Brown. I think they may be the same person.
Yes I will celebrate widely when she dies. I have taken at pledge to jump up and down wherever I am when I hear the news - see http://southpawpunch.blogspot.com/2006/09/death-of-thatcher-speed-day.html
Is it true Dave? Did you go to public school. We must be told!
Public school punk? Sadly not, Sue. Entirely state educated. Polytechnic punk, more like.
And being a student - on a grant that was almost as much as the wages in a badly-paid job at the time - did make me stand out, I suppose.
Plus I was politically committed, which didn't always go down well.
Thank god for that! You had me worried there for an instance.