On April 8th parties were held on the streets of Merseyside, throughout Britain many people rejoiced, celebrated and laughed following the death of an 87 year old.
The Bogeywoman was dead, the person responsible for: the decline of the NHS, the decimation of the economy, the destruction of mining towns, the impotence of the unions, the keeping of islands that didn’t belong to Britain and the death of baby Jesus. Ding dong the witch is dead, hurrah, etc.
Thatcher was such an evil woman she’d been voted in three times, becoming the longest serving Prime Minister in the 20th century, such was her evil that for three successive elections she’d comfortably won a majority.
Now I’m no Thatcherite, nor am I about to praise someone who I remember causing so much anger in so many, but something strikes me as slightly odd in all the sudden outpouring of not just celebration but also blame.
Blame for the aforementioned problems and travesties, yet blame that somehow is being treated as making the rest of us completely exonerated. After all, it’s not as if the British public voted her in is it? Oh but hang on they/we did, not once but thrice even after the miners strike we all claim we supported, the Falklands invasion many of us now criticise and the decline of the unions many of us lament, we voted her in time after time after time.
Where were Labour in all of this? Why wasn’t the Left there to prevent the Iron Lady from implementing her devious scheme to ruin the socialist utopia that had been created by the the likes of Clement Attlee?
Well Labour was in power when Thatcher took over as leader of the Conservatives, unfortunately they weren’t doing a very good job in government. James Callaghan saw his office crippled by the power of the unions, as rubbish and corpses mounted up due to strikes. Thatcher reminded us as unemployment, litter and bodies rose, through the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi that: “Labour isn’t working.”
Yet once in power Thatcher’s unpopularity should’ve made her a one-term PM right? Erm well no wrong, the Argentine Junta rescued her by invading the Malvinas, thereby giving her the war she needed to ride a wave of patriotism. Well probably but where was Labour in all this? Michael Foot was leading the party, yet did anyone feel he was ever going to be the next Prime Minister? On Remembrance Sunday as he stood at the Cenotaph in his donkey jacket, looking better suited to running a bath rather than the nation, did anyone really see Britain’s future PM?
No, they didn’t see the 67 year old as a man who could move the country forward and neither did the Labour party happily accepting his resignation in 1983 following the Tory landslide at the general election. As if Thatcher’s popularity and the recent rise of the newly formed SDP/Liberal alliance wasn’t enough to turn voters off Labour the party decided to give them a push with a manifesto described as “the longest suicide note in history.”
The 1983 Labour manifesto called for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the re-nationalisation of industries and the dissolution of the House of Lords among other things, Thatcher simply looked on a smiled. The miners’ strike is another example of Thatcherite evil and while I’m not defending her actions, who enabled her to emerge as the eventual winner in that left versus right struggle? Arthur Scargill must take some of the blame, if not all, for calling a strike not only without a ballot but also at a time when the government had been able to stockpile coal and plan to ride out whatever industrial action was on the horizon.
Thatcher may have broken the back of the unions but she was given the weapons by often inept leadership. Again though, the Iron Lady is to blame, not the unions for crippling the country in 1979, or Scargill for calling the 84 strike, it’s the grocer’s daughter alone who’s responsible.
As the 80s progressed and Nigella’s dad’s boom got the economy moving, giving birth to yupees, red braces and mobile phones the size of suitcases Thatcher’s evil plan seemed to be working. Yet there was a chance to decapitate the Tory’s over the the Westland helicopter affair, a smoking gun that could’ve spelled the end of Thatcher’s reign before the boom really took off. Yet as the revelations came forward that the Prime minister had ignored the advice of ministers and the cabinet seemed split, Labour leader Neil Kinnock missed his chance. Rather than pressing Thatcher in the commons, asking her questions she may not have been able to answer, Kinnock lived up to his “Welsh Windbag” moniker giving a self-righteous speech that allowed the PM to recover when at one point she was firmly on the ropes.
Eventually it was the Tories themselves that had enough of Thatcher and decided to get rid of the leader that had given them eleven years in government. Even following her resignation, after the poll tax riots and the distrust the entire nation seemed to have towards the government, Labour still couldn’t win an election. To make matters worse it was Thatcher’s preferred successor John Major who the public chose over Kinnock in 1992. Labour was busy celebrating it’s seemingly impending victory the night before the general election in one of the most infamous displays of arrogance in political history at a rally in Sheffield. “Introducing the next Prime Minister…..” except Kinnock not Major took to the stage.
We can dance on Thatcher’s grave all we like, we can rejoice in the passing of one of the most reviled British leaders in recent history but let’s look at some of the people that helped put and keep her in power, before we party too hard.
