Oh dear... I don't normally go in for the political stuff - but I'm not sure my point of view about what's going on in Britain right now is actually political. I mean, I don't have any faith that Labour, the "Liberals" ( God help us ), or even Plaid Cymru are going to save us, so I'm not asking for the vote for anyone, or even civil disobedience.
I've been away from "Britain" (inverted commas, not sure how far the concept exists outside the Olympics ) for almost twenty years - apparently Mr. Blobby's not so big any more. But it seems like an increasingly surreal place. In case anyone's not heard, on Wednesday there will be a state funeral ( to all intents and purposes ) for a much-loved Prime Minister, rolling through London with military guard to St. Paul's cathedral the first since Winston Churchill to receive this honour. With a level of security to match the London Olympics. Not because of Al Quaeda etc., who probably haven't heard of the lady. They need that level of policing to stop protesters from interfering with this national heroine's honours.
Now, I'm one of the few people you might find who thinks that this woman was neither a saint nor the Wicked Witch of the West. I'm old enough to remember, from a child's point of view, Britain in the 1970s : strikes, power cuts, inflation; some of what Margaret Thatcher did to begin with looks sensible to me : get the unions back under control, privatise industries which have no need to be state monopolies ( telephones etc.), even the Falklands ( described memorably by Jorge Luís Borges as "dos hombres calvos peleando por un peine", two bald men fighting over a comb ) if you accept, perhaps charitably, that the motive was to protect British citizens from a nasty right-wing dictatorship.
But legacy... when a lot of her fans talk about her legacy, how she made Britain great again, they're using words in ways that I don't understand. Now, as I've been known to tell my students, History is always about the present, and the debate about any political figure is always a conversation about the here and now. Can these people really be saying that where we are now is a good place ?
Two aspects of this legacy I think are particularly sad. It may be that these were unintended. The conversion of the UK economy from an industrial base to an economy centered on services, tourism, financial services has increasingly made it a London-centered country ( and London is more or less now an independent enclave within the U.K., gradually being sold off to Russians, Qataris, etc. ). The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are a consequence of the way the Conservative Party has become an exclusively English affair, provoked in turn by the way those countries were handled in the 1980s. If Scotland goes in 2014 - and I would bet that the "Thatcher Dividend" some newspapers are talking about is more likely to go to the SNP than the Tories, as people get to watch on Wednesday what their taxes are spent on - then Wales will go within a decade, unthinkable even 10 years ago. And that will be Britain gone.
The other ? The dangerous little idea that imposing your views on the 50 % of the population who disagree with you is somehow admirable. In fact, that was always part of the Thatcher myth more than reality; but it's been taken up by a whole raft of idiot politicians who think that if they defend a point of view which is truly offensive to a large proportion of their population, then this PROVES that they are right.
There isn't a statue of Margaret Thatcher in London : even a bust made for the House of Commons got destroyed as an act of protest some years back, I think.I hope things are respectful on Wednesday; I'm glad I'm not paying for it, although I'm annoyed my sister, an NHS nurse, has to ( and I haven't even started on how her governments set in progress the movements which put ever greater pressure on teachers, doctors, nurses, etc., while letting bankers regulate themselves ). It would be nice to think the media attention might one day be lavished on someone who brought people together, rather than divided them.
