Where’s the respect?

The news of Margaret Thatcher’s death was marked by my 14-year-old daughter with sadness and respect. She took on board the totemic value of being the first woman prime minister and the forging of a path that girls like her can follow.

In contrast, a couple of years ago my son came home from primary school and asked me why Margaret Thatcher had been such a bad Prime Minister. This was a wake-up call to me that education is not neutral and some teachers are happy to peddle their politics in the classroom. It was also a good opportunity to suggest to him that he needn’t trust everything those in authority tell him but he should seek out evidence for himself and constantly question everyone (including me). He mischievously suggested that he could therefore disregard what I had just told him before breezing up to his bedroom to practise guitar riffs.

I suspect that Lady Thatcher will have felt proud about the fact that her death has re-established a national debate both about the past and her legacy but also about the future direction of British politics. It is best to ignore the death parties and the horribly misognistic ‘Ding Dong, the witch is dead’ download as a reminder that the extreme left which she took on in the 1980s, is now reduced to sneering pathetically and powerlessly from the sidelines.

Yet even in the mainstream public debate there has been a stark divide over her record as Prime Minister which is inexplicable. Her opponents deny her even her womanhood. They suggest that she alone was responsible for the divisiveness which then infected British politics. And they cannot bring themselves to praise any one single policy.

The theme that I find most worr ying is the very idea that Margaret Thatcher’s policies somehow created greed, consumerism and all that is bad in human nature extremely disturbing especially when that allegation comes from Christian sources. In a blog entitled ‘Milk snatching’, the Bishop of Bradford somehow manages to blame Margaret Thatcher for the very ungenerous and puerile reactions which her death has led to (www.nickbaines.wordpress.com/). He writes of the “evidence that she created a nasty, vitriolic, dehumanising and utterly divided culture and society... to be seen in the response her death has provoked.”

I find it hard to believe that a Christian leader can seriously use such loose language crediting her with the creation of such vices.

Yet, it should be no surprise that many church leaders have ambivalent reactions to Margaret Thatcher but I find it troubling that they can find it so difficult to list at least some positives from her premiership. By and large the silence from the bench of Bishops has been depressing. Yet at least, the Archbishop of Canterbury was sure-footed in praising her devotion to public service and the Christian faith that inspired her. This is a sign that he will at least be much more in touch with a charitable understanding of public duties, responsibilities and service than some of his colleagues.