Margaret Thatcher’s divisive legacy
THE ANGER STILL FELT toward the Iron Lady by so many British citizens should prompt reflection on the part of today’s politicians
The deeply polarizing legacy of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, former Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom, has come thundering back in the wake of her death last week at age 87.
As a kid growing up in Canada during the 1980s, my memories of Thatcher were fairly benign. In an era when she towered over the U.K. as the Iron Lady, I confess I really only knew her as a puppet on the British TV show Spitting Image.
For those of you who didn’t grow up on a steady diet of acerbic British satire (full disclosure: my sense of humour was shaped by Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different), Spitting Image was a show that skewered the world of politics and its leaders by transforming them into rubber puppets.
The series, which aired from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, depicted Thatcher as a helmet-haired, cigarchomping tyrant in a pinstriped suit whose relationship with Ronald Reagan (portrayed as a nuke-obsessed buffoon) held some kind of romantic tension that I didn’t really get at the time.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher in the flesh was arguably the most severe political figure to hold office in postwar Britain.
Not surprisingly, tributes for the late baroness have been divided. Was she a great leader, or the most socially ruinous prime minister the modern world has ever seen?
Her critics argue that she made greed and individualism admirable qualities. Her policies on privatization and constraints on the labour movement, and her free-market approach to government, it is contended, led to deep ruptures in British society.
Yet many of her supporters passionately maintain that Thatcher saved Britain. She came to power in 1979 as the prime minister of a withered empire crippled by mass unemployment, labour strife, high interest rates, atrophying cities and general decline. Her government restructured the economy and re- formed the unions. She led Britain’s victory over Argentina in the 1982 Falklands war, which cemented her leadership and restored a sense of patriotism to the U.K. She is credited with helping bring an end to the Cold War.
Did Thatcher save or destroy Britain? The verdict is still out.
What I can say is that, in the slipstream of her death last week, what I have found most sobering is the anger — a deep, visceral rage — toward Thatcher felt by many British citizens that remains unmollified by the passage of time.
Margaret Thatcher “death parties” have been erupting all over the U.K. In Brixton, South London — the site of ferocious riots in 1981 — hundreds of people took to the streets chanting “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead dead dead!” and “The b---h is dead!”
Denouncing her right-wing social and economic policies, they danced to ska music, burned effigies, slugged cans of beer, popped champagne corks and waved pints of milk. (Even before she entered Downing St., Thatcher the secretary of state was known to many as “Thatcher the milk snatcher” for her decision to end universal free milk to schools.)
Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead, from The Wizard of Oz, hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts last week.
All this has made me wonder: Why is this rage still so raw? And why now? Thatcher has been out of office for more than two decades, and largely out of the public eye for many years.
What struck me is that the Thatcher “death party” scenes in places like Glasgow, Liverpool, Derry, Brixton and Bristol show young people — many of whom were probably not even alive during Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister — clashing with police, dancing, singing, protesting, rioting. These scenes looked so — familiar. Add a few red squares and I could be looking at street scenes from Montreal circa the printemps érable of 2012.
Thatcher died against the backdrop of a world reeling from grave economic instability and social upheaval. In Europe, the debt crisis and austerity measures are widening the gap between rich and poor.
The dredging up of her divisive legacy has resurrected fury — which perhaps was already simmering just beneath the surface — and a deep-seated distrust in the U.K. between government and citizens about who will care for and nurture society as they move through the global turmoil together.
The polarized reactions to Thatcher’s death should prompt politicians to reflect on their own nation-building legacies.