Britain’s statue of limitations
LONDON— The Iron Lady won’t be burnished in bronze.
Not if the Royal Parks agency and something called the Department for Digital Culture, Media and Sport have their way.
The timid way, clearly, since both have objected to plans for a bronze statue of the late Margaret Thatcher to be erected in Parliament Square.
Four years after the formidable former prime minister’s death — even her most vicious critics would surely grant that the woman was a tough hombre — Thatcher is causing civil servants to tremble in their boots.
Thatcherism was either a blight, from which the United Kingdom has yet to recover, the mother of all hard-headed and hard-hearted politicians, or a bitter-medicine antidote for the many ailments which had brought the realm to its trade union bullied knees. I’ll leave that for others to bang on about.
But there’s no denying the grocer’s daughter put some lead in the U.K.’s pencil, even as she deepened social divisions.
London probably has more statues of real people — as opposed to saints and mythological deities — than any city on earth, its streets, squares, parks and gardens filled with monuments to royals, military heroes (villains to others), politicians, poets and plebeians who changed the course of history.
A seven-foot high bronze depiction of Baroness Thatcher already stands outside the chamber doors in the House of Commons, ordered after parliamentary rules were changed to permit the emplacement of statues portraying living figures, as Thatcher was still very much alive when the figure was commissioned and completed. When unveiled in 2007, she observed dryly: “I might have preferred iron, but bronze will do.”
Perhaps Thatcher doesn’t deserve further artistic iconography, and in so prominent a location as Parliament Square. That’s a decision for parliamentarians, however, not trembling w-----s burrowed deep into the bureaucracy of beadledom.
The 10-foot colossus, estimated to cost a thrifty (she would have liked that) $515,000 or so, was commissioned by the Public Memorials Appeal shortly after Thatcher died. The only peep of objection arose a year ago and came from her daughter, Carol Thatcher, “upset,” the trust has admitted, about the absence of a handbag in the design.
The PM’s ever-present purse was an icon of her political era, caricatured in editorial cartoons as a weapon for the purpose of bashing opponents and mealy party members over the head. The accessory even found a place in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as a verb. To be handbagged meant a female politician treating a person (or idea) ruthlessly or insensitively.
The co-founder of the Public Memorials Appeal Trust, which had no problem raising the funds for the statue, said last year: “There was talk that she didn’t like it because it isn’t made of iron, but she doesn’t mind that it’s not made of iron. Carol’s upset that there’s no handbag.”
It does seem a key unfortunate omission.
But that isn’t what’s got the two aforementioned agencies in a bother, as revealed by the Daily Telegraph. Rather, they’re cowering before the possibility that the statue — to be erected in a “resolute position looking toward Parliament with a stern gaze” — will be defaced by vandals, whether these imaginary anarchists grew up in Thatcherite Britain or not.
Hardly like that hasn’t happened before. During the massive student protests over tuition fees in 2010 — 30,000 “occupied” Parliament Square — a statue of Winston Churchill was defaced. At least one student urinated on poor old Winnie, while others scrawled offensive graffiti across the British Bulldog, including “racist warmonger” — for the man who saved Britain from the Nazis.
But that’s the ignorance of youth for you, those who either don’t care for or outright reject the inconvenient truths of history. Or try to whitewash history by imposing the sensibilities of 2017 on the past. Like the students, abetted by their union, who are demanding that Ryerson change its name and remove a statue of Egerton Ryerson from the university’s downtown Toronto campus because, while a notable advocate for public education in Ontario, he’s retroactively grievously un-PC as a proponent of the terribly harmful (looking backward) residential school system for Indigenous children.
Similarly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month metaphorically chiselled Hector-Louis Langevin — a father of Confederation and one of the architects of that school system — out of the Langevin Block in Ottawa, rechristening it the Office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council Office.
We judge harshly in retrospect. We rename, refute and revoke.
What was perfectly acceptable a decade ago, much less a century ago, is deemed offensive or insensitive by one demographic or another, even if intrinsically entwined with history. None of which can change history.
Thatcher, love her or hate her, can be effaced but she can’t be expunged from the recent past.
Any politician — from Oliver Cromwell to Jeremy Corbyn — can ignite controversy. Doesn’t seem to matter that Cromwell enjoys pride of place outside the Commons when he actually shut it down in 1653.
Yet the faint-hearted functionaries cringe at the thought of Thatcheron-a-plinth drawing vandalizing wrath from left-wing hardheads and have formally objected, albeit couched in all manner of whinges, including the allegation that no assurance of agreeability has been received from Thatcher’s family.
One wonders what the Iron Lady would make of all this fuss and cowardice. (Or of Brexit, for that matter.)
It’s all posthumous hand-wringing for a woman who survived an IRA bombing.
Fifteen years ago, a man attacked another statue of Thatcher at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.
Decapitated her with a metal pole.
Thatcher, love her or hate her, can be effaced but she can’t be expunged from the recent past