I am tearing myself away from Facebook and Twitter - and from the BBC. The former is a blaze of joy and a curious sort of glee, which I have been feeling myself, the latter is full of reverential murmurings about legacy and so on. It seems to be the usual
nihil nisi bonum you get in obituaries. I remember when John Smith (the famous bank manager impersonator and opera lover who once lead the Labour party) died, and I discovered to my amazement from the BBC eulogies that he was actually a Great Socialist to boot.
It is unlikely that Mrs Thatcher's secret committment to Lenin will now be revealed, in fact I wonder if anything new will be revealed about her - did she actually like children perhaps?
OK, sorry, a cheap gag. And that's one of the reasons I crept away from FB and Twitter - too much glee - comments (including my own) that veered into areas of poor taste or unkindness. But the fact remains I do feel ridiculously exhilarated, this song
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xaxs7s_nina-simone-i-m-feeling-good_music#.UWLLpqI6O8A does seem particularly pertinent.
Irrational Exuberance
These feelings of exuberance seem irrational, and indeed I am surprised at their intensity - but feelings do tend to be irrational. I feel as if a great weight has been lifted off my heart - as though a distant admonitory, vaguely menacing presence has been removed. I have a weird sense of freedom, similar to that experienced when my mother died: it isn't uncommon for people to feel liberation on a parent's death. I didn't feel Mrs T was a parent - but she had that sort of disabling authority which she wielded during my 20s and early 30s which to some extent crippled many of us. Those of us involved in trades unions, industry and politics to fight battles for things we valued which exhausted and demoralised us and ultimately defeated us. I think for a generation of "good people" those defeats may have made us less effective in other spheres of life and reduced our confidence in our ability to fulfill our talents. This is a personal take on it - but I expect it's true for a lot of people.
Now Win the Peace!
We aren't really in a new world, we are living with the inheritance of Thatcherism, and we don't seem to know what to do about it. Tony Blair was just as appalling as Thatcher - worse really, at least she was a genuine Tory: he was not genuine Labour but simply a careerist opportunist. The problem is that, barring the likelihood of the UK becoming a socialist/anarcho-syndicalist/green paradise, we have to find some way to get out from under, to find a way to harness capitalism, get it back in the traces and draw us along again, under
our control. How can we carry on in a world where the boss may earn 2,000 times what the lowest paid employee earns? There
is wealth to be redistributed, there
is potential for work and (green) industry in the UK, there is room for more housing, we are educating some the world elite's children at our universities and commercial educational establishments, we should be using some of the profits to ensure our children get a better, cheaper education.
There are so many good things that could be done, even in these difficult times, but we do not have a government with the will or imagination, we have a government with ideology, which genuinely believes that keeping the rich rich will benefit the country. In London there used to be "Millionaire's Row" now we have a Millionaire's Borough (K&C)... it has all got out of hand. Mrs Thatcher's death won't change anything - but in some way I feel as though she was standing behind the present government, adding to their puny stature - perhaps now that she's gone we'll be less scared of taking them on. And perhaps the "good Tories" will have more of a voice now - when there is a dominant figure in the background - even if there is no formal power there - people are often cowed by precedent, by not wanting to stir things up too much.
Dancing on her grave?
Why do people feel so
gleeful that she's died? Many people find this disturbing, but it's something I've noticed with certain old people: they feel a sort of glee about contemporaries who died before them. They don't believe in an afterlife - and so the fact that they are getting a few more weeks/months/years longer than their friends pleases them, as though they'd won a race or something. I think there is an element of this in the exultation that's been demonstrated. As Mark said "We've survived her" - I think this is how people must have felt when Franco died. She is gone, we are here, we can try something new. We have another chance, we are free. I felt it myself when my mother died, I was much more able to write, in fact driven to write, without the feeling of her critical input on anything I did.
Sadly Thatcherism hasn't died today and 8th April won't become a national holiday, but I think now that she's died there will be time to re-evaluate her, and time will bear her influence away... eventually. So for that a little bit of "Hurrah!" may be allowed without everyone else getting over-sensitive about it.
