A14 and The Living Dead

I was heading back from Wales after visiting relatives and to get back to Bas-Vegas I travel down the A14/M11. Someone has put some graffiti on an old disused building which epitomised the news awaiting me when I landed:

I have often wondered when Mrs Thatcher would finally shuffle off and join her husband in that great golf club in the sky, assuming there is one and that's where she's gone. Although I'm not quite as acerbic as Pete Wylie, as an old socialist, I couldn't abide the woman. She tried to make this country live in the past, and that's always a mistake. The future may be a frightening and uncertain place, but you have to face it and either shape it or be prepared to be shaped by it.

There was a documentary by Adam Curtis about the subject called The Attic, part of the Living Dead series.

I quite like the bit at the end where she falls asleep half-way through one her own speeches.

As for her legacy, well I think we have a more self-centred, venal society. As Oscar Wilde once put it, we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing". Whether that would have happened anyway is debatable, and maybe she just happened to be in charge at the time, but she didn't do anything to prevent it. She divided this country, or reinforced the divisions that were already there, rather than trying to overcome them. The graph below, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies via The New Statesman website, shows inequality of incomes on year between 1979 and 2008.

As for her much vaunted popularity, you've got to remember that Churchill lost more elections than he won and was a terrible peacetime politician (one of the worst Chancellors of the Exchequer of the 20^th Century). My grandmother, of that between-the-wars generation, said he was a war-monger (he was in charge of the Galippoli campaign, in which many men from my home town died). Tony Blair won three elections and look how he turned out.

Another thing that has occurred to me is that previously Prime Ministers and other politicians had looked upon their role as a duty that came with being one of an elite, either socially (with the Conservatives and Liberals) or intellectually (Labour). Mrs Thatcher was neither (a grocer's daughter with a Chemistry degree). She seemed to have one eye on her place in history, and this seems to have infected subsequent leaders, especially Tony Blair. This falls in with Churchill's view of history, that it is a history of Great Men (or Women), a simplistic, cardboard-cutout view. This is only one view of history and misses out, or minimises, the others which are just as valid if not more so. Plus when politicians do this they seem to forget why they are there: just run the damn country without screwing it up. That would be enough of an achievement.

Oh, go on then, Pete, if you MUST... (sorry for the language, but he's a scouser).

Coda: amidst all the comments from both right, left and middle is this fitting piece from Russell Brand, via Boing Boing, in the Guardian.