Farewell Baroness: Mourn or Shut-up

It was a sad moment when I learnt of Margaret Thatcher's death last week, sadder still when the leftist cynics from the backwaters of British obscurity cheerfully burned old newspaper clippings they had been saving since 1982, and anti-west whores like George Galloway babbled of their glee and made a fuss about the cancellation of this weeks Prime Minister's questions to make way for the funeral.

I can think of no word more appropriate than pathetic to describe the mewlings of such stuffy grudge holders. This is not to minimize the impact of Thatcherism on Britain's working class, but for these people to maintain such vehement outspoken loathing twenty two and a half years after the Iron Lady strode out of No. 10, is for them to convict themselves of a kind of stubborn selfishness that only exists in the developed world. How marvelous that Britain maintains a level of condition in society that allows people to remain off their rag about a leader after almost three decades, without sacrificing time and energy to put food on the table, or beer in their jugs. This perhaps gets at the core of their grumpy position, Thatcherism worked and Britain got richer and more powerful. It came at the expense of coal miners and industry north of London, the curmudgeons received the pain, for the gain of society as a whole. It is pathetic that these people do not accept their selfless suffering and move on, instead they judge it appropriate to disrupt and darken the farewell of an old woman who spent her life trying to make life in the UK better.

I have not written anything since the death of Margaret Thatcher. This wasn't by design or because I felt obliged to observe a mourning period and neither shave nor pick up a pen, I simply didn't feel I had anything of value to say. Quite apart from politics (I have given up trying to define my own political view) I admired Margaret Thatcher in a very general way. I was born in the final months of her Prime Ministership and I grew up in the Blair era. Like Tony Blair I suppose I have tremendous respect for Thatcher, her courage, and her personality (I suppose I am mirroring her by staying up most of the night to continue working with a scotch and soda by my side). I am not of the cohort who proclaim her as the last conviction politician, that being a glimpse of the pathetic fallacy by which people reduce history to myth-making. To me she is not at all superhuman, her success in politics being as much to do with other people as herself. At the end she was a shadowy figure, reduced by age and impediment to a cold and lonely place in retirement. The conceited curmudgeon's would not allow her to outlive the divisiveness of her government, it is my fervent hope that they allow the funeral the respect that they refuse to extend to the Iron Lady, and either mourn or shut-up.