Ideas@TheCentre
Requiem for a reformer
To London on Wednesday for the funeral. I was worried that with most of her natural supporters at work, the procession route would be lined with attention-seeking students, angry teachers with rings through their noses, and an assortment of agitprop writers and artists feeling bitter about their arts council grants. I wanted to make sure she had some friends as she trundled through town for the last time.
I needn’t have worried. On a dull, grey London morning, thousands of well-wishers turned out. The crowd on the Strand was seven or eight deep on both sides of the road. Thatcher’s people. I asked the man standing next to me where he lived.
‘Colchester,’ he replied guardedly.
‘Did you come to London just for the funeral?’
He nodded.
‘Why did you come?’
‘To pay my respects.’
I met up with Richard, an old chum from my youth. The son of a baker, his parents bought their council house thanks to Maggie. He left school at 15 for a clerical job at Lambeth council. Today, after working all hours and seizing his opportunities, he is a millionaire. He lives in a fifteenth-century thatched farmhouse in Suffolk. Mrs T would have thrilled at his achievements.
Behind us, a middle-aged man raises a banner for a TV crew to film: ‘Rest in [the word 'peace' struck out] shame.’ Richard says he doesn’t understand the vicious hatred expressed in the days since Margaret Thatcher died. ‘I don’t feel that way about anyone,’ he says, genuinely bemused.
To our right, a woman holds up another sign: ‘I’m here for the people she killed through poverty.’ She has a young child who is next to a man hiding his face behind a scarf.
A woman with bright red hair parades with a placard informing us: ‘I am not happy to pay for Thatcher’s funeral.’ Have you noticed how protesters nowadays make themselves the issue? I’m here because of poverty; I’m not happy paying for this funeral; this war is not in my name.
The man in front of me scowls: ‘Did she ever pay any tax in her life?’ Several people laugh. ‘No, but she’s received plenty,’ says another.
The protesters are heavily outnumbered. As the coffin passes, draped in the union flag and drawn by six black horses, the applause begins. We hear it ripple up the Strand as she disappears past us. The protesters hold their banners aloft, but remain silent. Democracy has won.
We turn and shuffle back up Aldwych, feeling slightly silly that we went to all that trouble just for a few brief seconds. A journalist is taking a photograph of an elderly woman standing at a crash barrier with a basket of spring flowers containing a message of sympathy. A man pushes past her holding aloft a giant yellow smiley face.
‘I’m glad we came,’ says Richard. I’m glad too, although still not convinced that such ceremony was appropriate for a political leader (even her). I wonder whether we have set an unfortunate precedent, and I worry this was another sign of the emotional incontinence (or what Paul Comrie-Thompson called in a CIS publication ‘conspicuous compassion’) that has flooded the country since Princess Diana’s death.
On the train home, I read that morning’s Times editorial. It notes that there was no Times editorial on the morning following Thatcher’s election back in 1979. The print unions had shut down the paper between November 1978 and November 1979 in a fierce battle over the introduction of computers in the newsroom. It is a reminder of just how bad things were before Maggie. Perhaps she deserved a bit of state pomp after all.
Professor Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
