The Republic of Heaven

In light of today's news, I have felt the need to seek out opinion on a medium that has a more limited capacity to be inexorably linked to my identity in 2013 and one which will limit the impact on my grandchildren's advertising preferences in 2108.

This inclination comes not from the conventional desire for a garden-variety internet diatribe, but more from a concern that a lack of a strong opinion on Margaret Thatcher is somehow a critical-thinking inadequacy for someone who considers themselves to be politically- or philosophically-engaged. My exposure in recent years to the unrelentingly polarized debate of US politics may have exacerbated the paralysis to any consensus-driven reasoning that I may have previously possessed. I use the term "debate" in its loosest sense as that implies some kind of exchange of ideas rather than the tautological expression of the same ideas, which seems to be the mode (we could really do with a Jeremy Paxman over here, but instead we imported Jeremy Kyle).

Is the lack of a strong opinion on Thatcher a healthy response to a false dichotomy? We tend to categorize every politician as either bad or good rather than their ideas. At the risk of sounding like an opinion columnist for The Guardian, it seems that her strength and conviction had both profoundly negative and positive consequences. Her uncompromising persona was probably an asset in the Falklands conflict and a liability in the Northern Ireland peace process. Whether her effect on unions and the British economy was positive or negative is more subjective to your political ideology. I'm not a fan of unions and see their diminished influence as a positive, but I consider the decline of manufacturing and shift of complete focus to the City of London and dependence on banking and services to be a loss to the country as a whole, especially when compared with manufacturing in the US or Germany. I'm not sure what could have been done differently: France has strong unions, but it's not like their manufacturing sector is going from strength to strength. In any case, the baby may have been thrown out with the bath water.

I apologize for any excess of sesquipedalian argot (long inaccessible words) that may be present in this post. Any use of which was solely a self-serving and cathartic indulgence, in response to the trite tripe that is so prevalent in the (social and traditional) media. Consider this choice of delivery to be my elitist, passive-aggressive, inflammatory diatribe to the great unwashed. At least by posting it here, I had the good taste (or judgment) to not inflict it on them (or judging by recent forum activity, on anyone except myself).

I'm one of the few people who can truly say they voted for (or against) Margaret Thatcher. She was my MP when I lived in London, and I once heard her speak at my workplace.

I'm not convinced that people do not have strong opinions about MT, nor that they don't express them. You've only had to read the right-wing UK press over the past few weeks to see that or, in my case, talk to other people who were around in the time of her pomp.

It's certainly true that she threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to UK manufacturing industry. Her scorched-earth policies defeated the unions, true, but they also wiped out much of the UK's industrial base. At the same time, she launched the processes that led to the ascendency of the City and the house-ownership boom. However, her vision of a home-owning democracy has come very badly unstuck since. For every person like me who has cashed in on house price inflation or, like others I know, bought a council house at a knock-down price there are now many more who can see no way that they will ever be able to buy a home of their own. By treating banks and other financial institutions as wealth-creators, rather than enablers of the creation of wealth she established a system of false values from which we are still suffering. Or, to put it another way, without her influence, the UK would have ended up rather more like Germany and rather less like Greece. The laws of unforeseen consequences have operated in such as way as to produce results which have often been the opposite of those she said she intended.

There's a campaign running at the present to reinstate Grammar Schools. It's the oddest irony; that MT, the bright girl from a modest background who was enabled by the Grammar School system to ascend to the greatest heights of the British establishment, oversaw the closure of the majority of the Grammar Schools during her time in power. It's almost as if she was pulling the ladder up after herself.

And finally, if you want to see Thatcher's legacy, circumspire. It's not a pretty sight.