Those who fail to respect Lady Thatcher are the real nasty party

I could have written about Margaret Thatcher in this space last week, but I was too sad.

Saddened less at the passing of a sick, old woman than by the nauseating joy of the unreconstructed Left on her demise. One need not contemplate their antics for long to know who is, and always has been, the real “nasty party” in British politics.

Before Thatcher good socialists surely drank light ale, not champagne

Arguably too young to know any better

I was 24 when Mrs Thatcher came to power and frankly unsure that this new-fangled idea of putting a suburban housewife in control of the levers of Government would get us very far. I was pleasantly surprised.

I find it hard to believe that any sane person who grew up amidst the turmoil of never-ending strikes, or endured the utter uselessness of our Soviet-style State-owned utilities and manufacturing industries, could fail to welcome their end at the hands of the Iron Lady.

For me and many others, she turned despair at Britain’s apparently unstoppable decline into hope that we might yet enjoy growing prosperity and freedom, and play a useful role on the international stage.

The immense and, outside Argentina, overwhelmingly positive international coverage of her life over the last week underlines the huge respect that she enjoyed worldwide for helping to bring down the Soviet Union and free the nations of eastern Europe after nearly half a century of subjugation.

Reagan/Thatcher 1   Soviet Union 0 (after extra time)

Ah but, her critics say, even the good things she did went sour in the end: the council house sales of the 1980s begetting the credit crunch and housing crisis of today, victory in the Falklands laying the ground for subsequent, less successful interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Really? Surely a woman who left office in 1990 cannot be blamed for what went so horribly wrong under the leadership of her much less talented successors 10 or 20 years later?

If any criticism can be made, it might be that the sheer dominance of her personality and policies apparently deprived those who followed her of the power of independent thought, turning the stark choice of the 1983 general election between Thatcher and Michael Foot into the bland, middle-of-the-road capitalist consensus of Blairism and the Coalition.

I would welcome another Thatcher, whether from Left or Right, who would once again offer us a really meaningful choice at the ballot box.

As for the appropriateness of tomorrow’s funeral arrangements, let me offer a rare word of praise for Gordon Brown: because all the essential details of Lady Thatcher’s funeral were agreed with the Government four years ago when he was in power.

The notion that this is some sort of party political stunt devised by David Cameron is simply incorrect. 

When objective history comes to be written, I am sure that Lady Thatcher’s achievements will be ranked amongst the most important of any peacetime Prime Minister of the 20th century, fully justifying the honours that were bestowed upon her in life and, tomorrow, in death.

Yes, Attlee also transformed Britain and did not receive a State or ceremonial funeral. But, with respect, Labour’s crowning achievement of 1945-51, the NHS, has been so hugely successful that it has been copied precisely nowhere. While the key tenets of Thatcherism from monetary policy to privatisation have been adopted throughout the world.

At least the modest Earl made it to Westminster Abbey

The fact that Lady Thatcher was, in the BBC’s favourite word of the moment, “divisive”, is irrelevant. Few 19th century politicians were more divisive than Gladstone, who even split his own Liberal party over Irish Home Rule, yet he was rightly accorded a full State funeral on his demise in 1898. Disraeli turned one down.

Gladstone lying in state in Westminster Hall: a marked absence of a flag

Oddly enough the only politician I ever loathed enough to feel moved to crack open a bottle of champagne on his death was another Tory, Edward Heath. I was deeply upset by the total dishonesty with which he initially pretended that our membership of the Common Market involved “no essential loss of sovereignty”.

Even so, I was wrong to celebrate his passing, as those who are planning to demonstrate against Lady Thatcher tomorrow will be on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.

Death is the one certainty for us all, and every death diminishes us. The only proper response to it is sympathy and respect.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Where did all the fish and money go?

Britain is famously an island built on coal and surrounded by fish. It helped to make us the greatest and richest power on Earth. So how come we now find ourselves running out of seafood, energy and cash?

The chattering classes currently seem to be more exercised about fish than by their personal trainers. Television coverage has belatedly drawn their attention to the scandal of half the fish caught in the North Sea being thrown back dead to comply with EU quota rules.

It is easy (and enjoyable) to blame this on Edward Heath’s decision to offer up the British fishing industry as a sacrifice to secure the great prize of Common Market entry in 1973.

The argument that joining this apparent trading club would make us all more prosperous seemed pretty persuasive to anyone comparing the relative progress of the British, French and German economies at the time, and came with the assurance that there was “no essential loss of national sovereignty” involved.

This was, we now know, a lie to rank among the biggest of a century that generated more than its fair share.

We foolishly threw open our once rich fisheries to other nations’ bottom-scraping trawlers, which essentially hoovered the seas clean of life.

There is sadly no guarantee that we would not have created this same mess all by ourselves, if left to our own devices. We are guilty, too, of ignoring repeated warnings not to eat endangered species such as tuna and cod, to which we apparently remain as addicted as the Chinese are to the non-existent medical benefits of rhino horn and tiger bones.

In energy, the EU crops up again as the organisation forcing us to close down our coal power stations, though it can reasonably be pointed out that successive British governments had ample warning to come up with an alternative, whether the sane one of nuclear or the crackpot one of covering both land and sea with intermittently wafting windmills.

Then there is the whole cash thing. You will have noted that we no longer have enough of the stuff to fund luxuries like local courts, libraries and municipal flowerbeds, and it can surely only be a matter of time before our council’s only role is to allocate us a time to bring our own rubbish to the recycling centre, and ask whether we would mind stopping to fill in the potholes along our way.

Where has all the money gone? Sucked up in huge trawl nets by rapacious bankers, politicians and Eurocrats? Well, up to a point, though here again sadly many of us are guilty of allowing the lure of easy credit to encourage us to live beyond our means.

Now the day of reckoning has arrived, and some take pleasure in pointing out that the euro zone is in an even bigger mess than we are. This is to misunderstand the whole nature of the euro project, which was never intended to create the economic benefits lauded by its more gullible fans.

It was and is a political project to advance the cause of creating a United States of Europe so that a few well-nourished individuals can strut the world stage claiming parity with the US, China and the other emerging great powers. Disasters affecting peripheral economies saddled with inappropriate interest rates were an entirely predictable consequence, designed to ease the transfer of power from national governments to the centre.

Our politicians continue to dodge the uncomfortable fact that semi-detachment from the European project is untenable in the long run, and we will have to submit ourselves to rule from Brussels or break free. Either course will be painful and dangerous, but only independence can restore Britain’s self-respect. And with it the right to take charge, like grown-ups, of our fisheries, energy policy and money.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.