Maggie's Boys In Blue

Of the living former Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, fully half are now in utter disgrace, drenched in blood that cries out to heaven for vengeance. One of them at least has the decency almost never to set foot here. But that the other remains at liberty should give the lie, once and for all, to the ludicrous fiction that she is a lower-middle-class person made good.

Someone like that would not be protected. Someone like that would gleefully be hung out to dry as an example to everyone else who might ever get ideas above their station. But Thatcher is not such a person. She grew up as a local princess, the daughter of the businessman and politician who ran every charity and committee for miles around, sent her to a fee-paying school, and then put her through Oxford without a scholarship.

An Independent after the Liberal Party had collapsed as a serious force, her Premiership made him, even if vicariously and posthumously, the last great Victorian and Edwardian Liberal commercial baron from the provinces to exercise national political influence. She herself is the last great figure of that Liberal oligarchy, one of the grandest elites in British history. Hence her continued non-arrest over Hillsborough.

The other story here is of how she detached the police from their communities. Before the Miners' Strike, miners and policemen were routinely brothers, or married to each others' sisters, or things like that. The miners, after all, were the epitome of the respectable working class. But she destroyed the economic basis of that class. And she altered the entire basis of policing, both with lavish monetary rewards for serving the Prime Minister of the day rather than the community on the ground, and by changing the basis of policing.

Note that Hillsborough happened several years after the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. That Act was part of the process. Preventative policing was dismantled, and Officers owing allegiance to a politician, to her party, and to a class from which they had not come but to which she had granted them the illusion of permanently precarious access, were equipped with draconian new powers in order to respond to the consequences of that dismantlement. Hillsborough was the result.