One Week On

Hits on this site have gone through the roof since last Monday, beginning on that day and not stopping since.

The silencing of Big Ben for That Funeral will articulate most eloquently the contempt for Parliament expressed both by the event itself and by the manner of paying for it, at and by which neoliberal capitalism will be declared the official ideology of the State with London as its capital in 2013, no more up for debate than Protestantism was in the State with London as its capital in 1713, or than Catholicism was in the State with London as its capital in 1413.

The objection to George Galloway's objection to the cancellation of Prime Minister's Questions is that it has taken George Galloway to make it. Why is it not being done by members of the party that got rid of her; the party of Lawson, Howe, Heseltine, Major, Hurd and Clarke, who are all going to be there to hear Heseltine's protégé read the lesson without any apparent hint of irony? The silencing of Big Ben, indeed.

It is wholly appropriate that Angela Merkel should stay away, with Guido Westerwelle attending instead. Margaret Thatcher stood in his National Liberal tradition: bourgeois, modernist, imperialist, terrified of the working-class movement, fiercely anti-Catholic, secular in Germany and Nonconformist in Britain to very similar effects, attached to Royal Houses (Hanoverian, Hohenzollern) and to monarchs (Victoria, Wilhelm I) seen as embodying bourgeois and modernising imperialism against older Royal and Noble orders held in abject contempt. We all know where it ended up in 1914.

Thus was Thatcher's support for most of the major social changes of the late 1960s. Those would have happened at that point anyway. They would have happened with rather more Prime Ministerial enthusiasm if Ted Heath, or Margaret Thatcher, had been in Downing Street instead of Harold Wilson.

Thatcher opposed the abolition of capital punishment, the one unambiguously and unambivalently good item on those agenda. She supported abortion, which as Prime Minister she was later to legalise up to birth in three out of the four cases in which she had voted to make it legal at all. She voted to make divorce far easier, and to abolish the existing forms of censorship without putting anything in their place.

Her attitude to the comprehensivisation of schools became fully apparent when she became Education Secretary and closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled; during her Premiership, O-levels were replaced with GCSEs.

She supported the humane and necessary decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, which predated by several years the emergence, among the pederasts of America's coastal metropoles, of the historically illiterate and scientifically baseless notion, still unknown to most of the world, that homosexuality is an individual or collective identity economically, socially, culturally or politically; that "homosexual" can be a noun rather than an adjective, or refer to persons rather than to acts.

Funnily enough, she took a public school Tory approach in practice, publicly condemning the whole thing in strident terms while privately surrounding herself with them and even making a notorious pederast her Parliamentary Private Secretary. Homosexually inclined men remain among her most devoted admirers, just as they were at the time.

And even her support for a failed attempt to ban hare coursing did not exactly manifest how far the Member for Finchley had moved from small town Lincolnshire. Hare coursing was, and is, the sort of thing done by landed C of E Tories or by the lower orders. But it was not done by mercantile Methodist pillars of the Liberal Establishment.