Get Over Her!

I have been taken to task by some people for attacking Margaret Thatcher. But did Margaret Thatcher, or did she not, sign the Single European Act? Did she, or did she not, sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement, as well as attempt to reintroduce devolution in Northern Ireland at one time, causing integrationist PPSes to resign? Did she, or did she not, take Britain into the ERM? (And don't give me the "she was bullied" line. Margaret Thatcher was bullied? Pull the other one!)

Did she, or did she not, bring in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act? Did she, or did she not, replace O-levels with GCSEs? Did she, or did she, not, effect the destruction of the stockades of working-class male employment, and thus of paternal authority (especially over teenage boys), in those communities? If you take away the economic clout of teenage boys' and young men's fathers, and you dismantle the institutions through which they exercise their authority, then you rob them of their power over their hot-headed sons. And we all know what happens next. This is not about class: if the same thing were done to the patriarchal figures of upper-middle-class families in the Home Counties, then the same consequences would result.

Did she, or did she not, at least indulge and tacitly encourage the misdefinition of liberty as the "freedom" to do absolutely anything one pleases, and the maxim that "greed is good"? And did she, or did she not, actually say that "there is no such thing as society", by definition including the society that is the family, and the society that is the nation?

So one could go on, and on, and on. Is not Political Correctness a recognisably 1980s phenomenon? Are not Thatcher's arguments against pits, steelworks, shipyards and factories directly applicable to farms? Indeed, did she not continue to subsidise farmers (as I'm very glad that she did), along with fee-paying schools, mortgage-holders and nuclear power (a good idea now, I might add), all for purely political rather than economic reasons, and thus contrary to her own ostensible ideology? Did she not, contrary to that same ideology, decline to privatise the Royal Mail "because it's Royal" (as, again, I'm very glad that she did)?

Did not welfare dependency increase to previously unimaginable proportions on her watch? Was not the provision of local services subjected to an unprecedented degree of central government micromanagement? And did she, or did she not, practically invite in the Argentine forces and then find that a Navy which she had starved of resources effectively had to function as if independent of political (i.e., her) control (a sort of coup), or else the Falkland Islands would be Argentine to this day?

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Get over her!