In the last 40 years, each main party has had a Leader who has led it to three consecutive General Election victories, in both cases including two consecutive landslides.
In Labour's case, it has moved from booing that Leader's name to simply never uttering it, although there is an acceptance of the real achievements in reducing child poverty, and in introducing the minimum wage and the Human Rights Act. Achievements for which Jeremy Corbyn did of course vote. Indeed, of the four Leadership candidates in July 2015, he was the only one who still did vote to defend that record on child poverty.
But on the Conservative side, there is a sharp distinction between grassroots and a certain number of backbench cultists, and a controlling element that finds Margaret Thatcher useful or even interesting only as the first of the party's two women Leaders and Prime Ministers, enabling them to howl that Labour has never even produced one. Notice that they, too, rarely say her name. Above a certain level in her party, she is almost as unmentionable as Tony Blair has become at every level of his.
The latest device to placate the cultists is the proposal for a statue of Thatcher in Parliament Square. But recent confirmation of what everyone had always known means that that will always be absolutely impossible. Victorians are one thing, but we are talking here about someone who as late as 1990 was using a prominent position on the world stage to agitate for South Africa to become an all-white state.
Thatcher's position was more extreme than that, at the time, of the Herstigte Nasionale Party, those scourges of P.W. Botha's liberal softness and backsliding, who for part of her Premiership bankrolled her supporters in the League of St George. It was more extreme than that of Franz Josef Strauss or Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It made her by far the most racist figure to have held a national office of any prominence anywhere in the West since the 1950s. There will never be a statue of her in Parliament Square. And, as she herself might have put it, "that's that."
In Labour's case, it has moved from booing that Leader's name to simply never uttering it, although there is an acceptance of the real achievements in reducing child poverty, and in introducing the minimum wage and the Human Rights Act. Achievements for which Jeremy Corbyn did of course vote. Indeed, of the four Leadership candidates in July 2015, he was the only one who still did vote to defend that record on child poverty.
But on the Conservative side, there is a sharp distinction between grassroots and a certain number of backbench cultists, and a controlling element that finds Margaret Thatcher useful or even interesting only as the first of the party's two women Leaders and Prime Ministers, enabling them to howl that Labour has never even produced one. Notice that they, too, rarely say her name. Above a certain level in her party, she is almost as unmentionable as Tony Blair has become at every level of his.
The latest device to placate the cultists is the proposal for a statue of Thatcher in Parliament Square. But recent confirmation of what everyone had always known means that that will always be absolutely impossible. Victorians are one thing, but we are talking here about someone who as late as 1990 was using a prominent position on the world stage to agitate for South Africa to become an all-white state.
Thatcher's position was more extreme than that, at the time, of the Herstigte Nasionale Party, those scourges of P.W. Botha's liberal softness and backsliding, who for part of her Premiership bankrolled her supporters in the League of St George. It was more extreme than that of Franz Josef Strauss or Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It made her by far the most racist figure to have held a national office of any prominence anywhere in the West since the 1950s. There will never be a statue of her in Parliament Square. And, as she herself might have put it, "that's that."
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