Thatcher funeral: Can we ever ignore Thatcherism?

The Iron Lady might not have been for turning but protesters can turn their back on Margaret Thatcher. There’s a Turn Your Back on Thatcher protest planned today for her funeral. They plan to “reject the legacy” of Maggie Thatcher by quietly turning their backs on the coffin as it goes by. “That way the world press will not be able to avoid recording how many of us reject the legacy of the ‘no such thing as society’ woman and the police won’t be able to find a hot spot to kettle or disperse,” said Lois Davis, a member of the Facebook group Maggie’s Good Riddance Party. The Turn Your Back on Maggie Thatcher group has 196 likes. The Turn Your Back on Thatcher group has 411 likes. More than 800 people have pledged to attend Maggie’s Good Riddance Party and some have vowed to pelt her coffin with eggs and coal. Those are not earth-shattering numbers, given that tens of thousands of miners lost their jobs during the mine closures of 1984-85, and anyway these numbers are just Facebook pledges. It probably reflects the fact that while plenty of people in Britain (and other parts of the world) resent the hagiographic airbrushing of the former British Prime Minister, she’s been out of the picture for a long long time. Her funeral is today but she’s been all but dead in the public imagination for years. Until Meryl Streep resurrected her with an Oscar, Maggie Thatcher had faded from the global memory. Russell Brand, no admirer of Thatcher, captured that rather poignantly in a blog for The Guardian about the woman he had grown up thinking was “the headmistress of the country” with a voice that was a “bellicose yawn, both boring and boring”. In the end even the most formidable battle-axe becomes just an old shuffling woman.

(W)e spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. “What’s going on there, mate?” John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. “Maggie Thatcher,” he said. “Comes here every week to water them flowers.” The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off.

Brand writes that noone present, including himself spoke with vitriol or eyed that “pale phantom, dumbly filling her day” with anything but curiosity. [caption id=“attachment_705602” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Pallbearers carry the coffin of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher into the Palace of Westminster in London. Reuters[/caption] It is in that sense easier to reserve the anger (and the coal and the rotten eggs) for the dead Thatcher instead of the shuffling Thatcher losing her memory. Thatcher was unlucky in her dotage. Her own party which had tired of her and forced her to resign had not turned her into a sort of sunny Reaganesque figure as the Republicans did with Ronald Reagan or the BJP now does with the ailing Atal Behari Vajpayee. Reagan had already been so embalmed in the sweetness of his Jellybeans by the time he died, that there was hardly a contrary voice raised during his funeral. Thatcher didn’t turn into a sweet old national grandma. Other than that poignant frail appearance at Reagan’s funeral, which she attended against the orders of her doctor, the Iron Lady just rusted away at home. Despite all the hoopla about more than 2,300 guests,her funeral is hardly a great reunion of the Cold Warriors since most of them are dead or too old to go anywhere. For today’s television watchers much of the guest lists reads more like a Who’s That instead of a Who’s Who. For example, France will be represented by Elisabeth Guigou, the Socialist MP who was a close advisor to President Mitterand during the Thatcher years. Mikhail Gorbachev cannot attend because of “health reasons.” Neither can Helmut Kohl. Nancy Reagan, at 91, sent her “heartbroken” regrets. No serving cabinet member from Obama’s White House will be in attendance despite the effusive eulogy Obama offered up after Thatcher’s death. Former secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker III will lead the US delegation. Given the number of them in attendance, television announcers are likely to confuse one old white man in a dark suit with another. Except for the two bona fide “stars” in attendance – Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney. They could actually be more meaningful targets of protest instead of the now dead Maggie. Margaret Thatcher is dead and protesters may turn their back on her cortege in a perfectly civil and peaceful gesture of protest especially for what will apparently be a 10 million pound funeral at a time of benefit cuts. But the larger and more pertinent question facing Britain is whether Thatcherism will be buried with Thatcher. Or as the Daily Mash tweaked the lyrics of W. H. Auden’s famous poem: Shut up Big Ben, cut off your leftwing groans Prevent protestors coming, arrest them at home Silence the pop charts and with Cameron Bring the hearse you paid for, you know, that one … She shafted the North, the South survived the test A working week was quite rare at best A loon, a nutbag, a hawk, so long I thought Thatcherism was forever: I’m not wrong The poor are not wanted now; put down every one They’re all on the fiddle, or so says The Sun Paw away on Twitter and rally the good; You can whinge all you want, it won’t do any good.