I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.
She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.
I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.
The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.
They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.
Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.
Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.
No 'small C' conservative: Thatcher was a 'passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family'Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.
And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.
More from Peter Hitchens... PETER HITCHENS: We set Syria ablaze... Now we're hurling in explosives 01/06/13 The horrific killing of a soldier in London does not deserve the attention it is still getting 25/05/13 The Great Innocence Robbery: The awful abuse of girls in Oxford is just the latest consequence 19/05/13 Wondering how they ignored a kidnapper in Ohio? Well we're ignoring something MUCH bigger 11/05/13 PETER HITCHENS: Fruitcakes and closet racists? Cameron's talking about YOU! 04/05/13 PETER HITCHENS: Fanatical fools trying to blow us all up? They're the least of our problems... 27/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: What 'decriminalise' really means is: we're giving junkies a drug den next door to you 21/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: Miliband shoots at a footballing fascist - and scores an own goal 06/04/13 VIEW FULL ARCHIVEAt least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.
Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.
As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?
She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.
She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.
She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.
In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place.
Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.
SHE realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.
I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.
But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.
Putin: The Naked TruthAlas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.
It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.
I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).
Unfazed: Putin faces the naked protester as he tours a trade fair with Angela Merkel, rightBut why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.
Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.
Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee. When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her. When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.
Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?
If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.
Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day. While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle. In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens click here
