Monday 30 January 2012

The horns of a dilemma

I'd like to see The Iron Lady, I really would. For anybody my age, who can remember her administration all too clearly, (my father coming home from working a night shift to declare with resignation to my mother, "She's got in") and spent their teenage years with her forming a constant backdrop to their lives, Thatcher is a hugely important and controversial figure.

Alan Davies, in his excellent, personal diary of the time for Channel 4, put all this much more eloquently than I can. His documentary recalled all too vividly the times we lived through. This was an era of the ending of free school milk, the miners' strike which so bitterly divided (and continues to divide) previously tightly-knit communities all over Britain. Of the absolute crushing of the union movement. Of the move towards privatisation of all our major national industry. Of huge job losses, massive cuts in private sector spending (any of this sounding familiar?) but most tellingly, the era in which money became the absolute prime motivator for everything. An era in which one woman, through the force of her personality, the culture of fear and contempt even within her own Cabinet and a dogmatic belief in her way that bordered on obsessive, managed to change the entire face of our society (a society which she didn't believe existed, of course) through sheer force of will.

Boom/bust economics, the culture of greed, the idea of banks as risk-takers rather than safe havens for one's savings, the abdication of responsibility for actually running pretty much anything, the idea that the 'market' will take care of things, all these concepts were actively made to flourish under her. She actually succeeded, I think, in moving the entire country to the right, politically speaking. People started to vote with their wallets rather than their sense of social responsibility. We are, for me, still paying the price for her government to this day, and in fact the present lot are recapitulating many of the worst policies, partly no doubt because they're Thatcherites themselves. She's left behind a dogma that plenty of Conservative thinkers still live by - she's still doing damage even now, even as a frail and evidently demented old woman. (I mean that in the medical sense – as in 'suffering from dementia' – not as a cheap shot).

The film has received mixed reviews, and I wonder how many of the reviewers were, like me, wide-eyed teenagers during this period. It may be that the film retains a bit less resonance for anybody older, or indeed younger, than my generation. Her family have distanced themselves from it completely, apparently unhappy at its portrayal of her as she is now. But here's the thing. I still can't stand the woman. I can't bear what she's made us, the legacy that Thatcherite economics, Thatcherite thinking, has left us. I've signed the petition (I realise this may sound morbid or even celebratory, but it's not) requesting that she not receive a State funeral on her death, because for millions of people she represents nothing less than the living embodiment of misery, bitterness, neglect, unemployment, despair, and they don't want to see that celebrated, however respectfully it's done.

So I think, on balance, I'll probably not go to see it. I worry that it'll elevate her, seek to celebrate her 'achievements', however bleakly it may paint a picture of her currently. I also worry that any portrayal of her as she is now may evoke an entirely understandable and human sympathy for the woman, rather than the politician, which overshadows the damage she did, and continues to do. Her family, it seems, are keen that she be remembered for who she was at the peak of her powers, not for what she is now. I heartily agree with them.

2 comments:

  1. I'm glad that's where you got to. I shall avoid seeing this film at all costs.

    As Stewart Lee put it in the Guardian with his equivalent biopic on Hitler...the elderly Hitler (Meryl Streep) sits in his Berlin bunker, recalling his struggles to be taken seriously as a young landscape artist (Glenn Close), the problematic Nazi years now merely light comic relief.

    You forgot to mention the woeful economic failings - the entire spunking of North Sea Oil money. Oh and Clause 28.

    She had a myopic Victorian vision and it was hateful. Someone should do that film.

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    1. I did indeed forget to mention them - it would make for lengthy reading if I'd been able to remember everything.

      Clause 28 was a particularly virulent example of the thinking of the people in charge at the time, yet one of its leading exponents, one Ann Widdicombe, has somehow been allowed to morph into a dotty, harmless old battle-axe. The same must not be allowed to happen with Thatcher.

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