OPINION: Margaret Thatcher and the birth of two nations

“I am thoroughly in favour of Mrs Thatcher’s visit to the Falklands. I find a bit of hesitation, though, about her coming back.” John Mortimer, lawyer, author and playwright.

And so, Margaret Hilda Thatcher is no more. You can usually tell what people thought about her by whether or not they referred to her solely by her surname or whether they added the courteous ‘Mrs’. The omission or inclusion of the title providing a fair litmus test for the speaker’s political point of view.

To me she was ‘’Thatcher’.

This is an opinion piece; not an obituary. I feel no particular need to be either condemnatory or slavish in my admiration. That she had a great influence on the affairs and direction of the nation is undeniable. Whether or not this was positive or negative depends on your own perspective.

Several years ago, when working in London, I chanced to meet one of those strange creatures we referred to then as ‘Yuppies’. It was just before Christmas and he was sporting a large plaster-cast on his leg. This fresh-faced, rather arrogant young man was a commodities broker who worked in the City. He told me the tale of his injury.

Evidently he had been out celebrating getting his Christmas bonus by drinking copious quantities of vintage Krug at £400 per bottle. The bonus received by this fresh-faced, 21-year old ‘Hooray Henry’ had been a £40,000 Porsche. Thus fortified, he had tripped over a kerb in his drunken state, badly fracturing his ankle.

A few weeks later, I was visiting some friends in a pit-village near Chesterfield. I should say ‘former pit-village’ as the local pit had been closed down in the wake of the infamous miners strike a year or two earlier.

We went out for a drink to the former Miners Institute where, to this day, neighbour refuses to speak to neighbour depending on whether or not they had chosen to disobey the NUM and return to work or whether they had followed the strike through to the bitter end at horrendous personal cost.

The pit had since closed with few of those present having found work. Several had lost their homes. The talk that night included memories of picket-busting policemen waving bundles of £10 notes at strikers who were relying on handouts to survive were still fresh in the memory. For me, these two encounters encapsulate the extremes of what became known as ’the Thatcher years’.

Without seeking to pull apart every policy ascribed to Mrs Thatcher, the inheritance she left was of a two-nation state based on the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Greed became not only desirable but a national obsession. Consensus and unity were thrown out of the window and money and the power that it brought became the only game in town.

The sale of many of our utilities and rail network was, in many cases, little short of a disaster and the sale of council houses, coupled with a refusal to allow local authorities permission to build replacements was a policy that later in the decade thousands of families lost their homes when they were plunged into negative equity following the crash. Many of those former council homes ended up in the hands of private landlords and today’s homelessness crisis is a direct legacy.

In health, large psychiatric hospitals closed in their dozens with so-called ‘care in the community’ policies being wholly unable to take the strain.

And yet, there is no doubt that politics at the time had become stagnated. The Callaghan Labour government had been a shambles and public services had become a joke. Don’t worry, I’m not going into a polemic on the ‘Winter of Discontent’. Most of us agree that something had to change but the ‘cure’ that Thatcherism brought with it all but killed the patient.

Whatever your own views about her; and I’m sure you will have fairly strong ones, most of us will agree that she left behind a nation that had changed in many respects. For me, it is a nation that has had much of its compassion removed and this continues to this day.

Was Margaret Thatcher a great prime minister? It certainly seems as if many of the history books will remember her in that way. But, as the example of the first Duke of Wellington reminds us, the great do not also have to be good. Wellington was an egotistical bully; loathed by many of his own troops. He was also a philanderer and adulterer. However, when he died, there followed weeks of national mourning culminating in one of the most elaborate funerals ever seen in Britain.

I cannot ever recall a situation where the death of a great statesman became the occasion to hold street parties as happened on the day that Margaret Thatcher died. That she should arouse such strong feelings 23 years after leaving office is perhaps her most poignant legacy.