Tag Archive: Margaret Thatcher


NO TEARS FOR THATCHER

The horror that was  Thatcher as depicted by Steve Bell.

‘You should not speak ill of the dead’ is what every good boy is taught but today I will make an exception.

Tributes will be made and a funeral pageant will follow but we should not forget that Margaret Thatcher was one of the most hateful politicians of modern times.

Her destructive, divisive policies left a mark on Britain that is still there now – praising greed and selfishness with contempt rather than compassion for the weak in society.

“Don’t be too nasty”, said my wife when she knew I was writing this post.

Ok –  I’ll just let the following two quotes and a song from 1989 speak for themselves.

“Whatever side of the political debate you stand on, no one can deny that as prime minister she left a unique and lasting imprint on the country she served” – Nick Cleggg, on hearing of the Iron Lady”s demise.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever” – George Orwell’s prophetic words from 1984

SYNOD VOTE FOR SECULARISM

If a company refused to promote someone on the grounds of gender  it would justifiably be prosecuted for sexual discrimination.

The vote by the General Synod of the Church of England to deny women priests the opportunity to become bishops sets them above the law as well as showing how out of touch they are with modern society.

Maybe they are counting on the fact that no-one will dare challenge this decision for fear of stirring the wrath of God; presumably, few lawyers would run the risk of dissing the deity’s earthly representative if there was a possibility of being punished with eternal damnation.

Opponents referred to St Paul’s scripture that states  “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over man”. (It’s a pity Tory politicians didn’t follow this dictate when Margaret Thatcher was running for leader!).

Even the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams admitted that the decision means that the church has lost what little remains of its credibility.

Personally, I think this is good news as it confirms that the Church is an irrelevant anachronism and furthers the cause of a state run under the principles of secular Humanism.

HOW I KILLED MARGARET THATCHER by Anthony Cartwright (Tindal Street Press, 2012)

Book coverTindal Street Press, based at The Custard Factory in Birmingham, is a not-for-profit independent publishing house that was first established in 1998. Its mission is to seek out contemporary regional writers to counteract the bias towards London or South-East England.

One of these is Anthony Cartwright and they have published his previous two novels – The Afterglow (2004) and Heartland (2009).

The title of this promising writer’s third work is misleading. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that neither Cartwright nor his fictional alter ego Sean Bull actually succeed in assassinating Margaret Thatcher. ‘How I would have dearly liked to have killed Margaret Thatcher’ would be a more accurate, but much less eye-catching, title.

The novel documents a young boy’s harsh political and social education, the direct consequence of coming of age under Thatcher’s iron regime.

Cartwright was born in Dudley and this is where the novel is set, a location described in the novel as being “the frayed edge of the empire”. The Midlands was once the industrial heartland of England and was one of the regions most devastated by the cynical and divisive Tory policies. Continue reading

BIRDSONG: LOVE AND SLAUGHTER

BIRDSONG directed by Philip Martin (BBC Television drama, 2012)

Clémence Poésy (Isabelle) and Eddie Redmayne (Stephen)

The last WWI veteran Harry Patch wrote the following in his memoir, The Last Post:
“We were soon back in the trenches …..our living conditions there were lousy, dirty and unsanitary….. there were rats as big as cats, and if you had any leather equipment the damn things would gnaw at it. We had leather equipment – and they’d chew it. If you stood still long enough they’d chew your boot laces”.

How can you hope to capture such horrors of warfare for TV or cinema and still make it watchable?  The answer is that  you can’t. The most you can do is suggest the kind of atrocities the soldiers had to endure and leave the rest to your imagination.

Nevertheless the lack of a single rat in this otherwise impressive three-hour BBC adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ much-loved novel set during WWI is suspicious.  It may be reasonable to eliminate such ugly details but there is no doubt  that what remains is a sanitized version of reality. Continue reading

A DEMENTED THATCHER

THE IRON LADY directed by Phyllida Lloyd (UK, 2011)

The Iron Lady  is a film about one of the most significant (and hated) political figures of the 20th century but is practically devoid on any political content.  It tells you more about the state of dementia than it does about the state of Britain in the 1990s.

That the movie should end up as little more than a vehicle for Meryl Streep is perhaps only fitting since , for Margaret Thatcher, character is all.

Thatcher stands as the epitome of conviction politics but there is no excuse for ignoring the human consequences of her regime as though they were incidental details.  We see scenes of the coalminers’ strike, the Falklands war, the hunger strikers in Northern Ireland and finally the poll tax riots but you never get any understanding of what really drove her  to stick so unwavering to her cynical beliefs on any of these issues. Continue reading