Is Celebrating Death Justifiable?

[prendrelemick]

Yup! It's going to be a shouting at the telly day for me I think.

[Scheherazade]

Definitely. All day. As far away from a television as I can get. I think a private funeral followed at a later date by a Memorial Service would have been quite sufficient. It's enough for most politicians. I can't help feeling someone, somewhere, is making political hay out of what should be a private, family event.

Yep. What Kasie said.

[Lokasenna]

I'm keeping away from the TV as well, though every now and then I flick on to the BBC's website - everything seems quiet.

I did like this bloke though: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22180329. I wish more people would make protests in such a dignified, thoughtful and eloquent way - I think that speaks far more powerfully against Thatcher/Thatcherism than grotesque effigies, drunken street parties, and up-beat Judy Garland numbers.

Oh well, thanks to Youtube I'm still getting some political entertainment - currently listening to a series of old Paxman vs. Galloway interviews while I work. They should just give the two of them a selection of melee weaponry, and let them get on with it - most entertaining.

[WICKES]

I did like this bloke though: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22180329. I wish more people would make protests in such a dignified, thoughtful and eloquent way - .

...me too. The best of the working class socialists I remember as a child were real men who'd have considered it beneath them to celebrate the death of an old woman.

[prendrelemick]

Never thought I'd be glad to see Bargain Hunt!

[Emil Miller]

I have just watched the whole ceremony and it was quite brilliantly stage managed although I don't usually bother with that sort of thing. The interesting part was trying to put a name to the old political dinosaurs, of whom there were many, but I searched in vain for Arthur Scargill and Denis Skinner. A much more pleasant interlude was watching Mrs Thatcher's grand daughter Amanda give a reading at the service as she is a little lollipop. I've long had a liking for Mrs. Cameron ( don't tell Dave) who looked particularly charming and elegant. It's not only Electra that mourning becomes.

[Emil Miller]

Doubled the post. But I'll take the opportunity to say that Sir Bernard Ingham looked like the creature from the black lagoon.

[TheFifthElement]

Yes, well, isn't she supposed to get one as an ex-PM, no matter what she did or did not do?

That's the thing kiki, aside from Churchill no other former PM has been given a ceremonial funeral. Not even Clement Attlee, who was doubtless the greatest post war PM and a campaigner for consensus and freedom and a promoter values such as caring for others, especially the poor, and whose government rebuilt Britain post-war.

Kasie makes a great point here:

I think a private funeral followed at a later date by a Memorial Service would have been quite sufficient. It's enough for most politicians. I can't help feeling someone, somewhere, is making political hay out of what should be a private, family event.

because there is a sense of political capital about this whole affair, and it's not even clear if it's really what Thatcher wanted. In terms of the protests, I think most people would agree that it is inappropriate to protest at a funeral however this is not just a funeral it's a ceremonial and public event. Being so, I think it is absolutely right in a democracy that people have the right and facility, and can exercise those rights, to express their opinions whatever they are and that includes, in this case, the right to protest against Thatcher's policies and the way they continue to echo through the society she didn’t even believe in to this day.

I can understand why people have felt very angry about this whole event. I think the way it has been done, with the pomp and the eulogising, that it has scraped up a whole load of bad feeling that people probably thought they'd worked past and which they feel compelled to express just to counter the impression that would otherwise be left, that she was a great leader and did great things for this country. That is one view, but it isn't the whole story. I don't think it is right to ask people to pretend that they're sad or to ignore the harm that was done, the anger, the violence, the mistakes or the pain any more than it would be right to stop people from expressing their sorrow or their admiration of her. People have said that she was a divisive politician and I think that was true. Her policies worked well for some areas of the country and some areas of the economy. For others they were devastating. People lost their jobs, their communities and their hope for the future. Some sections of the population were directly discriminated against, as in the case of Section 28 which caused a great deal of harm to the homosexual communities. The case of miners has already been mentioned. I don't think it is inappropriate to question her choice in friends (Jimmy Saville anyone?), her undying and vocal support for Pinochet in spite of his terrible and brutal crimes against his own people. General Suharto she referred to as "one of our very best and most valuable friends". Her support of Saddam Hussein's regime. Her misplaced statements about Mandela and her stance against imposing sanctions on Apartheid South Africa. There are still questions to be answered about how much influence she had in the 'softening' of the criticism of the police following the Hillsborough disaster, which has resulted in years of blame being laid in the hands of the victims, though I think one of the mothers of a Hillsborough victim got it right when she said "it is terrible to speak ill of the dead. I know, because that's exactly what happened to my son."

I also think that the celebrations, as distasteful as they might be, are merely an expression of the powerlessness that people felt and, perhaps, continue to feel in the face of policies over which they had little influence and could do little to change. It is a little trite, I think, to say things like 'well if people didn't like it they should have voted against it' as this ignores the fact that many people did vote against the government of the time and many people would have been impacted by these policies who did not have even have the right to vote. The young in particular were affected by the lack of jobs and many people would have grown up seeing their parents on picket lines, losing their jobs and their self-respect, or in poverty. Then there are the people who did protest, and whose protests were brutally quashed by the police at the time. What I remember, as I was quite young during the Thatcher era, is seeing riot after riot after riot on TV. People did protest, but it's ineffectual if no one is listening.

Perhaps the sight of mass groups of people celebrating the death of a politician who caused them or those that they loved harm is one of the safety mechanisms that makes other politicians stop and think before implementing policies which will inflict damage on swathes of the population. Very little is done in this country to canvass public opinion for changes in policy, once the polls are closed. Of course it wouldn’t prevent the brutal dictator and it probably wouldn’t have stopped Thatcher who patently didn’t care about the damage being done, but perhaps in the current media age it might inspire a pause for thought and maybe that in itself is enough.

And I think there is a certain hypocrisy about it. No one seems to have a problem with people celebrating on the streets where Gaddafi’s body was being dragged out of the storm drain and photographed and filmed and shared around the world on YouTube. No one is saying, “you know that Stalin was just a sad old man in the end wasn’t he?” or the same about Pol Pot or Chairman Mao though perhaps they too had families and people who loved them, perhaps they were sometimes kind to strangers and also just doing what they thought was best. Conviction politicians. The rhetoric works in kind of in the same way.

And my main worry about all of this is that it detracts from the current problems. By talking about and focusing on Thatcher it makes us all focus on the past and diverts our attention from what needs to be done now. Thatcher’s policies were destructive to many, but many successive governments have done little about it. People are, and feel, just as powerless now as they did back then, and little has been done to engage a public consensus, a different style of politics, in spite of the meteoric technological advancements, particularly in the area of communications, which would make it possible now. If people really want to reject what she stood for, the stagnation of British politics which still seems to be caught in the wake of what she did, then turning their backs at her funeral isn’t the best way to do it. But it does leave you asking, what is there that you can do that would matter? And that is, perhaps, the question we should be asking of our politicians now rather than debating the finer points of her legacy.


Of course whatever you thought of Thatcher, for the positive or negative, she did inspire some amazing TV. Quite astonished that the thread has gone so far and no one has yet posted a clip from Spitting Image.

[Emil Miller]

Of course whatever you thought of Thatcher, for the positive or negative, she did inspire some amazing TV. Quite astonished that the thread has gone so far and no one has yet posted a clip from Spitting Image.

Here's one.

[prendrelemick]

Meanwhile in Leeds...



and that really is the best way to protest.

[prendrelemick]

Doubled the post. But I'll take the opportunity to say that Sir Bernard Ingham looked like the creature from the black lagoon.

Oi! He's my homie. (If that's the correct term for a hometown boy.)

[Emil Miller]

Oi! He's my homie. (If that's the correct term for a hometown boy.)

Here he is as of today.