Is It All Over Yet?

Margaret Thatcher is finally dead. I don't think this is a cause for celebration. She was a strange woman ('we are a grandmother') and a profoundly unsympathetic character who pushed through changes which are still affecting us now, and she became the bogeywoman of the left. But this misses the point that she didn't achieve these things single-handedly: her government had huge support in this country; she never lost an election.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family and a place which wasn't hugely affected by Margaret Thatcher's policies, but that doesn't mean she didn't have a huge effect on the context of my childhood. With an ex-miner-turned-teacher father, we were always going to hate her, and we did.

But many of the people we knew supported her. Maybe they had no concept of what her government was wreaking in the industrial heartlands, maybe they really thought it was a good thing to sort out the unions. They weren't bad people, and they voted for her because she offered them personal advancement.

I still remember being astonished that policeman fathers of my schoolmates went to police the picketlines in the miners' strike: that wasn't what I was hearing at home. But, for a man with young children and no particular interest in politics, getting massive overtime for a few weeks work was probably a sound decision. Instead, my sister and I got woken one night for some flying pickets to sleep in my room.

People hated her so much they were disappointed she wasn't killed in the Brighton Bombing. To me, that sounds savage now. But it reflected the savagery of feeling on both sides in the 80s. I don't get this nostalgia for 'the Eighties': remembering 'the Eighties' makes me feel queasy.

One of my clearest memories is of the day she resigned: waiting for our German lesson to start after break and Mrs Church not turning up. She was a little daffy so that wasn't completely surprising, except she wasn't just a few minutes late. Somebody in the class had a radio and said Thatcher had resigned. We didn't believe him until Mrs Church arrived about 20 minutes late so say all the teachers were glued to the radio in the staff room. We did have a bit of a party that day.

But since then, Maggie became personally more and more irrelevant, and she hasn't taken part in public life for many years, and for that reason I don't find any cause for celebration.

So, you can loathe what she stood for, and I don't think it should be glossed over, but that's very different to celebrating the death of a frail, sick and confused old woman. If they want to look at it like that, it makes people as bad as they think she was.

It should be used, if at all, as an opportunity for people opposing this current government and its abhorrent cuts, to remind themselves that people now, as then, support them, from fear and self-interest. We should look for a way to persuade people more effectively to come round to our way of thinking, not attack them.

Well, that's my tuppence'th. Here's a photo of Alexander hiding in the ironing basket.