Dancing on graves

“Their quests for inner knowledge For knowing themselves, For prosperity, peace, universalAwareness... were no moreThan all the avatars Of idleness.”
From Dodo ka Dookh by Bachchoo

Earth receives a controversial guest — Margaret Thatcher is laid to rest. Her funeral was attended by those invited by a committee consisting of her family, close friends and the Tory party. They even invited those Tory colleagues who finally brought her down.
They included Michael Heseltine, the minister who stood against her in the leadership contest that forced her resignation; Geoffrey Howe, once her Chancellor who, before resigning, made a devastating speech in Parliament attacking her style of governance and the attributes of her personality that made it impossible or humiliating for him to work with her. His speech was the publication of the split in the Tory party leading to the leadership challenge and her resignation.
The Prime Minister of Argentina was not invited. Neither was Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Labour Party during her time in office, though subsequent Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were cordially asked. Ken Livingstone, former leader of the Greater London Council which Thatcher abolished (he went on to become the mayor of London) was not invited. Neither was Arthur Scargill, the former president of the National Union of Miners who led a bitter year-long strike against her attempt to close the coal mines of Britain, nor Gerry Adams, the leader of the Irish Republican Army who fought a guerrilla campaign against Thatcher’s government.
Thatcher was given the closest thing to a state funeral, though convention doesn’t allow for former Prime Ministers to be treated as though they were royalty. There was no fly-past of the Royal Air Force, though one comedian quipped that the Argentinian Air Force would have readily complied.
While most of her party, significant swathes of British society and the right-wing press mourned her passing in sanctimonious terms, the BBC and other newspapers attempted to present, throughout the week between her death and the funeral, objective or balanced assessments of her impact on Britain, its politics, economics, people and its future. Friends and sycophants, enemies and critics spoke.
We saw clips of Thatcher at several points in her career. In one clip she is seen emerging from Downing Street and announcing to waiting reporters that her son Mark’s wife has given birth to a boy. “We are a grandmother”, she says forgetting for a moment (or longer?) that she is not Queen Victoria.
The nastiest news of the week was that several people, some not old enough to have been alive when she was Prime Minister, threw parties to celebrate her death. A campaign on Twitter and the Internet asked people to go out and buy the record of Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, a song from The Wizard of Oz, so that the number of sales would project the song onto the pop charts and compel the BBC and other radio stations that feature these charts to play it.
The campaign succeeded. The record sold thousands and reached No. 2 in the charts, presenting the BBC with a dilemma. In normal circumstances the BBC would play the record several times on its radio network. The fact that this song’s rise in the charts had a “political” dimension gave the BBC some pause. Internal conferences were convened to decide what to do. Grandees of the Tory party and editorials in right-wing newspapers called on Lord Tony Hall, the newly appointed director general, to use his executive power to ban the record.
These by and large professedly “anarchist” parties celebrating Thatcher’s death with banners, bands and balloons are puerile and nasty. Her policies, heritage, history, personality, motivations, dispositions, tastes, face and figure are all legitimate subjects for discussion and fair game for derision. The celebration of the demise of an old lady in the final stages of dementia is not. It’s not simply bad taste and bad manners, it’s an exercise in blundering stupidity.
So should one berate the good citizens of Italy for celebrating the hanging of Mussolini from a lamp-post? Does the same injunction apply to celebrating the death of Hitler or Stalin? Perhaps as many people in Italy or Russia had come to detest the policy and power of their respective dictators. The world quite rightly celebrated the death of Hitler. But all these were celebrations of the fall from power of tyrants. Their deaths brought about the end of their tyranny.
The time to celebrate Thatcher’s passing from power was when she was deposed by the rebellion in her own party. I celebrated — with a pint or more of bitter, as I remember — with friends who shared my dislike of her policies, her stance on the world and her pronouncement that we immigrants were “swamping” the culture of Britain. (“I never swamped nobody, Your Honour! Honest...” “...Then what of the smell of curry in your street, my good man?”)
Her death didn’t put an end to anything we opposed. Celebrating it would not induce anyone, least of all those of her party who try and build on her inheritance, to be being inspired by what we opponents consider her destructive acts and policies.
Matthew Paris, a journalist and former member of Parliament who worked in Thatcher’s office, recalls that she diligently replied to letters which people wrote to her. A lady whose husband had recently died wrote asking if Thatcher believed in God and heaven. Thatcher’s reply was, “I am a Christian and Christians believe in an afterlife.”
The sentence isn’t one charged with faith or conviction. It is more a procedural “truth”. In her final failing days one doubts if she “thought” anything. Those of faith who loved or
supported her will no doubt ascribe to her a place in the heaven of free-market politicians — a small room by my reckoning.
Others will assign to Lady Thatcher a long stint in another place. I don’t believe in either — or in dancing on graves.