THE THATCHER LEGACY PART TWO




THE SECOND RATE MIND

When watching people celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher the word macabre comes to mind, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think it speaks to something very deep in the human psyche. The giveaway to this deeper and darker element is the use of the word ‘witch.’ ‘Demonise’ has become so overused as to have become cliché, yet this is a true example of the demonization of a human being, i.e. to imbue them with supernatural powers.  This process which began during Thatcher’s lifetime seems destined to flourish after her death. This form of inflation not only serves to produce an enemy that is larger than life it also correspondingly reduces your own feelings of power and control, what hope can mere mortals have when fighting against a witch.

The truth of course is both simpler and more complex. When I used to watch Thatcher holding forth in some TV studio what struck me most forcefully was the banality of her mind.[1] Looking through the comments section of the Guardian yesterday I came across the following:-

'Representing the worst of an east midlands mentality based on nothing much apart from a day trip to Skegness and sold by an advertising agency to the masses'[2]

Now whilst this overstates the case, it is not far off the mark. Thatcher emerged from that particular milieu that is the lower middle class.  It was a class that lived in constant fear of the working classes, providing them with sleepless nights in the thought that they might one day be subsumed by the ‘workers,’ who constantly threatening their daily struggle to remain separate, ‘respectable and decent.’ [3]Their greatest bogey was organised labour, the trade unions that gave the working class the one thing that they ought by right to be deprived off, political clout. This class has been the backbone of every right wing authoritarian state, from Fascist Italy to Pinochet’s Chile. Had her father grown up in Germany he would have worn a Nazi party badge on his lapel.

Now only a Stalinist condemns a person purely on the basis of their class origins, many grow and develop out of highly restrictive backgrounds, Thatcher never did.

Militant Tendency might talk class warfare, Thatcher practised it. She was the grocer’s daughter determined to smash organised labour. She loathed the very idea of community socialism, the idea of the collective society ‘we;’ I truly believe her hatred to be visceral, community living, other than that manifested by the Women’s Institute and the Rotary Club, made her feel sick. She may never have said ‘there is no such thing as society,’ but in the sense that she despised the very idea of community needs ever taking precedence over the, by necessity, narrow and selfish interests of the nuclear family the phrase rings true. It sums up her philosophy in a nutshell. Her ‘success’ lay in breaking up old working class identities by selling off community housing, preaching gambler capitalism through share ownership and laying waste communities who resisted her. We live with the consequences.

Perhaps the thought that someone so un-original, so narrow minded, so lacking in empathy or compassion, so bereft of intellectual range, could do so much damage is too difficult to take. We have to turn her into a supernatural creature. She was not. She was a prejudiced lower middle class woman with a second rate mind, who knew how to manage a political machine and got some lucky breaks in both her allies and enemies. The rest is just wind.  


[1] It may well be that one of the central features of ‘charismatic’ or forceful leadership  is the possession of a second rate mind, whilst avoiding the hyperbole of comparing Thatcher literally to some of this list it is striking how many of the following possessed second and indeed third rate minds, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Reagan, Blair. 
[2] Having copied it and posted it on my Facebook page I did not attribute it. Now I cannot find its author, my apologise.
[3] I am consciously writing in the past tense, although I accept class divisions have shifted, I do not buy the new models of social stratification being hawked.


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