(iron [Lady] showing pol[itical pol]arisation)
Margaret Thatcher’s death
shows something that should have been obvious, but is often overlooked; mainly,
I guess, because the national press has a strong London bias. That is, that the
UK has such deep divisions within it that the experience of being British is so
ferociously different for different groups of British people.
Furthermore, it reveals how
polarised the right and left are – something that isn’t obvious in the actual
policy of the mainstream parties. In this sense, it’s a similar effect to that
of Obama’s recent re-election in America. In policy as in practise, the
democrats aren’t the left; often, they’re barely even liberal; their economic,
social & political priorities are a lot closer to those of their republican
opponents than people like to remember. But the two-party system provides a
central space in which a deeply-felt division within the people can be
neutralised (& thus, in a practical sense, ignored).
I don’t want to compare &
contrast a list of positives/negatives of Thatcher’s legacy. I don’t think
that’s necessary & I don’t think it’s intellectually useful. At the
beginning of Paul Preston’s brilliant The Spanish Civil War he says that he can see no positive element of
Franco’s victory that does anything toward outweighing the negative, &
admits that such facts make him ‘biased’ in a sense - & I occupy similar
(though less extreme, as she’s not actually a fascist) ground when it comes to
Thatcher, her politics & her symbolism. But I think, for me, it would be
better to say that she, as a figure, is more than one figure, she played more
than one part, & the memory of her, or the understanding of her legacy, is
more than a single memory, more than a single legacy. & I think a key
component of this is Thatcher as a woman.
I don’t want to know this,
but I know it: the left is uncomfortable with the first female prime minister
being the model for neoliberalism, conservativism, free-market economics,
aggressive foreign policy – because the left see themselves as the ones who
look out for women, basically. To those on the left, & I include myself in
this very much, the struggle for gender equality & representation is
suppose to go with the need for economic equality, for fair trade, for public
education & healthcare, the struggle for international peace – they are all
supposed to be one struggle.
I don’t want to know this,
but I know it: lefties hate Margaret Thatcher more because she’s a woman;
because she doesn’t conform to the struggle’s idea of what a female icon should
be.
Her gender causes equal, or
worse, trouble on the right; though strangely enough, it seems harder to spot.
The old school & the new school right unite to praise her – but they are
the same people who stand for tradition, for family values (i.e., traditional
gender roles, i.e., disempowered women), for a business & financial sector
dominated by men & by masculinity; they are, after all, the Camerons and
the Boris Johnsons, the posh boys club. So they use her gender as a weapon to
show the left that policies that – by definition – benefit the minority &
not the majority can contain within themselves so much mobility, so much
potential for members of the majority to, if they work hard enough, join the
minority, that even their most obvious victims are willing to support,
advocate, lead, author such policies. In this sense, her gender is being
tokenised by the right, even exoticised. ‘She’s an inspiration,’ conservatives
are saying, ‘because she succeeded against all the odds, as a woman’ – that is
to say, she is a beautiful, exotic anomaly within the system of oppression that
they created & continue to support.
So now people are singing Ding
Dong the Witch is Dead; calling her a
bitch, a cunt – so now
people are praising the success of the Green-Grocer’s Daughter, the woman who ‘didn’t feel theneed to make a fuss about the very real obstacles she faced and overcame - and without any help
from the 'sisterhood'
… We have to face the obvious
here; such terms don’t have equal meaning for men & women - there are not,
nor will there be, equivalents. Their use stems from a position of privilege
& prejudice. Thatcher’s legacy is horror enough, in terms of the inequality
she represented & promoted; we have a huge responsibility, moral, social &
intellectual, to condemn the sexist element in both sides here, & to build
a better frame for our understanding.