I
am a product of Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom. I served as guinea pig for
every educational experiment she launched during her Premiership, and lived
within sight of the pithead at Cadley Hill, which finally closed in 1988. I saw
friends risk their liberty over the ill-fated Poll Tax and stood on the
sidelines of a culture marked by the bleakness of strikes, the violence of
football fans, race riots, class division, and the immanence of the IRA. My England
of the 1980s was a grim, knee-capped, hopeless era in which Thatcher brandished
a political crowbar. I have no fond affections for her, her ideology, or her
political legacy.
Cadley Hill, 1984
That
being said, and with Glenn Greenwald’s important intervention in mind, I see no
humanity in dancing on Thatcher’s grave, or on anyone else’s for that matter. I
do not understand how so many characteristically reasonable people – people who
spend their lives looking for intellectual angles on everything with an
ever-refining insistence on nuance – can take pleasure, and I am discerning an
abundance of genuine heartfelt glee, from the death of a person. This kind of
people bemoaned the crass triumphalism of Joe Public in America on the death of
Osama Bin Laden, but happily celebrate the enfeeblement and subsequent
miserable demise of a compatriot. If Thatcher was criticised for commodifying
the individual, de-humanising society in the process, then the vacuous danse macabre instigated by her death
seems to testify to the depths to which that de-humanisation went.
Schadenfreude is,
quite obviously, not typically a particularly English quality. At the moment,
however, one wouldn’t know it. By all means speak ill of the dead, but in the
name of humanity stop raising a glass to death. It is unbecoming of the dignity
that so many people who detested Thatcher claimed to wish to uphold.
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