Gravedancing

In years to come will we be asked if we can remember the details of our lives the day we heard the news. I was at a bus stop listening to Radio 2 (unless I wasn't, details are sketchy). It's hard to remember anything or think clearly in the midst of this nauseating propaganda pea souper; the outpouring of Tory sycophancy and mistruth has been staggering - and it's still going on, partly because of the disturbances caused by 'leftists' dancing on Thatcher's (for it is she that I speak of) grave.

I am currently typing this (if, thanks to this broken keyboard, it can be called such) at Bristol library. On the way here I heard a couple of students, kids, on the seat behind me; one of them was saying that she wanted to get into 'sales'. That is the legacy of the 'iron lady'. Even when I was at school (which was during her heyday) I remember people saying similar things; one lad saying he wanted to get into accountancy. Even then I sneered - ok we need some people, I suppose, to deal with money matters, but to aspire to accountancy? In each case the motivation seems to be the same: it's good money. Whatever happened to true aspiration, with wanting to do something at least beneficial for society. While we might need people to count the coins, that's only because we live in a monetarist age.

There are better places to go to find a true representation of her reign of terror. Another Angry Voice is a blog on the links on this very page, while the Red Pepper has another analysis. Both will know doubt be ashes in the mouths of effusing Tory eulogists who, like Cameron, are happy to waste public money burying this creature while using the whole affair to launch into more ideological bollocks. I'm not going to engage in grave dancing, that's the sort of form the right wing media has (I seem to remember they 'celebrated' the sinking of the Belgrano with the phrase 'Gotcha'). This is how they operate, not I how operate.

Besides this isn't a victory: it's the marking of a new phase in the war against the Tory monied elite that worship Thatcher. The battle has not ended.

This whole business has revealed the Tories in a way they perhaps didn't realise. In their public eagerness to reveal their love for her warped and broken ideology they show their true colours in a way we could only have dreamed of during the Corporate Sports Festival and the Diamond Jubilee last year. Where it was ridiculous for GOve to suggest we all chip in to buy the Queen a new boat, we are told we must for out 10 million for a funeral.

It is now clear in a way it has never been before just how desperately wedded to a small minded ideology the Tories are, along with their hapless Libdem underlings. Every tribute is merely a thinly veiled pop at socialism/labour/the unions; a remark on how broken Britain was during the seventies. Yet it took a war and the vile rhetoric of the gutter press to shore up her support in the early years.

Noone can deny the devastating impact that is her legacy. No social housing at a time we are forced to undertake a 'spare room subsidy' (it's not a tax, remember!). She sold off the housing which of course gave more power to the banking sector (that she also supported). Why do people still have to rely on a huge millstone of debt - hundreds of thousands of pounds - just to get into a home! Thatcher allowed people to buy these houses, which of course is a vote winner, and never replaced them. Gone forever it seems is the notion of housing as a right and a communal resource. Now it's all housing bubbles and property speculation, all helped by banks that were unfettered in he eighties as never before. Where has that left us, well that's obvious to anyone with a brain surely.

Utilities were privatised in a purely ideological drive to destroy society leaving people with a dependence on market forces and profiteering corporations. This takes more money out of the economy as people have no choice but to spend their money on heating lighting and water. That is less money to be spent freely.

Perhaps the most nauseating part of her legacy is the perverse notion that she was an example to women. People the world over - including hopeless Hollywood actors like Streep - see her as a powerful icon of womanhood. They of course forget that she was backed by a very rich husband and was, ultimately, stabbed in the back by the stuffy patriarchy that remains in power to this day. There are very few women in the Tory party and in politics in general, yet most of them are obliged to pay this singular tribute to Thatcher just because she happened to be born with a particular set of chromosomes: had Thatcher not been the first, someone else would have. In my, masculine, opinion it means nothing. She did nothing to reform politics into a more gender equal environment, certainly didn't reform the attitudes of the ruling elite, and has left us with creatures as reprehensible and morally dead as the disgusting Edwina Currie and Theresa 'catwoman' May.

Yet since Monday the BBC has gone into overdrive, predictably I suppose, hosting an endless array of political superstars from yesteryear, from spitting image puppets like Douglas Hurd to Glasnost Gorbachev. It's like some ghastly TV reunion show. No doubt next week there will be wall to wall coverage of her corpse proceeding through the streets of a changed London, as oblivious in death as in life, to the havoc her stubborn ideas wrought.