Not a Thatcher FanSays
Norm Johnson of the Guardian:
We all owe her a great blah, blah, blah, so let's all sing happy birthday to the nicest, kindest octogenarian fascist currently drooling outside Brazil. Well, as I said to the nice lady on Newsnight this week, that argument is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. I'll go further: I'll punch the guy who says he hates Thatch more than me. If anything, I hate her more viscerally today, from the top of her mad, shrunken old bonce to the tip of her gnarly toes, than I did 20 years ago. You want my real thoughts on Thatch? Unprintable. Suffice it to say my principal concern as she shuffles towards the grave is how best we can dispose of her body, to avoid it contaminating the earth for 10,000 years. Maybe they'd have it in Australia, with our nuclear waste.Amusingly, though, he's solid on the war, and admits that perhaps old Maggie did accomplish a few things:
So, yes, the unions were sorted on her watch. And I say that as someone whose big toe has never been the same since Wapping. Ditto the cold war. There was respect for the transatlantic alliance. Caution on Europe. The economy, stupid. Council houses for sale. Shaking up the teachers. A national curriculum. League tables. Rail privatisation. De-fetishisation of the green belt. The foundations for PFI. Concern for the daytime-TV-watching classes. Full prisons. Contracting out. Rupert Murdoch.It just goes to show that some people can never reexamine their past and conclude that they were indeed wrong.