{"id":207002,"date":"2013-12-20T20:00:16","date_gmt":"2013-12-20T14:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=207002"},"modified":"2013-12-20T20:00:16","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T14:30:16","slug":"maggies-harm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/maggies-harm\/","title":{"rendered":"Maggie\u2019s Harm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Spitting
Spitting image<\/strong> Baroness Thatcher at the unveiling of her portrait at the National Portraits Gallery. Photo: AFP<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nHave you ever thought, right, but you don\u2019t know, but you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole fuckin\u2019 life and all you have to look forward to is fuckin\u2019 sickness and purgatory?\u201d
\nMike Leigh\u2019s 1993 film Naked<\/em>, through its violent, sociopathic protagonist Johnny, paints a bleak picture of post- Thatcher Britain. Unemployed \u2014 one of over 3.5 million in the country \u2014 and running away from a beating at the hands of a man whose wife he has raped, Johnny flees Manchester for London. He wanders the streets of the capital, latching on to people who offer him shelter from the cold, only to ridicule them with some of the sharpest dialogue written in cinema. He is a man convinced that society is on the verge of collapse, living with pre-apocalyptic abandon, scornful of those who still hope for better days.
\nThe England around him provides little evidence to the contrary. It is a land of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease (it is heavily insinuated that Johnny is HIV-positive), the five Giant Evils that the Beveridge Report sought to eliminate through its vision of a cradle-to- grave welfare state that formed the basis of post-War British society. This consensus, which even her Conservative Party supported in large part, was directly challenged and eventually shattered by Margaret Thatcher\u2019s decade-long premiership. Her economic policies arrested rampant inflation and (somewhat) rekindled growth, but trebled unemployment; her cuts to social security programmes meant the unemployed lived worse lives. Her refusal to compromise with labour unions and her policy of mine closures destroyed the country\u2019s coal industry, inflicting untellable harm to the communities that depended on mining for sustenance, and to trade unionism at large. Her proposal to let individuals buy their council homes precipitated a housing crisis that would in turn contribute to the 2008 financial collapse. Despite the shopkeeper\u2019s daughter\u2019s challenge to the traditional class barriers of politics, her policies increased inequality in Britain, making it the most unequal large nation in Europe today. Social mobility, despite her exhortations for the poor to lift themselves by the bootstraps, actually decreased in the Thatcher years from the levels under Labour rule. The only sight of Jerusalem in England\u2019s green and pleasant land was the violence of the anti-Thatcher riots and the IRA\u2019s bombing campaign.
\nMore insidious than the economic impact of Thatcher\u2019s policies was her championing of political individualism, the creation of the \u2018Me Generation\u2019. Johnny, and his yuppie mirror image Jeremy, are its products, devoid of empathy, giving voice to their, and society\u2019s, darkest impulses. The film is populated by characters fending for themselves, jobless youths living on the street or security guards guarding empty buildings. They talk, but don\u2019t listen, all preoccupied with the injustices in their own lives.
\nJonathan\u00a0<\/strong>Aitken’s\u00a0biography of Margaret Thatcher doesn\u2019t concern itself with the social costs of the Thatcher years. There is little critical examination of her policies; as a Conservative MP, Aitken is largely supportive of her economic reforms and rigid stance against the unions (\u201cThe power struggle against union militancy had to be fought and won\u201d, he writes, expressing surprise that her actions did not win her popularity). The focus of the book is instead on the rough and tumble of British parliamentary politics, on Thatcher\u2019s rise to power and eventual fall.
\nBut despite its title, Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality<\/em> is by no means a hagiography. \u201cThis is a portrait that attempts to combine both the applause and appraisal,\u201d he writes, and the book presents a fascinating account of the life of the first woman prime minister of a Western democracy, warts and all. Even in a year where Thatcher has been almost deified after her death, Aitken does not make any efforts to paper over her personal failings. \u201cShe was much easier to admire from afar than to work with at close quarters,\u201d he writes. \u201cShe could be personally kind to her staff but impersonally unpleasant towards those whose views or misfortunes lay outside her field of empathy. She was never an easy person.\u201d He calls her quoting of St Francis\u2019 apocryphal prayer \u2014 \u201cWhere there is discord, may we bring harmony\u201d \u2014 on taking office an \u201cill-judged lurch into uncharacteristic hypocrisy\u201d.
\n
\"Margaret
Margaret Thatcher<\/strong> Jonathan aitken Bloomsbury 764 pp; Rs 2275<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nHer ambition, nurtured by her father and helped by her insecurities about her background, defined her from an early age. At one point in Phyllida Lloyd\u2019s The Iron Lady<\/em>, an ageing Thatcher says that politics \u201cused to be about doing something. Now it is about being someone.\u201d But Margaret Roberts was always obsessed with becoming an MP. Aitken describes her in Oxford, disenchanted by the male chauvinism and social snobbery that she faced, but winning no friends through her constant attempts at recruiting whoever she met into the Conservative Party. Over-eager and socially awkward, lacking a common touch or a sense of humour, Thatcher\u2019s ambition would leave her isolated throughout her career.
\nDespite her ambition, few considered Thatcher a likely future prime minister before the infamous winter of discontent in 1979, when James Callaghan\u2019s Labour government failed to prevent the largest industrial action in half a century. It wasn\u2019t just her gender; Aitken\u2019s biography shows in great detail how she was a political lightweight until the precise moment when she was not. Although a powerful public speaker, she struggled in Parliament, being outmanoeuvred so easily by Harold Wilson and Callaghan while Leader of the Opposition that her party was already contemplating replacing her. Her rise to that post was the result of there being no credible alternative to Ted Heath, and helped by a Macchiavellian campaign for the leadership. Even her promotions in the party to the front bench, Aitken contends, were largely the result of her being the token woman.
\nFor someone who changed the fundamental ideology of Britain, there was very little Britain knew about the ideas Thatcher stood for before her election. They knew much more about what she was against. She was never overtly involved in the ideological debates the Conservative party faced in the 1970s, though she did discreetly support the neoliberals led by Keith Joseph. Unlike the principles of the welfare state, arrived at after years of negotiations, protests and incremental advances, her policies were imposed on the nation through the \u201celective dictatorship\u201d of her secure majority in Parliament. Those in her Cabinet who disagreed were replaced by those who didn\u2019t, and the split in the Labour party meant she never had a credible Opposition to worry about. Any fears of losing an election were laid to rest after the spectacular victory in the Falkland Islands.
\nInstead of coherent ideas, what Britain got from Thatcher throughout her political career was a set of homilies, reducing the complexities of governance into highly simplistic rubrics. She shrewdly couched the most divisive of ideas in common sense \u2014 balancing the budget is like keeping household accounts; no mother would ever deny her child milk, so it is all right for the government to do so \u2014 which often conveniently ignored the realities of poverty. These shallow statements were accompanied by one of the most negative election campaigns in British history. It\u2019s a model that is copied extensively today, both by the Tea Party in the US and Narendra Modi in India, successful as it feeds on, and adds to, the paranoia of the middle classes. This brand of disingenuous politics may be her most dangerous legacy of all.
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new biography of the Iron Lady paints a fascinating portrait of one of the most divisive leaders in world history, says Ajachi Chakrabarti <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":207011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,20,7056,8591,8592,8593,8594],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207002"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}