Margaret Thatcher was not a monster. Monsters are made and created by people to create a crude caricature of their own fears, angers and vices and that was true of Margaret Thatcher. You can disagree with her and you can disagree with the direction in which she took this country but for many she was a person on to which they could direct their own anger. People had a very tough time in the 1980’s because of what her government did, people suffered, people lost and had to pick themselves up my own family included, but many people had a tough existence because they didn’t strive to better themselves when opportunities arose. I came from a family and a town of miners and steelworkers. But come the end of the 20th Century the mining stopped and the steel working stopped and for some their whole world ended. I fully understand it. It must have felt the same for my family and my town at end of the 19th Century when the cotton mills stopped because that was all they knew or for my family at the end of the 18th Century when they were thrown out of their farmland. But you pick yourselves up and you move on and adjust to the new economy because it will always change; that is the capitalist system. And workers have always responded to those demands; they’ve been smart enough to do that. My family did that and had that same spirit, yet some of my neighbours did not. You cannot blame that one woman thirty years later if you still have not adjusted and re-skilled to meet the demands of the economy and missed the opportunities because you pine for a past that really wasn’t as idealistic and as community spirited as you feel it was. That is my address to those who are of a certain age but it’s not really appropriate on this board.
For those on this board who are not of that age, then you don’t really have the right to ‘claim’ her, either as a great woman or as a monster. It wasn’t your life or your existence.
Andrew, won't historians of the future, who are not of that age be making those claims? If so, why can't others who weren't around during her time have at least an opinion, based on what they've learned or read?
