Thatcher Statue
The town of Grantham has announced that it is ready to install its statue of Margaret Thatcher, but that it will be put on a high plinth due to the risk of vandalism. I was not surprised to see keyboard warriors threatening to vandalise the statue however high it is, though I doubt that they have ever vandalised anything other than a Wikipedia entry.
I suspect that the wisest words that I have ever heard about Margaret Thatcher were from Professor Hugh Burroughs of the International Politics Department in Aberystwyth. He was a wonderful man who combined huge enthusiasm for his subject with an understanding that universities were also places to have fun. His subject was British Politics, by the way. I once met him at the bottom of the stairs on the ground floor of the International Politics building. He asked if I was going to his seminar on the fourth floor and when I said yes, he jumped up the first few steps and shouted ‘race you!’
One day in British Politics seminar, we came to discuss Margaret Thatcher. Most people in the group were negative, with a couple of brave souls willing to advance a positive opinion of the former Prime Minister. After the discussion was over, Hugh Burroughs said that we should remember that eventually history will be written by people who were not alive during the times that they are writing about and so will never have the passions of either side of a debate. He suspected that history would not be as cruel to Margaret Thatcher as her detractors wanted and yet it would also not be as kind as her supporters wanted. I suspect that he is right.
It is curious that Margaret Thatcher still has such a hold over generations of people. Her death provided a fascinating glimpse into this clash of cultures – from the people who bought copies of ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead’ so that it would be in the charts to the way that Radio 1 refused to play it in its top forty countdown for fear of offending someone. Of course, in Wales this is even more apparent. Just over a year ago, I went to a night out in Pencoed where an English drag queen was part of the entertainment. She said that she was worried that she might be mistaken for a former British Prime Minister. Someone made the beautiful heckle, “Theresa May!” but no, she wanted to know what the Welsh thought of Margaret Thatcher. Someone shouted ‘c**t!’ and the drag queen noted, ‘fair enough, you haven’t moved on then’.
The whole idea of statues is weird too though. I wonder if we might not be better off without any but, if we are going to have them, they ought to represent something of who we are as a society. The campaign to have a statue of a woman in the middle of the new central square in Cardiff was criticised for tokenism, but when you have no statues of women elsewhere in the city, it is not a bad idea. Role models and examples are important – I am often reminded of the story of the daughter of one of New York’s senators watching the other senator – Hillary Clinton – on TV and asking her mother, ‘is it possible for a man to be a New York senator?’ Role models and examples work.
For that reason, having a statue of our first female Prime Minister in her home town is not unreasonable. Yes, there are those who will point out that she shows that any woman can get to the top if they have a hugely wealthy husband willing to bankroll and support her career, but we should not under-rate the fact that Mrs Thatcher had to navigate the same sexist world as other women (though money does always help).
I suppose that the problem for many people is her legacy. In still run-down former mining communities in south Wales, I can understand the anger that she still creates. The idea of celebrating someone who has been responsible for so much damage to communities must seem insulting. However, I would suspect that anyone selected for a statue will have problematic views somewhere along the line. There has been a recent suggestion of removing Mahatma Gandhi’s statue from Cardiff Bay because of his views on Africans. Apart from the fact that I wonder whether Gandhi would have approved of statues (I believe that is why his statue in Parliament Square has no plinth, so he is equal to the person looking at him), you are balancing things here. Do his views of Africans invalidate his achievements as an activist, campaigner and champion of non-violent resistance? We still celebrate Churchill, despite knowing his views of Indians (including Gandhi) and others.
I tend to think that there is a difference between a Churchill or a Gandhi and a Colston (Bristol’s great slave trader celebrated in statue and until recently a concert hall) or a Rhodes. All lives have a balance of good and bad in them and history often changes what those terms mean as well. None of us are truly ‘good’ people as none of us are perfect and if the only people who end up with statues are people who are perfect then we might as well remove all the statues and stick to abstract art. In fact, I suspect that it is the divisive people who attract statuary. History may well see John Major as our most successful international diplomat Prime Minister and Gordon Brown as the man with the motivation to save the banking system in 2008. But I have a feeling that it is the Thatchers and the Blairs who get the statues.
However, I am going to suggest that the anger over the statue of Margaret Thatcher is misplaced. Just prior to her death, Tony Benn was asked if she should have a state funeral. He replied that it seemed irrelevant and, when pushed by people to make some kind of anti-Thatcher statement, he simply replied, “Why punish her in death for what she did in life?” Of course, he belonged to a different age, where debate was about issues and opinions rather than shouting loudly on twitter and being desperate to prove that anyone who disagrees with you is evil.
If you are really angry about the decline of industrial communities devastated by Thatcherite policies, then do something to campaign against austerity or support organisations that work in them. If you really think that privatisation has destroyed public services then campaign against the latest privatisations of your schools and health services (if you live in England) and support those who wish to restore some sense to public service provision rather than the current obsession with profit.
There is a comical side to this, of course. When someone posted on the Portsmouth FC fans forum a few years ago ‘My heart is full of hatred for Harry Redknapp’, there was a reply ‘Hate is a very strong emotion and you should not let your whole heart be taken over with hatred for Harry Redknapp. You need to hate Thatcher as well’. Just before Christmas I was at a works do and accidentally wrote 2018 as 1988 leading to a conversation about whether 1988 would be a better year to be alive in. A colleague said that she was only 3 years old in 1988 so yes, it would be. I said that by contrast I was a teenager in 1988. ‘Don’t worry,’ she consoled me, ‘there was only another two years of Thatcher’. I challenged this and asked her if she thought that everyone born in the 1970s spent their lives ‘hating Thatcher’. She thought about this and replied, ‘yes’.
Comical though this is, it is time to move on from making this all about personality. There are plenty of arguments to be had about history, but a real challenge to Thatcherism would be to oppose its modern day manifestations. If Grantham wants to celebrate one of its famous daughters, then why not? Perhaps in a 100 years’ time there will be a ‘Thatcher Must Fall’ movement that will take it down. In the meantime, the effort it would take to go and spray paint something rude across it could be used so much more productively.