Laurence Inman’s acerbic commentary on the late Baroness Thatcher

Much has been made this week of the dead Thatcher and the fact that she was a moral and intellectual shrimp, that she brought about the violent and premature deaths of hundreds of young men in the ‘interests’ of a few dozen Daily Mail readers on the other side of the world, that this was done while she obstinately ignored the legitimate claims to proper civil rights of her own citizens in Northern Ireland, that she deliberately prolonged the conflict there at the behest of her scummy pals in the press, that she victimised and criminalised union members and tried to starve them and their families into submission to her will, that she used the police and the army (illegally) to do this, that she lowered the general level of trust between the government and the governed, that she promoted the idea that happiness and success can only be measured in money and possessions, and then only relatively, because it wasn’t enough to have things, you had to have more than your neighbour, that she applauded the destruction, not only of communities, but also of the very idea of community, that she thought the economy of a once proud and inventive country could be supported by its citizens flogging money-scams to each other, that she brought about her own destruction through hubris, so that even the toads and slugs who licked her boots for twenty years, seeing their majorities in leafy Surrey and sunny Berkshire and drowsy Kent melting away, stabbed her in the back, and the lies, the re-writing of history, the insults, the spite, the insanity, the greed, the violence, the sheer meanness of spirit, and, oh, the waste of it all…yes, much, much has been made of that this week, and more will be made of it next week when they drag her body through the streets to St Paul’s, and the Queen will show us her true allegiances, and the route will be lined by her agents of oppression, armed to the bloody teeth, and no opposition will be tolerated, no other reaction but dumb acceptance, servility and dribbling sentimentality will be countenanced, no leniency offered to those who will not get their heads straight, who cannot contain their hatred, of her, of the system that spawned and sustained her….none of this is right, and no amount of smug sophistry will make it right, we should stand outside St Paul’s and roar our rejection of everything that monster and her class have shackled us to.