Dancing on Maggie’s grave

Many of us in Malta were shocked when a substantial part of Britain's population reacted with evident and unabashed glee to the news of Margaret Thatcher's death. Saying that she was a 'woman who divided a nation', as one particular British tabloid did, is simplistic and hardly explains the controversies in Britain about Thatcher's legacy.

Attempts to draw some parallel with the way we behaved at the news of Dom Mintoff's death were again off the mark. Mintoff was certainly divisive and his crude, vulgar methods made things worse. Essentially, however, Maltese society has never been as divided as Britain's, and many of Mintoff's divisive stances were provoked unnecessarily by the enormous chips on his shoulders. When Mintoff won his 'wars' with Britain and the church, he could have easily attempted - most probably successfully - to adopt a reconciliatory stance with all sections of Maltese society.

However his forma mentis would have none of this, and his preferred tactics were such that he needed an enemy to rally his supporters and keep them continually focused and on edge. Hence his infamous 'queue' of entities to be conquered and controlled. Division was a necessary ruse for Mintoff's way of doing things.

There is still much resentment of the way Mintoff did things in Malta. Yet when a blog writer commented that she will celebrate Mintoff's death when it happens, everybody was shocked. This may be the sort of thing that the uncouth British working class can do upon Thatcher's death, but certainly not Malta's tasteful 'educated' class upon Mintoff's death!

It is only now that Malta's young generations, who cannot understand the foibles of their country's political past, have ditched division, realising that this is completely unnecessary and unwarranted. Perhaps someone should look at the result of the recent election in this light.

Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, did not sow division. Britain's class divisions existed before Thatcher and seem to be destined to survive her death for a long time. Thatcher's successful attempt to restructure Britain's economy and liberate it from the socialist-inspired, suffocating control of the state to the freedom of unfettered market forces had to be carried out at the expense of the working class. Her grand scheme of things would not allow her to empathise with those who would be hardest hit.

In a television documentary on Thatcher broadcast recently on BBC, the image of the closed Yorkshire coalmines and the nostalgia for things past were depicted as the cause for so much hatred against Thatcher, who was accused of being 'hell-bent on dismantling the welfare state'. In truth, those coalmines could not survive the tremor that was necessary if Britain was to recover from its evident decline in the seventies and become once again a leading developed nation in Europe. As a result of her policies, however, unemployment shot up: it took a long time for the lost, unsustainable jobs to be replaced with productive ones. Those who still condemn Thatcher for closing the coalmines do not realise that sticking to the past way of doing things was the worst path that Britain could follow. More often than not, one has to be cruel to be kind.

During the House of Commons session in her honour, Michael Meacher, a former Labour environment minister said that Thatcher's "scorched earth" tactics had "polarised" the nation. "Too many industries, too many working-class communities across the north were laid waste during those years without any alternative and better future to replace what had been lost", he said.

By far the biggest critic of the Thatcher years in the House of Commons was former actress Glenda Jackson, a Labour MP. Jackson insisted that Thatcher had wreaked "heinous social, economic and spiritual damage" on Britain. Thatcherism, she claimed, had turned "greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker" from vices into virtues.

Jackson's rhetoric was extreme, but there is no doubt that Margaret Thatcher's legacy is controversial. The Conservative Party has permanently lost support in whole swathes of Britain. Yet Britain managed to overcome its economic difficulties, and the strength of the British economy today owes a lot to Thatcher. Her supporters insist it was all worth it. Her denigrators speak as if all the suffering could have been avoided - a very optimistic conjecture, at best.

Placed against the background of the eternal class divide in Britain's society, one can understand how and why there were people who wanted to dance on Maggie's grave. These included youngsters who were not even alive when Thatcher was driven out of office by the manoeuvres of a scheming group within the elite of the political party that she led.

To get a fleeting glimpse of Britain's social divide, one could perhaps look at the famous BBC comic series that makes fun of it by way of caricature: Keeping up appearances. Hyacinth Bucket is a caricature of a would-be respected member of British upper-class society, while her brother-in-law, Onslow, is a caricature of lower-class Britain. As in every caricature, situations and characteristics are exaggerated, but the basic truth consistently shines out. In spite of what one thinks of the British, one cannot help admiring the way they laugh at themselves - except, it seems, when it comes to Margaret Thatcher's legacy.

Rather than consciously dividing British society, I think that her economic policies, sound as they could have been, exacerbated an already-existing divide in British society.

Whether this divide will ever disappear is a moot point, but the fact remains that it existed much before Thatcher's policies made it worse.

Hubris

In a briefing on Margaret Thatcher, this is how the Economist described the situation that led to her political downfall: "Many middle-of-the-road voters were now nervous, as well as rank-and-file Tory MPs. Suddenly 'their people' were complaining about 'that woman'. Their nervousness was increased by ever-sharper divisions in the party between Europhiles and Eurosceptics, which could not be papered over.

"Adding to all this was Mrs. Thatcher's increasingly imperial style. After her third victory she became inclined to refer to herself as 'we' and to ride roughshod over any opposition. She used a clique of fellow-believers to design policy and sidelined backbench MPs. And she habitually asked colleagues whether they were 'one of us'. Even the Tory 'Sunday Telegraph' accused her of 'bourgeois triumphalism".

Why is it that I sense an uncanny parallel with certain recent developments in the Maltese political scene? Change the Europhile-Eurosceptic differences into the liberal-fundamentalist differences and you should get what I mean.