From @Dilettante11: Thatcher - the view from outside England

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

Here's a snapshot of some reaction to Margaret Thatcher's death from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Thatcher: The bogeyman of Welsh politics?

One of the clearest illustrations of the gap between the Margaret Thatcher of history and that of folklore is in this excellent article by David Williamson, political editor of Wales Online. In it, he draws attention to many of the discrepancies between the Thatcher of today’s remembering and the one Wales experienced. The best passage is worth quoting at length:

“When the Assembly took its first, often faltering, steps Mrs Thatcher’s memory was regularly evoked by AMs. Devolution, for all its imperfections, had a purpose: to prevent Thatcherite policies ripping through Wales again.

“Just as the myth of the bogeyman has been used by generations of parents to make children scamper upstairs at bedtime, the image of Mrs Thatcher as the nemesis of Wales has served an electoral purpose."

He lists the dry, psephological facts: that some three in ten Welsh voters backed Thatcher at the ballot box in each of her election victories. That in 1983 the Conservatives returned 14 Welsh MPs. That they did all this despite facing three consecutive Welsh leaders of the Labour Party in Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock, MPs for Cardiff South East, Blaenau Gwent and Islwyn respectively. One of the most memorable moments of the 1979 general election was David Dimbleby informing the nation that Keith Best was the first Tory MP for Anglesey since the Viscount Bulkeley… in 1722.

He also points out that, despite Margaret Thatcher being in Wales as in Scotland allegedly one of the key driving forces in the devolution movement, when their moment came in 1998 the Welsh only seized self-government by the skin of their teeth, 50.3% to 49.7%, despite the only party campaigning against devolution being the now MP-less Welsh Conservatives.

Failing to unite the United Kingdom

Indeed, the complex and disputed role of Thatcher as recruiting sergeant for devolution is also examined in this piece by the BBC’s Welsh political editor Betsan Powys. Whilst the full extent of her influence may be disputed, I’m not convinced by Ron Davies’ assertion that devolution would have happened irrespective of her time in office – if the Iron Lady truly were the daemon so many Welsh politicians claim she was, the ‘Thatcher Factor’ must surely have amounted to the measly 0.3% of the vote that formed the Yes victory margin.

The legacy of Thatcherism in Scotland, much like in Wales, is that she seems to have grown more monstrous as she grew more remote from contemporary experience. It seems hard to believe now that when the Conservatives won in 1979 they did so with 22 Scottish seats, up from Heath’s 16 and including seats in Glasgow and across the Highlands. She left with ten, and in the post-Thatcher 1992 election the Conservatives not only recaptured by-election losses like Kincardine and Deeside but recaptured Aberdeen South, lost in 1987, off Labour.

Yet today, Thatcher’s legacy is commonly taken as the reason that we only have a single MP and a shrinking corps in the Scottish Parliament – a view neatly captured by this BBC roundup of reactions to her death by Scottish political figures. Brian Taylor, the BBC’s Scottish political editor, sums it up:

“In many ways, she typified the conundrum which confronted the Conservative Party and continues to do so to this day. Her instincts, their instincts, were for a powerful brand of economic liberalism applied uniformly and with vigour across the United Kingdom.

“By contrast, the Scots were demonstrating their appetite for tailored politics, for distinctive treatment. For self-government, in short.”

As in Wales, one of the central planks of the analysis of her reign is that Thatcher, a staunch unionist and avowed opponent of devolution, ended up one of the great driving forces behind its eventual implementation. Sad as it is it seems hard to deny. Personally it always struck me that on the constitution, as in few other places, she was an unimaginative and cautious premier.

The defeat of devolution in the two 1979 referendums, and the rise in support for integration in Northern Irish unionism under her old mentor Enoch Powell, offered a real window for finding an alternative to national assemblies by passing power directly from Westminster to genuinely local government. Yet following the murder of Airey Nieve she allowed his reforming vision to die with him, and her centralising instincts brought Westminster to the zenith of its power but sowed the seeds for its post-1997 fragmentation. Indeed, one of the current debates in Scottish politics is the impact her passing will have on 2014.

A 'one nation' legacy lost

But probably the most interesting was Allan Massie’s comparison of Thatcher to that other long-standing Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin. It is well worth reading the whole thing, but I’ll quote his conclusion:

“Of course the times and the situation were different. Nevertheless Baldwin was right in his understanding of what the Tory Party should be, and Lady Thatcher, for all her many admirable qualities and achievements, was wrong in hers. Despite the efforts of her successors, the Tory party has come to represent, and be seen to represent, sectional interests. It needs a new Stanley Baldwin if it is ever to be a national party again.”

Doubtless that will not sit well with most Tories, since Thatcher was “for the most part … adored by her party in Scotland, just as in England”. But it falls to Thatcher’s defenders to find a better answer to the question of how we are “ever be a national party again”.

Black bunting in bad taste

But of course, as in England the response was not just contained to thoughtful columns and the respectful contributions of allies and opponents. The already-infamous “death parties”, not limited to looting London charity shops or attacking Bristol police officers, took place on an apparently more peaceable scale north of the border, with three hundred people marking the occasion in Glasgow’s George Square.

If you follow the link you’ll see the partygoers wearing posters bearing the slightly surreal slogan “Gotcha! Now get the rest”, which suggests they believe Lady T’s passing is the first stage of a cunning attempt to pick off Conservative politicians using human biology and time.

I actually debated against one of the Glasgow celebrants for the BBC World Service (in the second half of the show), and what struck me about all four of the anti-Thatcher panellists lined up opposite me was their shrill defensiveness. Naturally none of them supported celebrating the death of an old lady personally, good lord no. But how dare Conservatives try to suppress criticism of Thatcherism and censor people’s right to free expression? Of course, nobody is trying to do any such thing. There is a world of difference between censoring someone’s free speech and censuring them for how they exercise it.

These morbid parties also cropped up in Northern Ireland, particularly in Belfast and Londonderry. Revellers defied the calls of a PR-minded Martin McGuinness, who like Ed Miliband was clearly worried about the freer spirits of his political movement drawing popular ire.

Legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland

Other Northern Irish responses hinged on her approach to the troubles. First Minister Peter Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionists, praised her as “one of the greatest political figures in post-war Britain” whilst referencing the deep divisions between Ulster unionists (including Powell) and Thatcher left by the Anglo-Irish agreement, and noted commentator Alex Kane proclaims that he “will always be a Thatcherite”. Others take a different view: Timothy Lavin of Bloomberg is particularly scathing about her Northern Irish legacy.

Gerry Adams meanwhile has clearly taken out a lucrative insurance policy on a glass house, for he set about throwing stones with gusto. “Margaret Thatcher did great hurt to the Irish and British people during her time as British prime minister,” he claimed, adding that “her espousal of old draconian militaristic policies prolonged the war and caused great suffering.” That seems a little hard to stomach given that the ‘war’ was rather a terrorist campaign aimed at tearing Northern Ireland out of the UK against the democratic will of the majority of its inhabitants, waged by an organisation with which Sinn Fein is, to say the least, not unconnected.

Missing the point

But rather than leave the last word to the IRA, I thought I’d end with this piece on Thatcher in, of all places, the Belfast Telegraph’s Sports section. The author maintains that NI sportsmen and women “defied” Margaret Thatcher by “growing ever faster, higher, stronger” despite her cutting their public funding.

It strikes me that by buying into the myth that Thatcher cut public money to try to kill things, they miss the point. Teams and individuals thriving and growing despite a reduction of state involvement is the polar opposite of a challenge to Thatcherism. If anyone pointed these triumphs out to her at the time, I’m sure she was all the prouder of them.