Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Louise Mensch & Thatcher's Death

Ah Louise Mensch, the media friendly Tory MP for Corby (Majority, 1,950) has got a bee in her bonnet about members of the Labour Party who are wishing Lady Thatcher dead & intending to celebrate her passing. She thinks this is something the Labour Party should act upon.

I think she's wrong.

I think it is an issue of free speech and free thought. No one she's RT'd is threatening to kill Lady Thatcher. They're just waiting for the moment it happens naturally. They maybe wrong-headed about this but they're perfectly entitled to an opinion. Even if the Labour Party were to issue a statement saying they deplore such thoughts it isn't a reason to kick someone out of the Labour Party, just as rampant homophobia seems OK in the Tory Party.

Pretending that Lady Thatcher isn't a hugely hated figure, especially in the North of England, Scotland and Wales is to be a fool. Just those people who lived and worked in the mining towns of Britain which were destroyed in the wake of the Miner's strike purely for ideological revenge would be enough. Perhaps Louise should read some modern history books.

Personally I don't wish her dead. I won't celebrate afterwards either. I think both of those things are signs of weakness, not strength. We should seek to get one over on Lady Thatcher by undoing her legacy, not standing at her graveside waving bottle of beer singing 'ding dong the witch is dead'. Victory over her ideas is the only victory worth a damn. Anything else is petty childishness.

That's not because I like her but because Lady Thatcher is the reason I'm on the left. I was only 8 when she was elected Prime Minister but there was something about her I didn't like. It wasn't because she snatched my milk. I hated the milk. It was always warm & full fat. But it was after the Miner's strike that I decided that whatever Lady Thatcher stood for, it wasn't something I wanted to be part of.

Yes, I was only 12 but I was an annoyingly precocious little brat and it seemed to me that there was something wrong with Lady Thatcher's support for Solidarity in Poland, which was led by a Trade Unionist and her utter contempt and hatred for Trade Unionists in the UK attempting to exercise the sames rights as Lech Wałęsa. It seemed hypocritical to allow British policemen to batter Miner's (or Print Workers etc) whilst preaching at the Polish government. You either believe that workers have the right to strike, even for purely political reasons. Or you don't. You either believe in free speech for everyone, including the mad and bad, or you don't believe in free speech.

It was that which turned me into a leftie for which I will always be grateful to Lady Thatcher. I might have become a tilting at windmills romantic lefties since then rather than a practical 'let's win elections' New Labourite one but I can live with that. To mangle a quote from Edward R Murrow: If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox... then what kind of freedom do we have.

So Louise Mensch in my view the right to be wrong is fundamental to everything that a true democracy should stand for. You have a perfect right to challenge it, to dislike it and to rant about it but you have no right to censor it or demand other people censor it.