Thatcher’s funeral at street level

I was twelve years old when Churchill died. My father-a WW2 veteran- took me to the vigil outside his house and then got me to watch the funeral. I needed no persuading.  I knew that Churchill had not only saved Britain from Hitler but helped liberate half the world from fascism.

Earlier today my daughter left for work as usual, as did my wife, leaving me with grave doubts about whether I should take the morning off and go and watch Thatcher’s funeral live.  In the end I decided I would.

I never voted for her. Her economic and social programme ridiculed the concept of the common good, replacing it with egoism and the culture of money. She divided the country between those she left jobless and those who, thanks to her, got very rich with their shares and privatizations, and banking deals and deunionised workforces.
She destroyed whole communities in the North and Wales. Many people of a darker shade of pale intuitively felt she was a bit of a racist. Many poor people became poorer. In Ireland, she was hated by some as a symbol of state terrorism, if not for the coldness of her humanity.

But before my daughters were born, I worked as a foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires when the junta of Galtieri invaded the Faklands Islands. Thousands had disappeared – tortured and killed – and I thanked God that in Thatcher British and Argentines had a prime-minister capable of defeating the military regime in the field of battle and on the high seas and in the air. The military support that Pinochet’s Chile offered Thatcher and which she accepted did not diminish the impact Britain’s victory in the Falklands War subsequently had on the democratization of South America’s Southern Cone. Perhaps it was the memory of that war that took me first this morning to the Cenotaph, and later to Fleet Street, to watch Thatcher’s body go by.

The streets took a bit of time to fill out, not least along Whitehall, but they were eventually filled, generally with well-wishers. It was a strangely dispassionate funeral. Few tears-none, in  fact, that I could see-, and  silence broken by respectful applause, with the military-all pomp and circumstance- and the police discreet and retrained, and Land of Hope and Glory resonating along Fleet Street- a very British funeral. They were some who protested and got some air time on TV and live blogs, and Obama was not the only president to be absent. I did not feel the sense of national and international mourning I remember Churchill provoked.