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May 05, 2005
Julie Burchill On Margaret Thatcher
The Chicago Boyz highlight an article by Julie Burchill on the upcoming elections in the UK; in the process they provide an intriguing introduction to the iconoclastic Ms. Burchill:
There is nothing remotely like her mix of sentimental Bolshevism, working class cultural nostalgia, British patriotism and militarism, Judaeophilia, loathing of Germany and (usually) America, detestation of the British upper classes [...]. She is often wildly wrong, but always entertaining.
But there is nothing much wrong in the following, taken from a section of Burchill's article in which she recalls the impact of Margaret Thatcher:
She was just as much about revolution as reaction, and part of any revolution is destruction. Some of the things she destroyed seemed like a shame at the time, such as the old industries — though on balance, isn’t there anything good about the fact that thousands of young men who once simply because of who their fathers were would have been condemned to a life spent underground in the darkness, and an early death coughing up bits of lung, now won’t be? [...] “Dogs are bred to retrieve birds and Welshman to go down mines,” said some vile old-school Tory; not any more they’re not, thanks to Mrs T. [...]
Mrs Thatcher was hated by the old Tory establishment because she, more than any Labour leader, brought down the culture of deference, of knowing one’s place. [...]
It says it all that the Queen far preferred the company of the Labour Prime Ministers Wilson and Callaghan than she did the Conservative Thatcher; the Queen could smell the lack of respect on Mrs T, and it put her back up no end.
A couple immediate takes on this:
1) It is as obvious as the nose on one's face when a person possesses a mind capable of critical thought. Burchill must; and in the same manner as Christopher Hitchens, I might violently disagree with her on most of her other positions. But Burchill's championing of Thatcher, who was an anathema to the intelligentsia left (for example, Sting's song "We Work the Black Seam"), shows that she will not take a position based solely on emotion.
2) Class (as manifested by speaking accent and education, among other things) is an intrinsic quality of British life, the impact of which we Americans can scarcely imagine. I remember reading somewhere that any Brit can, within the first few syllables of a stranger's speaking, place that person exactly into their proper position in life. As Burchill said, the Queen prefers those of her class, political party notwithstanding.
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