Apparently there were a small number of protestors at Mrs Thatcher's funeral. Some of them shouted slogans and waved placards, some of them just turned their backs on the procession. In Goldthorpe, South Yorkshire, however, some 2,000 people had a right knees up, culminating in the burning of a Thatcher effigy.
People have a right to protest; but I wonder in this case whether they actually were protesting; and if so to whom, and against what?
You protest to show your opposition to some proposed course of action. But that actions the protestors disliked took place 25 years ago and more. In case they hadn't noticed, the focus of their objections hasn't been in office for nearly 23 of those years. During that period she has been in no position to do anything that anyone might have usefully protested about. Even her own party, for personal reasons rather than those of policy, effectively disowned her. She was an ex-Prime Minister. She is an ex-person.
Had Thatcher been alive, this could scarcely have been called a protest; now she's dead, the only people in a position to receive and understand the demonstrators' message are her friends, colleagues and family. Thatcher herself is beyond all that.
It strikes me as pointless at best, shabby at worst, to mark their day like this. And it's not even as if the protestors have in mind some particular part of Thatcher's legacy which they want undone. Some of them are too young to remember exactly what that legacy was, or what Britain was like beforehand. Their message can be summed up like this - "We didn't like her. And we want you to know it".
Mrs Thatcher in her prime lived life as a politician; but for the last decades of her life she lived as a human being. The people who burned her effigy on the day of her funeral, in denying her that humanity, were guilty of the same inhumanity they say characterised her dealings with them. Hypocrites all.
The issue of what kind of funeral Thatcher should have had is a vexed one, and the process by which this quasi state funeral came into being is shadowy and problematic. Will we put on this show for John Major or for Gordon Brown? I doubt it. But if not, who is to decide? It might be about time to have a protocol for ex Prime Ministers. The funeral cost quite a lot of money, which might well have been better spent elsewhere, but I can't help think some of the critics wouldn't have noticed the cost if the deceased had been someone of their own political caste. Personally I think that the nation is entitled to give a decent send off to someone who, whether we liked or loathed them, has been captain of the ship we all sail in.
I have never been to Goldthorpe, a former pit village to the south east of Barnsley, but I went to school near there in the 1970s, and in the five years leading up to the miners' strike frequently made the pilgrimage to Oakwell to watch Barnsley escape first from the old Fourth Division and then from the Third. I can still remember the names of the stations we used to pass on the train from Sheffield - Attercliffe, Brightside, Chapeltown, Elsecar, Wombwell. Even then, before the year long privation of the strike and the collapse of the mining industry, South Yorkshire was a bit of dump. God knows what it was like afterwards. And yet when I see the residents of Goldthorpe on TV, their voices still crackling with anger and hatred, I want to ask them some questions.
"Did you seriously expect every other working person in Britain to keep on paying part of their taxes to prop up miners' wages in perpetuity? When miners had had a 43% pay increase in 1971 and a 35% increase in 1974? When they had effectively brought down an elected government?" Unfortunately it isn't in the nature of TV reporters to ask those kind of questions. "You say Mrs Thatcher ushered in an era of selfishness", I'd have liked to ask, "But didn't the miners try and hold the country to ransom to suit their own purposes? Wasn't that selfish too?"
It's much easier to show Goldthorpe as a benighted khazi with colourful locals than it is to ask why it ended up that way.
I didn't watch the funeral myself. I wrote a few bars of the String Quartet I'm working on at the moment. I didn't like Mrs Thatcher much either.
