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Some time ago a friend rang and said: “Have you heard? They’re making a new film about Margaret Thatcher…”

“Great!” I said. Just what we need. A hard-hitting documentary drawing a line once and for all under an era of mass cultural and societal vandalism perpetrated in the cause of great personal wealth for a select few.

I mean, somebody tutted to me the other day about the Russian oligarchs who were enabled to have truly vast personal fortunes thanks to what some would describe as the reckless, ill-considered and short-termist sell-off of the country’s precious natural resources in the wake of the fall of communism, leaving the consumers of vital services at the mercy of a few very rich people. “Well, you can’t blame them,” I said. “They got the idea from us.”

 “Well, she had to do something about the unions…” I can hear the dread phrase from certain Brothers and Sisters in the distance.

Did achieving that “something” need to cost the total destruction of one half of the country’s economy? The loss of natural resources and our manufacturing base? The ability of the private sector to do whatever it likes with its employees? The creation of a continental divide between decent rights and pay in the public sector and the take-it-or-leave-it, there’s-plenty-of-Polish-people-who’ll-work-for-next-to-nothing of the private sector?

To this day, Thatcher divides the country. People in the south, and a few of the well-off middle classes in Scotland and the North, still talk well of her. Everybody else loathes and despises the woman and her helpers for the wreckage she created and the lives she ruined. Even the global economic collapse we’ve suffered can be traced to the legacy of the lunatic and discredited ‘trickle-down’ economic theory of Thatcher and then US President Ronald Reagan. They believed generating wealth for the economy’s leaders would mean that wealth trickled down from the few to the many, never for a moment suspecting the few would keep all that wealth clasped tight to their Armani-clad bosoms while they tried to find any way they could, however dangerous, however lethal the consequences to the rest of us, of getting more…

 (In 1896 the American Democrat politician William Jennings Bryan said: “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” On one side, Reagan and Thatcher and their ilk. On the other, Keynes, Galbraith and anybody slightly to the left of Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk).

(Oh, you may prefer the New Zealand politician Damien O’Connor’s 2011 view of trickle-down, or supply-side, economics: “The rich pissing on the poor”.).

Anyway, there are generations of families in the north who have never worked, who will never work, because their economies collapsed with the pit closures and there was no plan for the future beyond the defeat of the National Union of Miners. Men who laboured miles underground, risking their lives in the dark, breathing the sharp daggers of dust that would painfully end so many lives in gouts of coughed blood, digging by hand the resource that powered wealth and daring to work together for the benefit of all in search of a decent wage for their dangerous labours, demonised by a political elite in the cause of enrichment for the few. How dare those miners? How much better to take their jobs, even their homes, to preserve a system that properly rewards bankers and chief executives.

In most of Scotland, Thatcher remains an anathema – as Alex Salmond said this week, in Scotland there are more giant pandas than there are Tory MPs. There, she has never been forgiven, and will never be forgiven, for whoring the nation’s precious natural resources to her business friends. Neither will she be forgiven for treating Scotland as some sort of laboratory for her maddest excesses, like the poll tax. No, in Scotland hate is not strong enough a word.

The difference between north and south is that Scotland, unlike the north of England, has, thanks to devolution, been able to restore decency to the nation’s balance sheet: personal care for the elderly, university education for all, that sort of thing. But ah!, you say. England’s paying for it. Well, the OECD has done some research: an independent Scotland with access to all the nation’s resources would be the sixth most prosperous nation in the league table of OECD countries. The UK is presently 16^th.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, a new film about Thatcher. Great! Yes?

No.

It’s made by Americans and stars Meryl Streep – Meryl Streep, for the love of God, Meryl Streep – as Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady.

Well, cinemas all over the north have either boycotted or simply not screened the film. Campaigners in Chesterfield protested outside a Cineworld complex, claiming the film’s “too soft” on its subject. Facebook groups have been set up calling for a boycott. Half the film’s total audience on its opening weekend was in London and the south. Just eight per cent was in Yorkshire, Tyneside and the Borders. Chesterfield protester Hilary Cave, a former NUM official, summed up the argument: “The government that Margaret Thatcher led was responsible for mass unemployment, poverty and loss of community structure.”

Maybe I’ll go and watch the Sherlock Holmes movie instead.

(Sorry. It’s just that when anybody utters the name ‘Thatcher’ I tend to go off on one. As you can see).

Books and films

Movies, however, bring us to last week’s films and books argument, and a disappointing response from the Brothers and Sisters.

Films as good as books, you were asked for, and you clearly weren’t paying attention.

Anyway, a few recommendations over the phone, the e-mail or at the bar: one Sister said, and I agree, that Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café was a film at least as good as the Fannie Flagg book on which it was based. From Devon came a puzzling recommendation for The Shipping News, though I thought the book infinitely superior to the William Hurt film. The good Captain holds a candle for anything directed by David Lean, but as brilliant film, not as better than the books on which they were based. Brother Willis pointed out that the film of Sebastian Faulks’ novel Charlotte Gray does not bode well for the adaptation of Birdsong. Brother Fiddle thought The Go-Between a better film than book, and it certainly was a stunning film. Finally, my Auntie Glo agrees with me that making the film of The Lord of the Rings even more unwieldy and indigestible than the book was a remarkable feat.

The comments box is still open if anybody cares to join in.

He nose, you know

Thanks, Brother Hamster, for the solution to the breast implant debate last week: he’s absolutely right, you know. Fair enough to remove them for free but they absolutely should not be replaced for free.

Mind you, all that good work was massively undone by the nose to spite face gag, officially snatching the crown for worst line of the year so far from Old Father Cullingham.