FraserWords

Steel yourselves, my darlings, for the grisly spectre of Margaret Thatcher will be summoned shortly, and you know what that does to me.

But for the moment, and talking of incompetent intellectual pygmies with a cold selfish eye for the main chance, an unhealthy obsession with outdated political dogma, a disregard for democracy and an inflated sense of their own importance, I see Michael Gove – who is to this country’s knowledge of history what Wayne Rooney is to our knowledge of quantum physics – has been lecturing us about the First World War.

My partner, a teacher, was given a book for Christmas: “All I Know About Teaching”, by Michael Gove. Every one of its pages was empty. It would seem Gove’s follow-up will be “All I Know About World War One”.

The man who believes corporations should sponsor schools in which children can be taught by unqualified staff tells us the left has peddled myths about the Great War, as in Blackadder, claiming the conflict for its own twisted lefty ends. This prompted Baldrick himself, Sir Tony Robinson, to dismiss him as “very silly”, which says it all really. Gove must be one of the few politicians in history – good morning, Iain Duncan Smith! – to be Baldrick’s intellectual inferior.

Apart from anything else, a massive point of the Great War is that it has become shrouded by myth: from the left’s portrayal of a doomed generation of soldier poet lions led by bumbling uncaring aristocratic donkeys to the right’s revisionism, which insists Douglas Haig was on the right track when he sent wave after wave of men over the top to their doom, or believes, as that bumbling aristocratic donkey Boris Johnson repeated, that the war was all Germany’s fault and nothing to do with us, oh no.

The intelligent person is informed by myths and the reasons for their creation for – stop shuffling at the back, Gove, you stupid little boy, and listen for a change – myths do not create themselves. Who peddles the bloody things is really not the point.

But as I warned only a few short weeks ago – http://www.stuartfraserwords.co.uk/?p=605  – the centenary will bring about thousands of words of shuddering banality. It’s started earlier than I thought.

If any of you has an address for Michael Gove, do send him the link but be sure to remind him, from me of the old quote, attributed to both Lincoln and Twain, about a fool.

Now then…

I have some sympathy for Gove. Being told you are wrong for year after year, decade after decade, can be dispiriting, even though – and here’s where he and I part company – you know all along that you are right. So, this week, it feels very strange after so many years to be proved right.

I have spent 30 years arguing about the miners’ strike. Here in the southern heartland of England, I have argued in vain. There is, of course, myth here too, and doubltess Michael Gove hates that myth-peddling great movie Brassed Off. But my truth of the strike, the truth known in the northern part of these isles, is of a fight by brave men and women to preserve their jobs and their families’ income, in a dispute provoked and prolonged by Thatcher and her ilk, with the aid of the English establishment, for political reasons.

That is not the truth of the people who believe good old Maggie put the great back into Britain by taking on evil old Scargill.

The truth of the good old Maggie brigade is so intensely felt, so vital to the identity of the southern English voter, that every aspect of the dispute is coloured. For example, despite mountains of evidence, including 44 separate court judgments, even today there are people who don’t believe me when I tell them about the policemen bussed in to attack strikers, hand-picked because they had no links to an area, ordered by the politicians to take an ever harder line. No, the loyalists just can’t let Maggie go.

But today, now, I very much look forward to hearing from all the people who told me I was a snivelling liar and that Mrs Thatcher was a principled patriot who took on the unions and saved Britain. I don’t want a letter or anything, just a ‘sorry’ will do.

Because, as we all saw in the news last week, documents released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule show incontrovertibly, conclusively, that the hate-filled bitch was lying through her teeth right from the get-go.

There is no equivocation whatsoever: the cabinet had discussed jobs to be lost and pits to be closed with the National Coal Board and Sir Iain MacGregor six months before the strike; the cabinet had ordered the police to take a tough line with union members within days of the start of the strike; the cabinet wanted arrests no matter what the evidence in order to combat secondary picketing; Thatcher was planning to use the army to tackle pickets; Thatcher was planning to declare a state of emergency as the dockers came out in support; to prevent the dockers’ support adding strength to the miners, Thatcher was prepared to sanction redundancy offers of an unheard-of £35,000 to buy them off.

There will be more to come, but this, for now, is enough. A totality of evidence that the strike was heavily politicised from the right as well as from the left, but with one essential difference – the right had access to the machinery of the state to act illegally against its own citizens, and the right used it.

The truth reveals to us, yet again, the real Maggie, the Maggie beyond the myths. The Maggie who loved Britain so much is a myth you won’t hear Michael Gove criticising. He likes that myth. But myth is what it is: Maggie loved Britain so much that she dodged paying her taxes; Maggie put the great back into Britain by hurling tens of thousands of men and women out of work; Maggie put the great back into Britain by selling our state’s precious possessions to foreign owners; Maggie used the apparatus of the state, in secret, against its allegedly free people. That Maggie is exposed. As those of us with eyes to see always knew she would be.

We knew she was no patriot; no friend of democracy; no servant of her people. We knew that the miners fought a just fight, and were on the side of right, and we were proud to have stood on that side with them.

Maggie was on the side, as always, of wrong. Maggie was not a democrat. Maggie broke the law of this land, sold this land’s treasures and lied, again and again, in the interest of her class-war agenda of hate, in the interest of protecting the rich from the poor. Farmers and bankers can be subsidised; miners can not. Obedient counties that vote the right way can have local councils; cities that vote the wrong way can not. Maggie would sell her grandmother, and sanction the death of hundreds, to buy electoral success.

I always looked forward to the verdict of history being passed on one of the most unpleasant politicians of this or any era, but even I never dreamed the verdict would become so damning so quickly.

It was interesting to read the comments on the TV and newspaper websites, and on Twitter, in the wake of the revelations – they show even moderates coming round to the idea that the woman was an intellectual pygmy, a little Englander whose reign was a disaster for this country. Here are a couple from the Channel 4 News website:

• The great and almost entirely ignored tragedy of our times is the destruction and sale of much of productive Britain.
• (The strike) was part of a phase of de-industrialisation of the UK based on “market forces” arguments when we were often competing against subsidised overseas competitors. As a result, we are almost wholly dependent on overseas suppliers for a whole range of strategic goods and much of our remaining shrunken industrial base is overseas-owned. To a large extent this has resulted in the de-skilling of much of the workforce and the creation of a precarious, minimal skill, minimum wage service sector workforce and an economy largely at the mercy of the performance of financial services. If Thatcher had not had such a one-dimensional view of economics, powered by a detestation of trade unions, she might have wondered whether the consequences of her polices actually created the sort of society she really wanted.
• One of the greatest failures of Thatcher’s governments, and one she rarely gets attacked for sadly, was the squandering of the North Sea oil wealth. Whilst Norway built up a huge sovereign wealth fund with theirs, Thatcher blew ours on ideologically motivated tax cuts. Norway showed strategic thinking, Thatcher’s extended to the next election.

I am aware that it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but where she’s concerned politeness has never been a virtue of mine – and what she did to the innocent men, women and children of the north lost her, for ever, the right to courtesy.

What a vile woman.