This is a new thread on unlikely admirers of Thatcher.
First up, here's Shawn Ryder from the Happy Mondays:
"I look at this city before Thatcher was in power - round here it was loads of tunnels, factories and fuckin' smog," he says peering through the bar's Venetian blinds. "Then, all of a sudden, that industry gets shut down and we've got lots of sunshine and open skies and a whole new industry. I'm not a working-class Tory. I just think what Thatcher did had to be done for the good of the country. It's sad - we all know what happened with the miners - but we were still living in the fucking 1800s in the mid 70s. It was almost Luddite-ish. And the Luddites had to be done the same way for us to move on as a fucking race."
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And less surprising, here's Julie Burchill on Thatcher:
"Only a terminally smug liberal would still write her off as an uptight bundle of Little Englandisms, seeking to preserve the old order, however hard she worked that look at first; voting for her was something akin to buying what one thought was a Vera Lynn record, getting it home and finding a Sex Pistols single inside.
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? It’s interesting to note that while some middle and even upper-class people choose to go into “low” jobs — journalist, actor, sportsman, plumber — which pay well and/or are a good laugh, no one ever went out of their way to become a miner. “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.
Her appetite for destruction was more often than not spot-on. 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. This led to the very British cultural social comedy of left-wing poshos such as the Foots being outraged by the upstart, while outsiders who should on paper have been Labour voters recognised her as one of them.
One of my younger friends, a very angry, talented, Anglo-Punjabi man of profoundly working-class origin, remembers as a child crying inconsolably for days when Mrs Thatcher was unseated by her own party. 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."
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