I should say at the outset that my personal politics are moderately left-leaning - I'm certainly a lot closer to socialism than I am to free market capitalism.
You would be hard-pressed to find a more divisive figure in Britain than Thatcher - there are some who worship the ground she walked on, and there are those who will be dancing in the street at the news that she's died. My own opinion is mixed. On the one hand, I despise many of the things she did to this country - I'm from the north east, an area that was traditionally very industrial and that was comprehensively gutted by Thatcher's policies. On the other hand, her presence was such a constant thing during my childhood that to have her now be gone is very strange. At the time, when she was dismantling the region where I lived, I was too young to understand it (I'm 37, by the way, born in 1976) and my family was never that politically engaged so a lot of it passed me by.
She was just this figure on the telly who made speeches and didn't like the miners and Arthur Scargill (I was only dimly aware of who Scargill was and even less idea what a trade union was), and she was the British PM who fought off the nasty Argentinians who wanted to come and take our Falkland Islands! Again, I was 6 at the time, I had no knowledge of the history of the Falklands, why Argentina might want it or indeed where the Falklands or Argentina actually was. All I had were the less-than-objective snatches I caught on the news when I was waiting for the cartoons to appear and a childlike view of the world being divided into "Us" and "Them" (where "Us" were the good guys, obviously). I knew something bad was going on but Thatcher would appear on the news giving a speech and it was reassuring, and as much as I now know a lot more about the Falklands, the history of colonialism, and how hateful the idea of "Us" and "Them" is, I still feel echoes of that.
What she did may have devastated parts of this country, and I now despise the kind of right-wing politics she represented, I can't separate that with those childhood impressions. And whatever you might think of her politics, it has to be admitted that she accomplished a huge amount. For becoming the first female prime minister at a time when gender inequality was still very prevalent (not that it's entirely disappeared now) she deserves respect at the very least.
I don't celebrate anyone's death, whether it's Thatcher or anyone else, all I can feel is sympathy for the grief of those who cared for them.
I will say, however, that I'm not looking forward to what is sure to be the nauseatingly mawkish news coverage of the next few days.
Right, that's enough, I've had my two penn'orth, I'm going back to writing the sequel to Crystal Eyes
