I was watching a foreign country and not for the first time. The fawning news coverage, the militarism, the righteous Christianity, the clapping crowds. Here was a line in the sand in which political or cultural understanding was impossible. Thanks to a dead old lady.
The City of London has never been fully integrated into the wider realm. It’s an odd little enclave; a Vatican for investment banking. It was therefore a fitting focal point as the body of Baroness Thatcher was paraded along those streets; given that it’s probably the one square mile of the United Kingdom where her legacy is not fought over.
It was a foreign country that I watched that day, a country called England. I didn’t feel disgust, or revulsion at this gathering; strange though it was for such a controversial figure; I felt a sense of otherness.
In the imperial temple of St Paul’s there was no room for anything other than an English sense of national identity, a strange mix of politeness and grandeur; of ritual supplication around the coffin of a leader who would have been more at home in the 19th than the 20th century. The country that those attending the event vowed to at the end of the ceremony to the tune of Holst’s anthem, was not mine.
I’m not claiming for an instant that Thatcher or her policies were, or still are, tied up with English national identity. Indeed I think that it would have been impossible for such a Prime Minister to have emerged in an independent England: for it was the thin cloak of Britishness that gave Thathcer her real and profound cultural mandate to do what she did.
In her notorious blue eyes lay a religious conviction that Britain wasn’t like any other country. This was something she would say time and time again, as in her interview with Robin Day before the 1987 general election. Even from the distance of several decades it’s still a terrifying performance of right wing nationalism.
Behind that piercing gaze was a project all about tapping into and reviving a British (English) nationalism that had lain dormant for some time. On a more cynical level, her obsession with all things Churchillian may have been borne out of a calculation that (much like the Republicans in the United States) that the Tories fare far better when there’s a war and an opportunity for bit of tabloid jingoism.
As Adam Curtis’s excellent exploration of Thathcer, The Attic makes clear, the lady was obsessed with an imperial past and it was in no small measure her mobilization of this nostalgia in England that sugared the pill of her disastrous economic policies.
That’s why, for all that pundits and Tory lairds may tell us, Thatcher represented a profound cultural disconnect with Scotland. It was not a clash of personality, not a question of accents, hats or handbags, but a clear and lasting demonstration of a split between two divergent societies and cultures.
Notorious for her thundering rhetoric and soundbites, it was one small pronoun that showed Scotland that it was time for change. Real change. The story is so well known that it doesn’t need repeating but it simply demonstrates how far we have come in the intervening years, no British Prime Minister will ever again utter the words “We in Scotland”. Of course, only a politician as alien to Scotland as Thatcher, ever would have.
Scotland isn’t special. We know that. Like most northern European nations, we understand that social cohesion is the only basis on which a better society can be worked towards. The simple fact that social cohesion does not exist, and cannot exist within Westminster politics, is why independence will happen.
Over used though it may be, the trope of the ‘canny Scot’ is at the heart of contemporary Scottish politics. Collectively we have no hard and fast opposition to an incorporating union, as a matter of principle. Yet all that we insist on as definitve would be seen as anathema to that bitter strain of British parochialism that was Thatcher’s political home.
We in Scotland know that an individual’s value cannot be reduced to a simple calculus of economic activity. We in Scotland know, as the opposition to today’s Tory policies highlight, that the lot of our weakest child is the lot of all of our children.
Occasionally history serves up delicious ironies. Royal or otherwise that “we” lives on in the psyche of a nation that for so long was taxed but not represented. That ham fisted attempt to cosy up to the Scottish electorate said something far greater than Thatcher could ever have understood.
Recently I find myself noting, when talking to Scots skeptical about the prospect of independence, that they unfailingly speak of Scotland as a we, a community, a polity, a society. That’s why Thatcher’s blundering PR disaster highlights more succinctly than any other quote the vast differences that she fostered between Scotland and England.
If I’m honest, I felt an odd sense of elation when the news of her death came through: not least because it is my generation that has had to reap the bitter crop that she sowed. The greatest financial crisis in a century and a legacy of no homes and no work are already causing untold damage to what may be yet another lost generation.
That sense of freedom I felt on 8 April was not about celebrating the death of a senile 87 year old. Rather it was a line in the sand, the death of a poorly thought out “ism” and a shortsighted era. It was also joy at the knowledge that for all the damage she inflicted, she was outlived by so much of what she sought to destroy. Not least Scotland.