Why the left hate Thatcher?
Cristina Odone blogs at the Telegraph:
John O’Farrell, Labour’s candidate in the Eastleigh by-election, used to contribute amusing articles to the New Statesman when I was the magazine’s deputy editor. The comedian was unfailingly polite in his dealings with me. Our contact was by telephone only and I remember picturing a mild-mannered soul clad in regulation socks and sandals.
But mention Margaret Thatcher and gentle O’Farrell starts foaming at the mouth and spewing bile. In a book he wrote about his support for Labour, he revealed his “disappointment” when the IRA failed to kill the then prime minister in Brighton, in 1984. “Why did she have to leave the bathroom two minutes earlier?” he asked himself when Mrs Thatcher survived the bomb blast that destroyed her bathroom in the Grand Hotel.
So Labour’s candidate is someone who supported the IRA attempted assassination of the UK Prime Minister. Charming, and not surprising.
Given the venom with which Labour supporters attack the former PM, you’d think that when their party finally came to power in 1997, it reversed every one of her hateful policies. In fact, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown guarded the Thatcher legacy as lovingly as if she’d been a grocer’s daughter born and bred in Islington. Her successors kept the privatisation and kept at bay the trade unions.
Smart men.
This makes me suspicious. If Labour can live with Margaret Thatcher’s policies, what is it about her that they find so unacceptable? …
Secondly, she’s a woman. The party that pays lip service to equality and feminism is, behind the scenes, deeply misogynist. Labour historians like to claim that Barbara Castle could have beaten Thatcher to be the first woman prime minister. But Castle was only allowed to rise to Cabinet ministerial level; and her biography, Red Queen, revealed that Wilson, Healey, Jenkins and Crosland kept her firmly in her place by reminding her that her female brain had scraped a third‑class degree. …
Harriet Harman and Diane Abbott are tolerated as noisy sisters; but the minute they aspire to higher office, the sniping starts. Labour women must not get ideas above their station. A woman who climbs to the very top wrongfoots the party’s apparatchiks. Working mothers are fine, as long as they are drones who contribute to the economy. Tokenism in the board room is also acceptable, as a female non-exec has little real bearing on what happens in the company.
But don’t let some uppity woman start bossing everyone about. Margaret Thatcher, née Roberts, did. Her extraordinary career has exposed Labour as the party of men.
Will the UK Labour Party ever have a female leader? I doubt it. The unions are so male dominated, and now get a third of the vote for leader.