It’s a year now since I got back from my little trip to England, where I visited rellies, was fed raw leek by a gorilla and slipped and slithered over frozen garbage in London.
And it’s nearly 20 years since I was there before that, horrified in the middle of the miners’ strike, in Thatcher’s heyday. I returned here gladly in 1985 wondering what on earth was going to happen to my birthplace in the north of England, which was so clearly under attack. Now we know. London now rates 45th on a list of liveable cities that includes virtually all Australian capitals in the top ten.
Two ABC programs got me thinking about all this: of course the two-part Thatcher biography in February, and the recently started Crime Team (Thursdays, 9.30pm). Funny how some programs are better for company: I needed it in the Thatcher documentaries, because they made hard watching for anyone who remembers free education, a fair working week, real weekends and a health system that worked.
‘Yes,’ said my husband. ‘I remember that time too. Before privatisation, outsourcing, anti-union legislation and gambling-led recoveries.’
‘A time when redistribution of wealth was still a respectable topic, and taxing the incomes of the rich rather than the food of the poor was the way to get money for government,’ I replied.
‘A time when we were governed instead of ruled,’ said my son, who was too young to remember, but could do the maths.
If economic rationalism has hit Australia hard, with the widening gap between rich and poor, the damage I’ve seen in my birth country has been far worse. That garbage in the streets, my relatives’ harrowing stories of dreadful negligence under the NHS, the general air of truculent mistrust, where had it all come from? Whodunnit?
Well, using the tools available to me at the time, as in the excellent, even compulsively viewable Crime Team, I can say that I have no doubt at all that Maggie Thatcher, Milton Friedman’s centrefold, dunnit. Blair, (whatever one thinks of him now) was hobbled from the start, trying to build a decent home out of the wreck she left behind her. Anyway, the documentary, careful and even-handed to the point of whitewash, was damning enough. She said enough to make you realise that it is always a mistake to vote for a successful psychopath. The sight of her weeping because she