1. Politicians are people who choose to be a in a position where they have vast amounts of power over the population. They have a moral duty to use that power for the greater good and to pay special attention to the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. People who ignore that duty should not be forgiven lightly.
2. Being a woman who achieves power does not make you a feminist. Margaret Thatcher famously hated feminism. She told her friends that she didn’t want to see more women in politics, because she wanted to be the only one. She was actively anti-women.
3. When you hear yourself saying “whatever her policies, she still deserves respect,” think about what you’re saying. There is NOTHING more important than your political beliefs. If you’re political beliefs are deeply wrong, you cannot be a good person. Thatcher had a fundamental lack of compassion for humanity and that helped to destroy a lot of people’s lives. So the argument that I should respect her even though I “disagreed with her policies” is ridiculous, because those policies are at the root of everything she was. And I didn’t just disagree with them. Show me a political or social problem from the last 20 years, and I can show you how Thatcher either created it or contributed to it.
4. I’ve been seeing posts saying “she can’t be that bad, because she was elected three times.” You don’t have to be popular to be elected. This country is deeply fragmented - there are left-wing people on one side who believe in taking care of those who need help and there are people on the other side who only care about themselves and whether they get a tax cut. Thatcher won by appealing to people’s greed over and over. But in fact, the way our voting system works means that someone can become prime minister with less than 40% of the vote (hello David Cameron). So being elected isn’t a sign of public approval.
5. People seem to have forgotten some of the most shocking things Thatcher did. She introduced a tax that poor people couldn’t afford to pay. She introduced a law that made it impossible for teachers to tell school children “it’s okay to be gay.” She helped the Chilean dictator General Pinochet to escape justice despite killing thousands of people. I’m not saying that crushing unions and privatising public industries was forgivable, but it was far from the worse thing she did.
6. If people are celebrating her death, it’s because some people don’t have much in life to celebrate generally nowadays and this is Thatcher’s true legacy. There are homeless people who have nowhere to live because Thatcher allowed people to buy their council houses and now there aren’t enough of them to go around. There are people who have never worked their whole life because they couldn’t get a job in the recessions of the early 80s and early 90s, and once they’d been unemployed a few months no employer wanted to touch them. There are communities that have been decimated because of her decisions. There are families who have waited over 20 years to find out the truth about what happened to relatives who died at Hillsborough because of her decision to back the police. There are plenty of people living miserable lives because of Thatcher, and when someone has to put up with so much crap, you can’t blame them for celebrating when the person responsible finally has the decency to die.
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