£10 million to stick Thatcher in the ground? Over £3K travel expenses can be claimed by MPs coming back to the ludicrous recalling of parilament? Ye gods.


"I suspect that you direct all this hatred and spleen at Mrs Thatcher because her time in power has shown up your unthinking left-wing ideology for what it is: terminally ineffective as well as terminally dreary"

Then your suspicions are wrong, this appalling vilification of people who care about their fellow citizens over the 48 hours since her death has shown her true legacy: bitterness, division, a deep mistrust of authority and the corruption of our political system. The communities we live in have seen our values eroded, viciously attacked and virtually wiped out in the years since Thatcher took office; all governments have continued on the path to the self-loathing consumerist culture of today. Some of us might not weep for the death of Thatcher, but we weep for our fellow citizens and the fact they are relegated to bit-part players in a deregulated capitalist oligarchy.

Thatcher herself wasn't one for forgiveness or forgetting (as is evidenced by the clip of her talking about Howe's betrayal of her that's been played many times in the last 48 hours) and she was a bitter person in life. She died with only an old advisor to offer comfort; no family, no friends and still separate from the society she so despised and closeted in a luxury hotel paid for by a pair of execrable aging male sycophants. I don't join in with the dancers celebrating her death as I see her a rather sad old lady, isolated and bereft of the vigour of her heyday. I find it hard to take joy in her situation at one of life's defining points.

Thatcher never understood community; the concept was beyond the grasp of her limited intellect. She never understood that compassion and empathy are virtues that ordinary people value greatly. Like the Bullingdon tosspots currently in hysterics over her demise (alongside the likes of Blair), she simply could not comprehend that as well as personal freedom people feel safe with the idea of the state taking some of the burden of the daily grind off their shoulders (hence the continuing massive support for the NHS) and that having an infrastructure that was owned by the people and industries supported by a government that enabled people to gain skills and make things whilst being protected from exploitation is important. All this is tied in with community, with society and the common good, and the destruction of these Thatcher presided over means she is despised by many people for whom the idea of a cohesive, equal and fair society is something worth working for. Thatcher could never, ever, understand that.

Why is her funeral not been run by a private company? Why is the hard-pressed taxpayer forking out for one old woman's funeral? We're paying because the people holding the purse strings are a bunch of detached, nasty, sad hypocrites who don't have the integrity to stick to their own shifting, corrupt values. Add insult to injury and make the plebs pay. Well, we've been paying for over thirty years and we're still paying now.

So next Wednesday I will be having drink. Because we'll be saying goodbye to someone who has turned our society into a vacuous, shallow and uncaring place to live. It won't be Thatcher the person I'll be celebrating the demise of, I don't take pleasure in the loss of human life, but the fact the architect of an ideology that treats misery and suffering as an acceptable cost for turning a profit is no longer here and the tragedy she inflicted upon us as a people hasn't cowed those to whom the idea of compassion over profit is a fundamental value of our society.

Thatcher and her cronies failed, in that they didn't and won't drive the empathy out of all of us. We deserve better than these people.