Scots 'got' Thatcherism but we didn't vote for it!

Once Labour stood with fellow Scots and shouted "Scotland, United will never be defeated!" Not any more... #indyref twitter.com/freescotlandno…
— Joe Middleton (@freescotlandnow) April 17, 2013
 

Thatcher: What does reaction say about Scotland?
Article in Scotsman by David Torrance

Given that David Torrance actually used to work for the Tory party at Westminster is he really the best person to look at 'both sides' of this?

I recently saw him on TV deliberately kniving the SNP during a discussion on class, he has a political agenda and I think like many others he is trying to re-write history to justify the 'Good old Maggie, she was just mis-understood in Scotland' myth.

"Of course anti-Thatcher hostility is not a specifically Scottish phenomenon, ­although here it has a curiously personal edge. Thatcher closed Ravenscraig; she shut down the coalmines, as if as Prime Minister she had personally – and by implication vindictively – directed the demise of heavy industry without reference to economic winds or management desire."

That anyone could blythly dismiss the Ravenscraig/Gartcosh closure like this suggests that David Torrance has read the books but he doesn't understand the reality on a gut level. He's perhaps just a few years too young as he was born in '77. That means he's only seven years younger than me but I have a vivid memory of '87 which is when Thatcher was first wholly rejected by Scots and was an election I was actually involved in, my first political action as a Scottish nationalist and I was interested in politics for some years before.

The Scots 'got' Thatcherism (in both senses, we were given it whether we wanted it or not, and we understood it), but we didn't vote for her and if Britain had provided devolution (something the Conservative's had promised us) we would have avoided much of the destruction of our industrial base during the Thatcher years. We certainly would never have had the Poll tax!

The recent film about Mrs Thatcher the Iron Lady was actually quite a clever film but it sheared away from the controversy of her legacy and in fact it seemed to be an attempt to humanise Thatcher, using her dementia as a device to show her love for her husband Dennis. That's not a bad thing, Mrs Thatcher was a human being after all, but despite the fantastic central performance by Meryl Streep it really did not serously touch on her politics at all! I don't think there was one mention of Scotland in it but that is probably not surprising.

We Scots definitely did understand her politics and we didn't like them in much the same way as we don't support the actions of David Cameron right now. 

Let's not forget that the Tories recently used the murder of six small children to justify their benefits reforms. That puts a few hundred people in George Square holding a flash demo on the day of Mrs Thatcher's death in perspective!

Harry Reid wrote these comments about Mrs Thatcher on the Scottish review of books:

"The fact is that by the mid 1980s Thatcher had lost Scotland. This was a disaster for such an enthusiastically Unionist politician, a leader who grandly claimed that the Tory party was a “national party or nothing”. This was a quote from Disraeli, which Thatcher duly delivered to an audience of Scots Tories. In this context, national meant British. So, in Scotland anyway, the Tory party became, by her own admission, nothing.

Thatcher could never really grasp that Scotland itself was a nation, and a proud one; that was part of the problem. For her, much as she tried to respect and to understand Scotland, the country was just a component part of the UK. In losing Scotland, she grievously diminished her party’s unionist credentials, and she helped to pave the way for the fragmentation of the Union she cherished.

Thus the most successful and controversial British leader of modern times, and the most politically talented Unionist, could not maintain the unity of the UK. That is, in essence, her legacy in Scotland. It could be argued that she, more than anyone, paved the way for eventual Scottish independence."

What we can say about Mrs Thatcher is that she clarified the relative status of Scotland and England within the British union. England elects a Government, we get the results, and our opinions can be utterly ignored by Westminster.

In private Mrs Thatcher actually claimed to be an English nationalist and her action in denying Scotland devolution (a reversal in policy which caused Malcolm Rifkind to resign) and making sure North Sea Oil stayed in 'British' hands were certainly not in our interests but a case could be argued that these two actions allowed her to keep British imperial delusions alive, something which is central to English state interests.

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PS: I recommend reading this article by Mike Small on Bella Caledonia:

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2013/04/11/ding-dong/