Ashes to ashes, rust to rust

It’s been a strange week of watching opinions fly back and forth since I turned the radio on over Monday lunchtime and noticed that everyone was talking about Margaret Thatcher in the past tense. After writing a couple of Facebook updates about the ex ex-prime minister, I felt that Facebook’s soundbite approach was no longer adequate. It’s just as well I don’t use Twitter.

Ken Livingstone repeated during the week the old notion that “history is written by the victors”. If the web has granted the world anything, it’s the fact that anyone free to use it, victor or vanquished, now has a voice, even if it is just to comment on funny cat pictures. No, I’m not going to lazily embed a YouTube link to “Tramp the Dirt Down” - one of Elvis Costello’s worst songs - or celebrate the death of an old woman from a stroke, I’m just going to give my side of the story.

Thatcherism is not dead. In fact, it isn’t even ill. Margaret Thatcher never lived long enough to see her beliefs discredited - the fact that she spent most of the last ten years needing to be told which day of the week it was meant that this was out of the question. Nor do I expect the likes of Norman Tebbit to suddenly shrug to the television cameras and ask “what was all that about, then?” The man’s belief in devil-take-the-hindmost market economics is unswerving, despite its consequences being all around us. He’d have made a bloody good pope.

But Tebbit is only the second-most misquoted Conservative minister of my lifetime. His “on your bike” (look up the full speech and you’ll find a somewhat different message) is only trumped by “no such thing as society” – again, one line taken out of context from an interview given by his boss to Woman’s Own magazine.

I grew up in 1970s and 1980s north-west England and now live in central-belt Scotland; both regions with that suffered under the decline of old industry and largely left out of the soft economies that have dubiously replaced it. All rhetoric, left-wing or right-wing, does well from having a bogeyman, and Margaret Thatcher was gift to her enemies in that. You can fairly blame her for many things in these places, but why not just go for it and blame her for everything?

I have sat next to old men in a shopping centre built on the site of a former steel forge saying that Thatcher closed the works down, when the factory in question barely survived the 1960s. I have been on trains crossing the River Clyde hearing Glaswegians telling their Canadian relatives that that section of the river used to be all shipyards until Thatcher did away with them – the more prosaic truth being that shipbuilding moved west years beforehand as the water in Glasgow city centre is too shallow and narrow for modern vessels.

My parents were both pharmacists who spent much of their careers dispensing tranquilisers to people in social dumping grounds before weaning them back off. The rioting in inner cities was logical; these places had been screwed for years, it’s just that the residents were now awake and alert to their surroundings in the short term. In the long term, heroin replaced Valium.

Many of the tributes have come from overseas. People who never saw the lop-sided treatment of the economy have eulogised some miracle worker who ended the cold war and apartheid. Both Gorbachev and de Klerk were astute enough to realise they’d inherited countries that were unsustainable. Painting Thatcher (and Reagan before her) as visionaries is ridiculous; they merely picked up the telephone. Let’s not let history exaggerate their importance just because big events happened on their watch.

Her true legacy is the continued delusion that we can all be successful in business, the castration of local government, the lie that free markets provide the solution to social issues, the demonisation of the poor rather than of poverty, the cockeyed faith in tertiary industry rather than maintaining a mixed economy. Her spirit is alive in “the bedroom tax”, which acknowledges the real-life problem of misallocated social housing but then financially penalises tenants as though they are responsible for someone else's administrative error. The Conservative Party, both then and now, can spot a social issue or under-performing public institution but will always blame the easiest target, or do away with the institution rather than repair it. It’s a good job Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron never qualified as vets; they’d have shot the horse every time.

Lastly, I’m not even going to blame her for all of that. Without public support she would have been a crank, even within her own party, or just somebody who helped invent cheap and nasty substitutes for ice cream. I’m going to blame the millions of people who voted for her, time after time, even though they knew that the success of her policies depended on writing off whole areas of the country.

We Don’t Need No Education (Slight Return)

My oldest child is in the second year of high school.  The new Scottish qualifications that replace Standard grades and Intermediates are National 4 and National 5, and my local high school now wants its pupils to choose the subjects that they will take to this level over the next two academic years.  As well as the four core subjects of English, Maths, PE and Religious Education, six others are chosen; one from each of the following groups:

SOCIAL SUBJECTS Geography; History; Modern Studies SCIENCE Biology; Chemistry; Physics CREATIVE & AESTHETIC Art; Music; Drama; PE Studies; PE Dance TECHNOLOGY Computing; Administration & IT; Accounting; Business Management; Graphic Communication; Design & Manufacture; Woodworking Skills; Food Technology; Textile Technology ELECTIVE 1 Spanish; Biology; Physics; Drama; Art; Food Technology; Computing; History ELECTIVE 2 French; German; Chemistry; PE Studies; Music; Administration & IT; Graphic Communication; Religious, Moral & Philosophical Studies

When I was thirteen, I would have chosen the same subjects as my mates did so I could hang around with them, or avoided subjects where I hated the teachers.  A couple of years can make all the difference between making decisions out of some sort of realism rather than just wanting to look cool.  But the way the subjects are laid out shows two big problems that the school system dumps onto everyone else.

First, despite all the evidence that this country’s workforce can’t sell a single thing overseas unless it’s to another English-speaker, all foreign languages have been sidelined in such a way that they can be avoided altogether by someone just looking for easy subjects.

The other is the redundancy of some of the more “modern” subjects.  Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies sounds like a big deal but any decent teaching of History will cover the ethics behind conflicts and political events.  Accounting is only really useful to people who have already proved their worth at maths, which most fourteen-year olds have yet to do.

I wonder if the exercise is more to make schools and their pass statistics look good than provide the universities, colleges and the job market with qualifications that would be of any use.