Good Or Shit: Margaret Thatcher

Two days passed before I learnt that Margaret Thatcher had died. It's surprising because I'm actually in England. There I was, at my new job, desperately trying to perform under pressure to the best of my ability whilst multi-tasking and meeting my deadlines, as an individual and part of a team, without a moment to read the news, and wondering why all around the office random people were sporadically breaking out into renditions of Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.

The way they went on about it you'd think that the air would have smelt different, that the sky would have clouded over (no, no, scrap that the sky is always clouded over) that a comet smashed into earth or men started giving birth or the Messiah showed up (or came back) and declared Israel-Palestine a secular federation of states with equal rights for all. But no, the only indication that something was amiss on the 8th of April, was the surge in popularity of a track written by the Munchkins of Munchkin Land, somewhere along the Yellow Brick Road, in Oz, back in 1939.

Which old witch? Why, that would be the wicked witch, you know her - Margaret Thatcher. She's the woman Englishmen think about when they're worried they're going to prematurely ejaculate but then do anyway, but for different reasons. The one they call the Iron Lady because she ruled with an iron fist, otherwise known as a fierce neoliberal agenda, you know, not big on welfare, public healthcare, unions, government spending, taxing rich people, anything to do with the environment other than what financial profits can be made from it, immigrants, homosexuals and poor people.

Thatcher is quite passionately admired and, vehemently hated in England. Hated so much that her death could actually cause a little tune from an old musical to take out the second spot on the official UK music chart 74 years after the Munchkins first sang it and 23 years after Thatcher actually did anything other than make a few public speeches. Hated so much that people would actually campaign to get this song in the charts, throw 'Thatcher's Dead' celebrations across the country, and go about singing that she was a witch and they're glad she's dead. It's not the kind of display you expect to see from a nation that prides itself on being emotionally controlled. Perhaps this is what happens when you let ideologically focused right wingers run nations, in the end the people turn against you and practically dance on your grave singing joyously about your death. Remember John Howard? He's not dead but in the end he lost his seat, and that's practically death anyway.  

As has been widely written about lately, to punk music, Thatcher was the gift that kept on giving. But it wasn't just punk, there is practically an entire canon of songs, covering all genres, written about Thatcher that express nothing other than a deep, deep loathing. The Beat's Stand Down Margaret (1980), The Specials Ghost Town (1981), Klaus Nomi was the first to tie Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead to Thatcher in his own re-working in 1982, The Varuker's Thatcher's Fortress (1984), Crass' How Does It Feel? (1986), Morrissey's Margaret On The Guillotine (1986) Hefner's The Day That Thatcher Dies (2000) it goes on and on. Many of them call for her death, many of them make references to the dancing and celebrating they will do when it happens.

It's wasn't the utter tastelessness of singing about how awesome it is that a person is dead that really bothered me. It's that it seems a premature celebration because, as someone said to me, “Thatcherism and its American cousin, Reaganomics, are still very much alive and kicking. And they're being practised to extremes their namesakes could only have dreamed of. ” Think of the Tea Party! This stuff is all very prevalent in the UK, the US, and soon, if the media and the polls are anything to go by, the AUS.

Take this, on the website of Australian conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, there are a list of suggestions for Abbott if he were to become PM this year. And in his speech at the recent IPA 70th birthday celebrations, between several references to Jesus, Abbott endorsed many of them. Here are a few of my favourites from the IPA's 74 suggestions: get rid of the carbon tax, the Department of Climate Change, the Clean Energy Fund, and the mining tax, privatise Australia Post, privatise Medibank, break up the ABC and sell it off, privatise SBS, and stop the NBN. It's all - protect the rich, fuck the poor, and what's wrong with slow internet? Back in our day we didn't even have Google maps.

If this sort of stuff were to happen in our country could we too find ourselves singing songs about how much we can't wait for Tony Abbott to die?

I think there is something significant that the Thatcher haters have forgotten and that Australians would do well to remember. You see, the Munchkins also sang their celebratory death song prematurely. Many of you will remember that while they were all dancing around Munchkin Land gleefully declaring their new found liberation the Wicked Witch of the West smoke-bombed in, threatened to get rid of the caring and progressive Dorothy - 'I'll get you my pretty' – did a whole bunch of evil shit in her bid to mine all the rubies out of a pair of slippers, and shit got a whole lot worse before it got any better. So, my message to fellow Australians is this – when we go to the polls this September, throw a bucket of water over Tony Abbott and melt that witch.