A BEEF WITH THE BRITISH

ON THE DEATH OF MARGARET THATCHER: MY MIND WENT TO THE FIRST TIME SHE JOLTED  MY POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS... WHEN SHE WON THE LEADERSHIP FROM OPPOSITION CONSERVATIVE LEADER EDWARD HEATH IN FEBRUARY 1975. 

IT WAS MY 12th BIRTHDAY.

I must have made my mind up I wouldn't vote for her by the reaction I had to my father's enthusiasm for the rise of  M.P.Margaret Thatcher. 

Dad quipped she was the new hope and glory for Britain - making her Great once again, for the hard-working smallbusiness/tradesman and property owning class. (Think of Arthur Daley character but better looking!)

Sex Pistols sound of the mid 70's. Creativity and destruction a fine line....

I saw NO FUTURE for me in Birmingham. I needed to get out and the opportunity came with an ad in the Evening Mail saying there was a skilled tool setting job in Melbourne and my step-father knew the man who placed it.

A big Qantas airplane swept me up in the sky on the 11th January 1978, taking me to the land of Australia as Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher was making her way to 10 Downing Street - HQ of the British Prime Minister, where she would embark on her dismantling of the ideology and policies of collectivism and a social safety net against the excesses of capitalism. 

She said there was no such thing as society only individualism, and those individuals who knew the value of the franchise, voted for her to make the decisions in 3 general elections.

There is something Freudian going on I haven't fully worked out yet, but my reaction to the news of Baroness Thatcher's death is tied to early memories of my father; I'd been swimming at the Municipal public baths built in the Edwardian brick-building boom of our Selly Oak inner-city suburb and had bought 2pennies worth of hot chips on the corner when I spied my dad driving a new car.

BIRMINGHAM, BRITISH MADE

There was no traffic so he put the brake on, leaned over to say hello as I pulled a chip out. He said his new car was a Rover. I asked where he was going at 6.00 at night, all dressed up.  He said he was going to vote.

That stopped me. He was serious - he'd even dressed respectably to do his duty or impress a woman. Who was he voting for?

Dad said he was voting for Margaret Thatcher. Maybe I was open-mouthed...Conservative, he said. He looked in his rear-view mirror and put his new car into gear. 

Say hello to the twins for me, he said, and your mum, and drove off. 

It was another separation, a wedge between us, but why? Had I decided my party political preferences already? I can't remember! I must have picked up media messages, along the way, radio, t.v. tabloid newspapers.

Our family was not one who had political debate at the kitchen table. There must have been a lesson learned a long time ago that engaging in the battle of ideas was too divisive on families - you didn't survive without family supports.

All I sensed then was, here was my father, left us, got a new home with all mod cons, a new woman, a new car. 

I walked across the road to our terrace house, a divorced, working mum and three daughters, probably still washing clothes in the bath because the old twin tub rattler was too cumbersome.

Dad dutifully paid 'Maintenance' every Friday,  but I still thought he was a bastard, quite naturally. Mum had helped him set up and establish his building and repairs business like many wives did and now another woman was reaping the material benefits.

A million miles and 5 years later Dad tried to explain how he didn't have money to send me when in a crisis of  teenage homelessness. He added he always thought it was important not to give hand-outs. You become more resourceful when you find your way on your own.

Life has cycles. It builds character, independence.....You are stronger for it.....I tuned out. In reality I believed if I had been a son, he would have thought and acted differently.

What did Margaret Thatcher do for girls and women? She was a woman whose parents supported an excellent education for their daughter. She went to Oxford training in Science and Law. I could see the Birmingham University clock outside my bedroom window, but I didn't know what a University was. Nobody said I could have gone there.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”  John Kenneth Galbraith

Dad was a self-made man but had a working-class inferiority chip on his shoulder. My Leeds born husband made me understand how the Education and Class system had belittled and expected little from their urban charges.

Poor literacy was common from my father's 1940's schooling to my husband's 1950's one.

By the 1960's when I was at primary school there had been some kind of revolution in approach and content of curriculum which gave me a life-long love of learning.

My husband and I as teenage migrants to Melbourne shared the feeling that we would go back to England when the Revolution came! 

We saw from a distance Prime Minister Thatcher stomp on the mining communities mining communities with no care for the consequences. We counted our blessings again; we had the Prime Minister of consensus at the helm, Bob Hawke.

CLICK TO

"New Matilda" on Australian Thatcherism

Excellent essay on Westminster's role in the British car industry.

http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/facts-and-figures/essays/essay-did-government-kill-mg-rover/

 

MY KIND OF ROLE-MODEL