Death of a PM

I was most put out that Margaret Thatcher died the other week. As a friend pointed out; 'What are you going to do Laura? She was your only impression!' So, career over, I thought I would pen a poem. Not exactly a tribute but...

'You’ve Never Had It So Good’

The lady wasn’t for turning

Or helping other women off the sticky floor, through the glass ceiling

Thatcherism offered no sisterhood, ran no women’s support groups

Nor did she care for minors

Thatcher, thatcher, milk snatcher

Or miners

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out

Or trade unionists

Never mind strike, get on your bike.

As for your three day week, you’re making Britain weak

Don’t you see those other countries coming up the rear

Tooled up to the nines, shiny new factories in gear

To compete against us while you have another fag break

Foreigners can keep their lights on, bury their dead. Collect their rubbish.

Why can’t we?

Yes, crank out another rust bucket Friday Special at British Leyland

While making out you’re doing a favour for England

But you don’t fool Maggie

Determined to break your stranglehold on the economy

Like some sociopath to socialists.

She sold the working man his council house for a few bob, then closed down his pit job.

Using the Police as her own private security force to protect the scabs

Creating scabs that would never heal

And men ungrateful for longer lives of unclogged lungs

Who didn’t care for shiftlessness.

Then she hit you with the poll tax

And you bit back with a poleaxe

More frightening than the Falklands

And finally the lady was for turning.

She tore the heart out of coal and cars and ships and steel

But offered instead no Roosevelt New Deal

Just the inexorable rise of privatisation and its fees

Until forced to devise Corporate Responsibility

To infer they don’t rob customers without environmental reason

Successive governments changed little of what Thatcher put in place

Except to embrace the EU and open the immigration floodgates

The messing with our NHS and education go on

Until the day can dawn when all tax-funded services are gone.

Those who did well under Thatcher love her

Those whose communities she destroyed loathe her

She divided to rule and she loved opposition

She would never have agreed to a coalition

She would never have fiddled her expenses either

Yes, she had a few qualities as a leader

And her ism will live on long after she’s gone.

But her greatest legacy was surely as a figure of controversy

For love or hate, she provoked debate

With her ‘don’t care got nowhere’ mantra

And sober single-minded agenda

She was the enemy of political apathy

A woman who defied what a woman should be

She made people care about politics like few others did

As she opened a pandora’s box without a resealable lid.

©LS King 2013

Originally I looked up Margaret Thatcher quotes and intended to cobble a poem together using those, but things went in a completely different direction as they often do in writing. I did find some of the sayings unintentionally amusing though (Mrs Thatcher was known for having very little sense of humour and never getting jokes). Could that be one of the reasons she was so embarrassingly awful in her cameo on  'Yes Minister' which she insisted they write for her...?

• 'Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.'
• 'When I’m out of politics, I’m going to run a business. It’ll be called ‘Rent-a-Spine’
• ‘Politics used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone.’
• 'We are a grandmother'
• 'I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.'
• 'You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it'
• 'I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air'
• 'There is no such thing as society, there are men and women and there are families.'
• 'To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.'
• 'What we think, we become. My father always said that... and I think I am fine.'
• 'Don’t follow the crowd. Let the crowd follow you.'