Scotland reacts to the death of Margaret Thatcher

With just one MP still in Scotland, the effect of Margaret Thatcher’s reign continues to blight the Conservative party north of the border.

Margaret Thatcher

With just one MP still in Scotland, the effect of Margaret Thatcher’s reign continues to blight the Conservative party north of the border.

In particular, it was the decision in 1989 to impose the poll tax on Scotland before the rest of the country which sealed the fate of the Scottish Tories to his day and sowed the seeds for growing nationalist feeling across a country that resented having the poll tax imposed on them like some sort of guinea pig.

In its obituary to the former prime minister, STV has concluded:

“In Scotland – and much of the north of England – Mrs Thatcher remained till her final breath a figure of revilement. It is no exaggeration to call her the most hated woman in Scotland and that contempt is unlikely to subside with her passing. The Sunday school injunction against speaking ill of the dead will not be kept this time.

“Asked why Scotland rejected his old boss, former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind posited: “She was a woman, an English woman, and a bossy English woman.

“However, the animosity felt towards Mrs Thatcher was inspired not by her Englishness, but by her worldview, her personality, and her tone. She was seen as remote and extreme, a cold practitioner of brutal policies that were contemptuous of the social democratic consensus that had embedded itself in Scottish national identity.”

But it wasn’t just the poll tax that caused uproar. Among her other, controversial flirtations with the Scottish establishment was the now famous Sermon on the Mound, a speech delivered by Thatcher in 1988 to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

In the speech, she controversially and somewhat divisively in Scotland sought to offer a theological justification for her political beliefs and ideas on capitalism and market economics. She claimed that “Christianity is about spiritual redemption, not social reform” before quoting St Paul by saying “If a man will not work he shall not eat”.

Yet for all the political discomfort felt in Scotland, it was a country that had meaning to her. The former chief political correspondent of the BBC John Sergeant noted:

“It’s interesting that her two election campaigns that really mattered were 1979 and ’83 – both of them started in Perth. That’s where she made her opening speech.

“So Scotland did matter to her a great deal, but she was always rather dismayed that she didn’t do very well in Scotland.

“Her heart used to sink travelling north, as it did for Tony Blair. Once the poll tax was hung round her neck, and of course the miners dispute and everything else, she was always an amazingly divisive figure in Scotland and Tory fortunes north of the border never recovered from that early period.”

Meanwhile, in his reflections, David Torrance, author of We in Scotland – Thatcherism in a Cold Climate, has acknowledged that Thatcher’s own assessment of her impact in Scotland is probably the most accurate. For the Scotsman he writes:

“In retrospect, it could be that Margaret Thatcher’s own assessment of her Scottish legacy was also the most accurate.

“Acknowledging in her memoirs that there had been ‘no Tartan Thatcherite revolution’, she went on to observe that the ‘balance sheet of Thatcherism in Scotland’ was ‘a lopsided one’, ‘economically positive but politically negative’.

“Although this is a difficult argument to make post-2008, the positive aspect of Lady Thatcher’s balance sheet was undoubtedly true. At the beginning of her premiership the Scottish economy lagged behind that of England – as it had for decades – but eleven years later it was in harmony with its southern neighbour, and even a little ahead. The post-Thatcher recession of the early 1990s, for example, barely impacted on Scotland.”

He continued:

“She was genuinely mystified by her political failure north of the border, frequently interrogating Scottish Tories as to the reasons why. It probably didn’t bother her personally, but as a Conservative imbued with Disraelian notions of ‘One Nation’, it undoubtedly concerned her politically. When, in 1990, the Prime Minister famously referred to ‘we in Scotland’ during a television interview, she did so out of a genuine desire to demonstrate empathy.

“Self-evidently, it didn’t work, and a few months later Mrs Thatcher was gone, forced out by jittery colleagues and little mourned in Scotland. Yet her legacy, however lopsided, persists, in the language, policy and most importantly the assumptions of a devolved nation, a legacy that will – most ironically of all –likely persist even in an independent Scotland.”

Giving his response, to her death, Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond who no doubt owes much of his position today to a continued resistance in Scotland to Thatcher praised her as a “formidable” politician. In a fairly short and sweet statement he declared:

“Margaret Thatcher was a truly formidable prime minister whose policies defined a political generation. No doubt there will now be a renewed debate about the impact of that legacy. Today, however, the proper reaction should be respect and condolences to her family.”

6 Responses to “Scotland reacts to the death of Margaret Thatcher”

  1. labman57

    Don’t know if I would be quite so strong in condemnation so soon after her passing. Not exactly as though she was responsible for mass murder of innocents … was she?
    But then, I’m not a Brit, so I’m not really in a position to judge.

    On a lighter note, as she was known as the “Iron Lady”, her eulogy might include a variation of a familiar passage:
    “Ashes to ashes, rust to rust … “

  2. Annette Allison

    Actually she was responsible for the slaughter of innocents in a long-term way. Before her poll tax and evictions for non-payment, before the mass redundancies as a result of her closure of the mines, demolition of Ravenscraig, closure of Linwood to name but a few of the casualties of the destruction of the mining, car and steel industries in Scotland, people sleeping rough on the streets in Scotland was not a common sight. To use the lingo of a son of a Thatcher, rough sleeping became a lifestyle choice of Thatcher’s for those she considered expendable. The only disturbance humans begging and sleeping on the streets of this vastly wealthy country ever caused her, was that she considered them a “litter” problem. And there we have the measure of this diabolical character’s appalling lack of humanity. She stopped free school milk for the poorest children – no one, no matter how young or how vulnerable was beyond her persecution. In communities she destroyed by the removal of pits, factories and furnaces and her governments total management failure to replace them with alternative work, she was responsible for a no-hope policy that saw people she wanted to expend turning to alcohol and drugs with no hope of work or housing. The physical slaughter of the miners by her henchmen in the police and the starving children of miners who were fed at soup kitchens during 1984-5, lead me and many others to state that without a doubt she was a Hitler, a Stalin, a Saddam Hussein and indeed responsible for the slaughter of innocents. The purpose her death should serve is for a media review of the source of modern social ills – unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction and associated crime – and lay the blame fairly and squarely at her door. That way we may recognise the face of evil as we see it in its present form – Cameron, Osborne et al – all sons of Thatchers – and resist their will through the ballot box, thereby saving countless lives. The YES campaign in Scotland will be greatly served by her death as Scottish Independence offers a route out of the long slow mass murder of working class people – the Tories favourite blood sport.

  3. Rob Ruffles

    she supported people that murdered people like pinochet but every pm has supported dictators for business interests

  4. Grafter Joe

    Quite clearly you are not an economist nor do you appear to be someone in favour of hard graft. Prior to Margaret Thatcher coming to power, this country was dead and on its knees the sick country in the World. Our industries- coal mining etc,etc, were dying and finding to survive. Yes, it was hard but so was resisting the plague, Hitler and al. No pain, no gain! By the time, By the time, Thatcher had been removed from office, our economy was picking up, the World was a safer place with the ending of the Cold War, Europe knew that the UK could not be taken lightly and the Unions had been put in their place.

  5. uglyfatbloke

    Annette – Wilson closed many more Scottish pits and put many more miners out of work than Thatcher did. In Scotland she was loathed because of her English nationalism more than anything else. Osborne, Cameron, Blair, Balls, Miliband…they are all Thatcher’s children, so I’m afraid we really don’t have much choice for the future.

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