Readers push back against my push-back:
Blegh. What about Republican gay-bashing couldn’t be described as part of their “war with the left”? How can we accept your Thatcherian position in the context of your uncompromising hate-fest for Bill Clinton?
The gay movement won in America because it eventually eschewed the kind of hate-politics that dominated the British left for ages. I have also had plenty of good things to say about Bill Clinton’s presidency, from welfare reform to fiscal balance. It remains a fact that he was substantively the most anti-gay president in US history. Preventing gay left propaganda in high schools in the 1980s is not the same as signing a bill that barred non-Americans with HIV from even entering the country, doubling the rate of gay discharges from the military, and signing the Defense of Marriage Act a decade later. Another quotes me:
A “fanatical devotee of the rule of law,” indeed. In that list of quotes on the Telegraph.co.uk was the line, “love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.” This from a woman whose government banned Gerry Adams‘ voice from being broadcast on radio and television and banned his travel to mainland Britain. Whatever you may think of Adams and irrespective of Sinn Féin’s abstention from Westminster, she denied the people of West Belfast their democratically elected voice. How does that chime with your support for Freedom of Speech?
Banning a terrorist from entering your country is not an attack on free speech. The other point is fair game. But it is also undeniably true that Thatcher’s breaking of the print unions was a boon for the media industry. I certainly don’t think this even begins to compare with the new era of p.c. censorship that has occurred since – in which even “insulting” remarks about religion were once banned in the UK. Another fact-checks me:
In your video where you respond to several dissents to your posthumous praise of Thatcher, you defend her decisions regarding Bobby Sands and other IRA hunger strikers at the Maze Prison in Belfast. You argue that her actions were understandable due to the IRA’s previous attempt on her life in 1980 when the IRA bombed a hotel where she and other MPs were staying during the Conservative Party’s annual conference in the UK.
Your history here, however, is exactly backwards.
Bobby Sands died in 1981 as a result of his hunger strike. The Brighton Hotel bombing occurred in 1984. Indeed, Patrick Magee, the IRA terrorist (or “Freedom Fighter,” take your pick) responsible for the attack later stated he did it, at least in part, due to Thatcher’s refusal to recognize Sands and the other Maze hunger strikers as political prisoners. So, if you want to find some justification for Thatcher’s actions toward the Maze hunger strikers in 1981, you need to look somewhere other than the 1984 Brighton Hotel Bombing, which, I agree, was an odious and cowardly act.
Also, to the extent you suggest human rights violations in Northern Ireland pre-dated Thatcher’s premiership and stopped once she assumed office, I believe you are incorrect about that, too. For that, you might look to the Stalker Inquiry, which closely examined these issues (or see Ken Loach’s film Hidden Agenda). For my $40 payment per year, I figure I am entitled to fact-check you every once in a while.
You are indeed, and I’m grateful. I got my chronology wrong in an extemporaneous video. But her closest parliamentary ally, Airey Neave, was murdered by the IRA in 1979, which no doubt affected her. Throughout the 1970s, the IRA bombed London and murdered civilians in pubs and department stores. But there was no torture under Thatcher, and the Stalker Inquiry was about shoot-to-kill policies – and its conclusion was that there was no official backing of the policy but unofficial tolerance of it. The year after the Brighton bombing, Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement that paved the way for the Good Friday accords. Another reader:
You were plain wrong and more than a bit flippant (did we have to have that little giggle about Bobby Sands’ death?) about the IRA’s interaction with Maggie. Your comment “allow the guy to die” indicates you do not remember (I prefer that to “never knew”) that 10 young men died in that spring and summer of 1981 so that Maggie could look macho and continue to treat them as “criminals” instead of the political prisoners they clearly were.
I’m a Northern Irish “cradle” Catholic brought up in the anti-British Republican Irish tradition but I have never had any truck with political violence. The Irish, like the Scots, the Welsh and a large section of the Northern English, had a clear sense that she felt that they clearly were “not one of us”, in her own words. Maggie eventually got it right with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement with the Republic of Ireland in 1985 which led eventually to the peace process under Tony Blair.
A few things. If you have no truck with political violence, then I do not understand how a cop-killer and embedded member of a terrorist organization, the IRA, is somehow a political prisoner, and allowed privileges other prisoners did not have. The hunger strike was an attempt to get themselves re-designated as POWs – and to bring publicity to their cause. Not giving in to their demands was not about being macho. It was about the rule of law.
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