I've experienced a new and uncomfortable sensation this week, beng ashamed of my home country. Living abroad and watching some of the dancing-on-grave that's been taking place back in the UK has provoked many emotions but I think now that the primary one is shame. That thousands of people would conspire to increase the misery of someone's grief by the promotion of a song meanly insulting their deceased loved one seems deeply shameful and ungracious I think. The Ding Dong campaign for me is a dark hour in British protest history.
That is not to say that I stand with those who seek to white-wash Baroness Thatcher's memory. Quite the opposite. I've learnt a lot in the last week about my own childhood and the times in which I spent my formative years. I think many intelligent people on the left have engaged in quite appropriately critical reflection on her legacy - such as Glenda Jackson, Polly Toynbee and the like - while many Tories have attempted to shut that kind of debate down (this article by Glenn Greenwald is very interesting for instance: Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette).
Alongside the necessity of considering her legacy for the historical record, and dwelling on the direction Britain took, and has taken, since she came to power in 1979; I can see that it is also essentially relevant to the political debate of today in the UK. As a new generation of Tories deliver a new tranche of fairly soulless, socially-callous cuts to public services and the infrastructure of the Welfare State, Thatcherism needs re-examining. As a tax on spare rooms for benefit receivers looms, the debacle of the Poll Tax needs recollection.
However, beyond all of this very sensible and intellectually weighty debate, from where I am sitting 11,000 miles away, conspiring to ensure "Ding Dong the Witch is dead" is number 1 for a woman's funeral is wicked and gut-wrenchingly distasteful. Australian debate gets pretty personal and acidic at times but they would never actively celebrate a death and many here seemed quite disgusted by the spectacle. She has a family afteral and while Mark Thatcher is not someone who's sensitivities I would usually seek to protect, Carol Thatcher does not deserve this kind of persecution by her fellow Brits at a time of grief. Most of those celebrating weren't even alive in the 80s. Most of them didn't indulge this kind of vitriol for Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden of Gaddafi - all of whom had so many heinous crimes to answer for.
But even for those that wish her ill, you could say she had paid her debt. As Germaine Greer pointed out (at the end of this clip), she enjoyed no plush non-exec jobs on boards and was bound for the humiliating speaker circuit until her health prevented her even from that. Unlike the comfortable pasture years most elder statespeople serve after their time in power, she was for the last 15 years reduced to a mere miserable pensioner, a decade of it widowed, with ever creeping dementia. Anyone wishing her ill has already had their wish satiated I feel. Now is the time to reflect on her legacy and it's lessons; celebrate her strengths, consider her weaknesses and regret her mistakes but most of all lament the passing of the extraordinary in an era of really quite ordinary leadership.