anyway - I was reading an month old Guardian yesterday - and was interested in this comment piece that revolved around the revelation that back in 1980 Harold Macmillan (a former old school 'one nation' Tory PM) had written Thatcher an eleven page long letter giving her advice not to go too far too fast and not be so divisive... I was on Google trying to find the original letter - I didn't find it but I did find the article I had read - and in it the writer was advising Cameron that he would do well to heed the same letter as good advice to himself - you know, being in charge of what is supposed to be a coalition Government and all...
But then I found the Daily Mail take on the letter which is basically a hymn to Thatcher - and thoroughly nauseating. Apparently according to them she single-handedly brought about a revolution that turned Britain around from the brink of disaster. Jeez. Talk about a revisionist rewriting of history. We'll just turn a blind eye to the cycles of boom and bust and recessions that kept happening as she and her minions kept dabbling with the economy... and which only ended when they had to abandon their Milton Friedman inspired plans because they weren't working, we'll ignore the mass unemployment, whole areas of the country that were laid to economic waste - and which still to this day haven't recovered. But I doubt if the Daily Mail journalists [I use the term loosely] ever travel outside of London - so they won't know about that. I'll bet the nearest a Mail journalist sees of that world is on TV in the form of dimly-remembered episodes of Brookside, and current episodes of Shameless, Coronation Street and old episodes of Rab E. Nesbitt.
I was going to have a mini-rant but this piece sums it up better than I could:
Supermac was right in 1980 and he's right today.
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