A gem in the letters column of today’s Independent, responding to The Mail on Sunday’s announcement that Margaret Thatcher is likely to have a state funeral when she falls off the perch:
Thatcher’s funeral
Since, according to Margaret Thatcher, “there is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families”, I trust her individual friends and family will pay for any public funeral (Philip Hensher, 14 July).
SALLY PARROTT
DORKING
I imagine there will, in tomorrow’s edition, come some inane response arguing public recognition of Thatcher’s “immense contribution / service to this country” (excuse me?), though I don’t recall Isaac Newton or John Lennon having been honoured with a state funeral.1 Nor, come to that, do I recall being among the one-third minority of the electorate (33.364%, i.e. 43.9% of a 76% turnout in 1979, and a more modest 30.6794% in 1983) who voted for the lady.
Even that modest figure, of course, misrepresents the grim reality of representative democracy. Parliamentary elections are, as Robin Cook once so eloquently explained, won on the often last minute decisions of just a few hundred floating voters in marginal constituencies. If you do not live in such a constituency you may congratulate yourself for having gone through the motions of doing your civic duty by placing your X on a piece of paper; but, quite frankly, it will have counted for nothing.
Interestingly, though insisting that there are only “individual men and women”, she appears never to have felt uncomfortable telling us what “the people of this country think”, what “the electorate” have decided, what “the people of Great Britain believe”. Margaret, for the sake of consistency you might want to concede that there is no ‘people’, only individual persons; no ‘electorate’, only individual voters; no ‘British’, only 60 million individuals who contigently find themselves living together as citizens of these islands.
Even though, I suppose, the joyous spectacle of seeing her shovelled into the ground at last might be worth a bob or two, I can think of many more responsible ways of spending the money of the two-thirds majority of taxpaying voters who democratically declared, with a X placed elsewhere, that they did not want Thatcher. It is perhaps fitting that, in a democratic society democracy, they should be consulted?
Convert this post to PDF - Philip Sidney, Horatio Nelson, Charles Darwin, and Edmund Hillary were so honoured, however.[back]