The Iron Lady – my Nemesis?

Kevan Pooler ♦ February 20, 2012 ♦ Leave a comment

Philip Roth’s was Polio, or Polio did for his hero in ‘Nemesis’. Having just read it, and now reading about Sherlock Holmes’ Moriarty, brought me to thinking of my Nemesis: The Iron Lady honestly, really, nearly ‘did’ for me.

I quake at the idea of going to see “The Iron Lady”. Meryl Streep has long been my favourite actress because of her uncanny ability to convincingly impersonate.

I’m not sure I can cope with Maggie Thatcher’s face filling my whole field of vision for a second, not least for a couple of dramatic hours.

There are three elements of the Maggie Thatcher’s influence which rile me: The Enterprise Culture; her destruction of British Heavy Industry, and with it the labouring, working class; and her pseudo religiosity characterised by her creepy paraphrasing of St Francis’s Prayer for Peace.

The Enterprise Culture destroyed the Big Society which existed at the time (See other blog – Youth of Today – how the Iron Lady spoilt it for them)

I’ve lived in ‘Middle England’, in both senses, all my life, near the Car Factories of Oxford, the Cotton Mills of Lancashire, the Steel Mills of Sheffield, The Hosiery Mills of Mansfield, and the mines of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. I’ve seen the all decimated and many workers inculcated to the dependency culture.

St Francis is the Saint of the Poor. I belonged to his Order of Friars for ten years. To have ANY Conservative Millionaire bowdlerising Francis’s prayer is tantamount to blasphemy. Millionaire Denis Thatcher’s Iron puppet, Maggie, did it to cynically hoodwink the poor, and bring unthinking Christians into her safe hands. It worked. Unforgivable.

My life has been spent within a caring Society, in the midst of families working hard in near dead industries, and espousing the virtues of loving my neighbour and giving to the poor. It has been at times a desperate struggle for me.

Thank you, Maggie Moriarty.

[Category: The Youth of Today – Fifty years of them]