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Lawmakers Debate Thatcher Legacy Parliament Debates Thatcher Legacy, as Vitriol Flows Online and in Streets
(about 7 hours later)
LONDON — As divided Britons sought to define Margaret Thatcher’s contentious and transformative legacy, Prime Minister David Cameron lauded her on Wednesday as a woman who had broken through Britain’s glass ceiling from her beginnings as the daughter of a greengrocer to make Britain “great again.” LONDON — If Margaret Thatcher stirred deep divisions in her political life, death changed almost nothing.
Mr. Cameron was speaking at the start of what was likely to be a protracted debate in Parliament to commemorate Mrs. Thatcher, who died on Monday at the age of 87 and is widely seen as one of the most abrasive and influential figures of modern British history. For three days since she died in a London hotel suite at the age of 87, an outpouring of sympathy, respect and reverence from those who have hailed Mrs. Thatcher as Britain’s greatest peacetime prime minister has been accompanied by a parallel, and deeply antagonistic, critique.
As much as the verbal tribute, the debate reflected the long reach of her radical policies, which reshaped Britain in the 1980s. In Parliament, even her ideological adversaries acknowledged her stature on Wednesday despite the fact that her free-market policies on labor unions, taxation and the economy divided the land and provoked strikes and riots. Her death has been received in many quarters with a vituperation that was notably absent in the United States with the passing of former President Ronald Reagan, her ideological counterpart and cold-war wingman, and much of that criticism has played out on Britain’s streets. “Death parties” have been held in cities including London, Belfast and Glasgow, with banners reading “Rejoice, Rejoice,” graffiti declaring “Rot in Hell, Maggie” and celebrants “dancing on the grave” of the former prime minister.
At the same time, her staunchest supporters, like Mr. Cameron, acknowledged that her role as a “conviction politician” meant that “her political story was a perpetual battle” in the country, within Parliament and sometimes within her own cabinet. Nor has the vitriol been confined to the streets. An arch-advocate of modernizing Britain, Mrs. Thatcher has effectively been put into the stocks of the Internet age, with a blizzard of hostile Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, blogs on leftist Web sites and comments on online newspaper articles about her death.
The measure of her legacy, he said, is that “so many of the principles that Lady Thatcher fought for are now part of the accepted political landscape in our country.” A Facebook campaign was under way to drive the street protesters’ anthem, “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” to No. 1 in Britain’s popular music charts.
Mr. Cameron pointed out that she was Britain’s first female prime minister and that her 11-year tenure, from 1979 to 1990, was the longest among British prime ministers in over 150 years. A more measured debate took place Wednesday in a special session of Parliament, in remembrances that went on for seven hours and rehearsed, mostly with a respectful forbearance, the embittered political arguments of the 1980s. While Prime Minister David Cameron, a fellow Conservative, described Mrs. Thatcher as “a prime minister who defined her age,” her harsher detractors depicted her as a relentless — many said heartless — destroyer of social cohesion, with policies that devastated state-owned industries and celebrated the pursuit of personal wealth as a civic virtue.
“They say, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man,’ ” Mr. Cameron said. “Well, in 1979, came the hour and came the lady. She made the political weather, she made history, and — let this be her epitaph — she made our country great again.” The disputes extended to the government’s elaborate plans for Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral next Wednesday. The Cameron government has decreed that it will be a state funeral in all but name, partly in deference to Mrs. Thatcher’s own insistence on “not making too much fuss” about her passing — and on not wasting unnecessary money on embellishments like a Royal Air Force flypast.
“At a time when it was difficult for a woman to enter Parliament, almost inconceivable that one could lead the Conservative Party, and by her own reckoning virtually impossible that a woman could become prime minister, she did all three,” he said. The funeral will be attended by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, who have attended no other former prime minister’s funeral since Sir Winston Churchill’s in 1965, which was designated as a state funeral in deference to his leadership in World War II. But despite the careful calibration, and the government’s description of the arrangements as being modeled on those for the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, and for the Queen Mother in 2002, there has been intense public and political discussion about the plans.
Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition, recalled Mrs. Thatcher’s attacks on the mining industry at home and, abroad, her condemnation of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as a “terrorist” organization. Critics have questioned whether the government should shoulder the estimated $15 million cost, whether Mrs. Thatcher deserves a horse-drawn gun carriage and gold-braided cavalrymen to escort her through London’s streets, and whether history is mocked by having her flag-draped coffin laid before the altar in St. Paul’s Cathedral — reprising honors for historic heroes like Adm. Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Churchill.
Mrs. Thatcher’s critics accuse her of being on the wrong side of history in South Africa, seeming to support the apartheid government in its bloody confrontation with protesters in the 1980s and opposing economic sanctions meant to weaken white rule. But some in South Africa say she contributed to Mr. Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 after 27 years of incarceration. Some critics suggested, satirically — and abusively, in the view of government officials organizing the event — that the funeral should be privatized, with the government seeking a profit, along the lines of Mrs. Thatcher’s sell-off of a range of loss-making, government-run businesses.
“She had a much better grasp of the complexities and geostrategic realities of South Africa than many of her contemporaries,” F.W. de Klerk, the country’s last white president, said in a statement issued in South Africa. Government officials brushed off the criticisms, saying the issue of greatest concern for the funeral was security, along the two-mile route of the cortege and at the cathedral, where there will be an invitation-only gathering of 2,000 mourners. Officials at Scotland Yard and MI5, the domestic security agency, said their concern focused on jihadist groups that have made Britain a target for recurrent terrorist plots, and on unreconciled offshoots of the Irish Republican Army, which backed a huge bombing attack in 1984 that was aimed at killing Mrs. Thatcher while she was attending the Conservatives’ annual conference at the seacoast resort of Brighton.
Mr. Miliband, seeking to strike a balance between offering respect and maintaining ideological distance, told Parliament that while Mrs. Thatcher was a “unique and towering figure,” she “made the wrong judgment about Nelson Mandela and sanctions in South Africa.” These debates, played out courteously in Parliament and the news media, contrasted sharply with the unbridled anger on the streets and the Internet. Some of the protests occurred in areas that took the hardest hits from Mrs. Thatcher’s drive to pare back the frontiers of the state, including coal-mining districts, mainly in the Midlands and the north, where hundreds of thousands lost their jobs from the Thatcher government’s decision to close down heavily subsidized mines that produced high-priced coal that found no buyers.
“I disagreed with much of what she did,” Mr. Miliband said, “but I respect what her death means for many, many people who admired her and I honor her personal achievements.” Dave Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, told one protest marking Mrs. Thatcher’s death: “It’s a great day. She did more damage to us than Hitler did.” Looking forward to a labor union gathering in the summer, he said it would be a jamboree to note the passing of the miners’ greatest enemy.
He went on: “it would be dishonest and not in keeping with the principles Margaret Thatcher stood for, even on this day, not to be open about the strong opinions and deep divisions there were and are.” “We will have a hell of a time, we will have comedians and bands and we are going to enjoy ourselves,” he said. “There will be a lot of men wanting to have a drink and celebrate.”
The parliamentary session was unusual in two senses — both the upper House of Lords and the lower House of Commons had been recalled from recess and the time set aside for tributes was more than seven hours, compared with the 63 minutes devoted to another former prime minister, Edward Heath, after his death in 2005. The Daily Telegraph, a staunchly Conservative newspaper that ran a hagiographic obituary of the former prime minister calling her “the outstanding peacetime leader of the 20th-century,” was forced to shut down all its comments sections on Web-posted articles about her death because of what the paper’s editor described as the “abuse” that was pouring in.
Mr. Cameron, like many Conservatives, casts himself as a political heir to Mrs. Thatcher, the Iron Lady whose ascendancy ended when the same party that is now praising her pushed her from office, to be replaced by John Major. One Web site, calling itself Twitchy, offered glimpses of the purged comments. “My mum is phoning all her pals and away to get champagne already hahaha,” was among the posts. Another said: “Goodbye Maggie, and good riddance. Along with Thatcher, Reagan destroyed the safety net and the social contract in the West.”
The Thatcher era is generally recalled as a time when a capitalist revolution crushed labor unions, decimated staid industries that had once formed the nation’s economic base, and inaugurated a period of robust economic growth that sanctified a generation’s acquisitiveness. Another read: “party time!!!!!! Thatcher’s dead!! The witch has snuffed it.” Still another, apparently posted by an American, declared: “Seeing people in the UK reacting to Margaret Thatcher’s death makes me jealous Cheney hasn’t died yet.”
The parliamentary debate on Wednesday came a week before Mrs. Thatcher’s ceremonial funeral, to be held under tight security precautions in central London. It presented a particular challenge to Mr. Miliband, because some of his followers believe that more than any other postwar leader, Mrs. Thatcher caused distress and hardship for hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Britons as she broke the power of once-mighty mining, print and other unions. Geri Halliwell, a member of the Spice Girls singing group that had a sweeping success on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1990s, bucked the trend with a Twitter message that saluted Mrs. Thatcher as “our first lady of girl power ... a green grocer’s daughter who taught me anything is possible.” But after a rush of admonishing Twitter posts, including one from a woman who rebuked the singer by saying that “Margaret Thatcher did not possess an ounce of ‘girl power’. Legendary and divisive she was, feminist she was not,” Ms. Halliwell staged an abject retreat. Deleting her tweet, she wrote a new one apologizing. “I’m sorry if I offended u,” she told her followers.
Such are the passions stirred by her legacy that some opposition lawmakers said they would boycott the session. It was left to Wednesday’s twin debates in the two houses of Parliament to convey a more moderated sense of the place in history that Mrs. Thatcher may eventually earn.
John Healey, a former government minister from the Labour party, said Mr. Cameron had sought to use Parliament for his own political purposes. “He’s wrong to recall Parliament, and wrong to hijack it in this way,” he said. “I will play no part and I will stay away.” Mr. Cameron set the tone for the Conservatives, saying, “She made the political weather, she made history, and — let this be her epitaph — she made our country great again.”
Some lawmakers have also challenged the cost and appropriateness of a funeral similar in pomp and solemnity to those of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, and the Queen Mother in 2005. Her body will be borne on a gun carriage to St. Paul’s Cathedral for the service, to be attended by Queen Elizabeth II, among many others. Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, which saw Mrs. Thatcher as a contemptible figure during her years in power, sought to find a middle ground. “Whatever your view of her, Margaret Thatcher was a unique, towering figure,” he said.
British news reports said there was speculation that guests would include Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, and Nancy Reagan, the former American first lady. Given her disputed legacy, security arrangements are expected to be similar to those for the 2012 London Olympics, the news reports said. About 700 military personnel will be part of the occasion. Others, like a Labour militant from the 1980s, Michael Meacher, were less generous, accusing the former prime minister of having pursued a “scorched earth policy” to subdue opponents. But the jarring moments were offset by a wealth of affectionate anecdotes about a leader who treated all who dealt with her with the same withering impatience.
Mark Thatcher, Mrs. Thatcher’s son, said in a statement outside her London home on Wednesday that her family was “enormously proud and grateful” that the queen would attend. “And I know my mother would be greatly honored as well as humbled by her presence,” he said. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a senior Thatcher cabinet minister, brought rolling laughter with an account of a telephone conversation between an incensed Mrs. Thatcher and President Reagan in 1983 after United States troops occupied Grenada, a Caribbean island that recognized Queen Elizabeth as its head of state in 1983, without notifying Britain in advance.
Two former Labour prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, plan to attend the funeral next week, British news reports said. “When she was in full flight, Reagan put his hand over the receiver, so she couldn’t hear, turned to his aides and said, ‘Gee, isn’t she marvelous?’ “ Sir Malcolm recalled.
Partisan sniping, though, underscored the depth of division about her legacy. The Conservative foreign secretary, William Hague, told BBC television that the biggest problem for the British left was that “they could never beat her” at the ballot box in her three terms in office.

John F. Burns reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

And some figures in the Church of England questioned whether the tone of the funeral service would match the church’s opposition to some of Mrs. Thatcher’s policies.
Giles Fraser, a former senior cleric at St. Paul’s Cathedral, said the Anglican Church was often the “unofficial opposition” to Mrs. Thatcher.
“Every day in that cathedral, the choir will sing about Jesus, that he brought down the mighty from their thrones then lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty,” he said in a radio interview. “They are very strong words. They are not words that you would necessarily associate with Mrs. Thatcher. This is a problem.”

John F. Burns reported from London and Alan Cowell from Paris.