The Lords That Time Forgot

Earlier this week the House of Lords debated the Gay Marriage Bill, with a surprisingly (and gratifyingly) large majority in favour, though not before some of the usual suspects and others vented some very odd views, which prompted this...

As ever, click for biggitudinality.

Norman Tebbit marries his son shocker!!!

Not really. But the latest in the tedious gay marriage saga, which has seen more than half the Tory party not merely flaunting but positively reveling in its boneheaded regressive bigotry, is the return of the Chingford Skinhead to public life. Not that he ever really went away, but for some reason Dave's keenness on letting the gays get married has got his dander up, to such an extent that he made some very strange comments in an interview granted to the Big Issue:

It’s like one of my colleagues said: we’ve got to make these same sex marriages available to all. It would lift my worries about inheritance tax because maybe I’d be allowed to marry my son. Why not?

Maybe, as some have claimed, he was simply trying to be funny. Tebbit is, it is reputed, in possession of a ready wit. But if so it was spectacularly misguided. Still, it gave me the opportunity to have a go at another cartoon (click for biggitude)...

Thatcher

So Thatcher died. After hating her and everything she stood for these last thirty years I felt nothing. It was totally unlike my JFK Moment upon hearing of her resignation as Prime Minister. Then I was young, in my first job, and sat on the khazi at work reading the paper when Jane, a fiery Glaswegian, thumped on the door to the Gents shouting, “McTodd, have you heard the news? Thatcher’s GONE!” Yes, she actually said GONE in block capitals.

So that was the death of Thatcher’s career. But when it came to the Lady’s actual, physical death this week, as I say, nothing. Oh sure, I jumped with both feet into the virtual bear-pit that is the Twitter, saying some fabulously vile things about her, but those were prompted by Olympic-scale fawning and drooling by Tories and other motley rightwingers. There’s nothing cheers McTodd up more than being really offensive to rightwing arseholes (by the way, if you’re a Tory and reading this, kindly piss off, there’s a good fellow). In fact, it is my ambition to actually cause a Tory’s death through paroxysms of rage induced by reading a tweet of mine.

So Thatcher died. And the media went into overdrive. The BBC News website’s homepage resembled an English version of what Pravda would have been had the old Soviet Union clung on into the age of the internet. Brezhnev and chums must be looking up green with envy, all they had was a dusty party newspaper and one TV channel endlessly playing solemn music. The Lady herself might have found this amusingly ironic, but for the fact that she famously had no sense of humour. As for the Tory press, well, the less said…

Meanwhile, the Tory party appears to have completely taken leave of its senses, creating a veritable Thatcher Death Cult despite the fact that they knifed her in the back in 1989 in the first place, ending not just her career but in a very meaningful way, ending her life. Perhaps they’re attempting to atone for that Original Sin… And with the State Funeral That Isn’t, Cameron has clearly co-opted Thatcher’s death in the brazen hope that some of her metallic glister will reflect on him.

Which prompts me to ponder the meaning of Thatcher. In his Independent column, Steve Harris ably points out how Thatcher’s death speaks volumes about the present. For the Conservatives it’s a reminder of the seemingly ironclad certainties of the Lady, in contrast with Cameron’s apparent weakness. Hence Dave’s eagerness to use her death, even to the extent of enmeshing the monarchy in what next week will be a party political stunt on a grand scale, something the Telegraph (of all places!) columnist Peter Oborne finds deeply disturbing. For Labour it’s a chance to prove that “Ideology mattered… ideas matter in politics.” For millions of others, including me, it’s an opportunity to celebrate the death of someone who in many ways mutilated British society.

The real point to me, however, is that neither side sees Thatcher as a flesh and blood human being. Those celebrating Thatcher’s death do not celebrate the death of a frail old lady. After all, even someone as jaded as I cannot fail to be touched by images such as this:

No, the death they and I celebrate is not that of an old lady, it’s the death of the Iron Lady, the death of a symbol, an emblem of everything we hated and hate about what this country has become. Thatcher started that revolution (though Blair continued it, and which is why, even discounting the Iraq War, he is also reviled by millions). By the same token, when Tories and assorted other rightwingers eulogise and canonise Thatcher, they do not venerate the woman, the human being, they venerate a symbol of power, a symbol of ideological certainty.

The point is that both sides have turned her into an abstract symbol, both have essentially dehumanised her and, in that sense, both sides are complicit in each other’s extremes. Consequently, for Tories to condemn those celebrating Thatcher’s death is therefore both hypocritical and spectacularly unreflective in its total lack of self-awareness.

I cannot help but recall a brilliant observation by the great jazz musician George Melly of his friend Trog’s work as a caricature artist. Trog, otherwise known as Wally Fawkes (and himself a jazzman), had simplified Thatcher

…as an image, reduced [her] to a few lines …a cartoon-strip figure. On the other hand, lesser-known political figures are drawn with near-realism and frequently cross-hatched to achieve sculptural solidity, the logic being that Thatcher… [has] become [an] almost abstract creature, whereas those lesser political figures remain individuals and are depicted as such.

What was true of depicting Thatcher as a graphic figure turns out, oddly enough, to be equally true of Thatcher as a public figure.

Daddy, what did YOU do in the Class War?

Bit of a Golden Oldie this one, as I did it last year, or maybe even the year before... Anyway, be that as it may, there is a famous World War One recruiting poster called Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War? A little girl sits on her pensive father's knee asking him that very question as her brother plays with toy soldiers on the floor. The implication is clear - sign-up and kill the Hun so that one day you can look your children in their eyes and say you did the right thing! You can see the original here. Some time ago it prompted me to wonder what Nick Clegg would tell his children one day, and this bit of Photoshoppery was the result...

Peter Bone(head) MP

So at long last gay marriage is now legal, though not without the Tories showing - as if evidence were needed - that they truly are still the Nasty Party, half of them abstaining rather than sully themselves with the act  of allowing sodomites and carpet-lickers to tie the knot. One of the leading anti-gay marriage campaigners was Peter Bone MP, who memorably described gay marriage as 'completely nuts.' Scientific analysis attempts to uncover the reasons for his antipathy, with a notable lack of success apart, perhaps, from providing a modicum of amusement...

 

Hello Dicky...

So they've discovered the bones of Richard III under a car park in Leicester. Well, somebody's got to do it, I suppose... My reaction:

Goodbye Nipper...

Nipper is, of course, the little dog sat in front of the gramophone listening to His Master's Voice. News of failed company HMV's charmingly casual sacking of hundreds of its workers and their revenge via Twitter led to this venture into editorial cartooning...