The Iron Midden

Mad Maggie Thatcher. Well, the old bat has got dementia. From Iron Maiden to Iron Midden.

There was an apolgists' piece in the Glasgow Herald today berating folk for taking any pleasure out of the Thatcher's condition. The thrust of the article was that by taking pleasure in the condition of one person suffering from dementia, then we take pleasure in the suffering of all old people.

What a load of bollocks. Thatcher is not any old person. Thatcher deserves no sympathy and she will get little sympathy from the Scots.

She imposed her twisted, narrow, little-Englander lunatic fringe policies on the UK and, in an act of calculated political spite, used Scotland as the test-bed for the most extreme of those policies - the Poll Tax. It seems incredible now. The rich man in his castle with squillions in the bank will pay the same tax as the trainee nurse in a bedsit living just above the poverty line.

She cut the link between earnings and pensions. She cut the link between earnings and unemployment benefit. She slashed public expenditure, decimating the health service and education.

She decimated the social cohesion which the survivors from the Second World War were promised was their reward and which every government since the war had strived to a greater or lesser degree to deliver.

She created a party in her own image and unimaginably boorish and brutish political thugs like Norman Tebbit emerged with ugly Anglo-centric prejudices oozing from every putrid pore.

Take pleasure in her condition. No, not us. It's too bloody easy for her. She might forget. We can't.