I was up in Mansfield on Thursday, interviewing retired miners for a film on the good old days of 1985, UDM v NUM and so on. The miners who stayed with the NUM in Nottinghamshire were, as you might guess, very militant indeed and very left wing. They still are. I asked one of them, off camera, what he thought of the whole Thatcher funeral business – there can’t be a group of people in Britain who more painfully copped her wrath, regardless of whether you think the strike was right or wrong. ‘I won’t be wearing a black tie,’ he admitted, ‘but it’s wrong, isn’t it, to revel in the death of a human being? You shouldn’t do that.’
I think that’s probably the general view from most of the people who really did have it bad under Thatcher – ie, the northern working class. It’s not them organising street parties; it’s our old friends in the south east, the liberal middle class metro twats who are, I think, responsible for almost everything bad in the country right now. Like that witless cow of a drama teacher from Worthing who is behind the anti-Thatcher Facebook campaign. How I hate these people. They’re not left wing, they’re stunted adolescents.
But nonetheless, the Daily Mail’s fury is absurd. There are only a few thousand of these people; why get so worked up? And why use it as another stick to beat the BBC? Of course it should play that fatuous tune – and, having done so, then examine if the charts are worth bothering with any more. 30,000 sales for a number one suggests to me that the charts are meaningless.
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