Thatcher's Funeral

According a “ceremonial” funeral (a state funeral in all but name) to Margaret Thatcher is evidence, if evidence were needed, that the neo-liberal capitalist ideology that she forced upon Britain has now been accepted as the official ideology of the British state. The message it sends so clearly is that neo-liberal capitalism transcends politics: it is the natural order of things, the "correct" state of affairs. This is, of course, the case everywhere: institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the European Bank enforce their neo-liberal “reform” agenda as the price for financial help without question or challenge. 

In their crass state deification of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron have finally torn away the mask that maintained the pretense that the state is a democratic institution over which different interests compete. No less than marxism in the old communist countries, neo-liberal capitalism is the box outside which we are no longer permitted to think. Its official apotheosis will take place as another box containing its chief ideologue is paraded triumphantly through the capital next Wednesday, when the values of justice and fairness will, it seems, finally be buried with her.    

Nicholas Till: April 2013