Falmouth Packet: Packet Skipper

So the great/terrible (delete depending on your partisan view) Iron Lady was laid to rest on Wednesday.

Whatever else you think about Margaret Thatcher, she certainly made an impact, and will be perhaps remembered best for the fact she did not really care what many people thought. She believed in what she believed in and saw things through, rightly or wrongly.

In an age of media savy politicians, this seems like a refreshing stance.

However as with many things in life, it is not always what you do, and sometimes how you do it that matters, and the nation’s first woman Prime Minsiter will certainly not be remembered for her soft human side.

No-one can ignore the devastation wrought on certain sections of society, and neither can we dispel the fact that she did turn around a nation that at times seemed like a poster child for industrial strife.

The fact that the society that followed, particularly the greed is good and bankers take all frenzy, now seems to be as much a busted flush as the one she ‘saved us’ from, will no doubt be written about by greater minds than mine. However what does grate is the political capital both sides of the fence are desperate to make out of her death.

One side screams at the other over their response to her death, with both playing to their home crowds in a shallow attempt to dress themselves as her true heirs, or those best placed to ‘roll back’ her policies.

Regardless of what you think of Maggie, the fact that her life’s last act will be to delve deep and make us pay, for a grand funeral with all the fanfare and trimmings seems a bit rich. Are funerals not meant to be a private-‘ised’ affair.

Now we are still in the economic dog house, and services are being slashed to the bone as taxpayers’ cash is syphoned off to corporate unelected bodies, so this decision does strike me as strange. No one begrudges the lady a noble send off, but £10million?

So here is a list of what £10million buys. Make your own mind up:

  • 322 nurses
  • 272 secondary school teachers
  • 320 fire officers
  • 269 paramedics
  • 44 libraries
  • 1,199 students' annual tuition fees
  • ten days of arts spending
  • two years of UK foreign aid to Iraq
  • two and a half Leveson Inquiries
  • two weeks of the BBC World Service
  • 152 MPs' basic salaries
  • 60 per cent of a Trident missile, or
  • 6,079 duck houses for MPs claiming on expenses

Oh, and those scourges of the wasted pound, the Taxpayers' Alliance have been strangly silent on this use of taxpayers money, maybe they are on their Easter holidays