Not as Simple as it Seems

Another day spent watching, thinking, and commenting online about politics because of the Thatcher Fest at Westminster. Seemed an abuse of parliamentary privilege to recall parliament during recess - the Speaker is supposed to only call them back if it is in the national interest. The summer riots of 2011 seemed a good reason. Spending a day talking about a former PM did not.

They could have had a discussion next week when parliament was sitting. Maybe, heavens above, they could have come in early on Wednesday morning, say start at 8am, so those that felt so inclined could have had their say before the funeral. Anyway, the 'debate' was largely a love-in, reflecting the political consensus that currently exists at Westminster. Only some of the later speakers on the dwindling opposition benches had much to say to challenge the idea that Thatcher had single-handedly defeated the evil trade unions, won the Falklands War, ended the Cold War and quite probably landed on the moon (I may have dozed off).

The SNP spokesmen, Angus Robertson, had been the most damning, saying Scotland would never forgive Thatcher for the Poll Tax, and Labour backbenchers Michael Meacher and Diane Abbott both used forms of words to express alternative opinions. We'd turned over to the main news when we saw on Twitter that Glenda Jackson had added an explosive contribution. The power of the internet meant I was able to watch it later, and not just the 'divide and rule' remark about Thatcher not being 'a woman on my terms' that the BBC News seemed to pick out, but the full tirade against what she saw as the evils of Thatcherism. Here's an extract:

"But the basis to Thatcherism - and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperate, desperately wrong track that Thatcherism took this country into - was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward.

What concerns me is that I'm beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis of the spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side."

Glenda Jackson MP

Anyway, the day therefore passed me by, so I went out the front door looking for a blip in the early evening. The grey evening reminded me of Bill Bryson's description of living in Britain as like 'living in tupperware', so I thought I'd take a quick picture of the greyness. Except, it wasn't uniformly grey, and turned out to be much more of an homage to the work of that photographic pioneer, Alfred Stieglitz and his Equivalents, arguably the first abstract photographic works of art.

I've discussed him before on blip when I tried to mark the 65th anniversary of his death in 2011.