Our children recently went to the stage version of Billy Elliot and, like most, loved it. I am sure it is an inspiring tale about aspiration, disadvantage and dancing. But the politics…. The miners, striking for a year in 1984–85, sing ‘Solidarity solidarity/ Solidarity forever’ while their police antagonists sing: ‘Keep it up till Christmas, lads,/ It means a lot to us/ We send our kids to private school. On a private bus.’ Were there really many rank-and-file policemen at that time who could afford to send their children to private school, even with the overtime? And where was the solidarity in a strike which was imposed on members of the union without a ballot? The careers of people like Elton John, who did the music, Stephen Daldry, who directed, and Lee Hall, who wrote those lyrics, have benefited enormously from the prosperity ushered in by the defeat of Arthur Scargill and other union bosses. The audiences jeer as a 20ft puppet representing Mrs Thatcher flies above the stage while the chorus sings ‘Merry Xmas Maggie Thatcher/ We all celebrate today/ ’Cos it’s one day closer to your death’. Margaret Thatcher will be 80 next month. I know we’ve had 25 years of licensed hatred of her, but the nastiness of it still shocks. The chorus also sings: ‘O my darling, O my darling/ O my darling Heseltine/ You’re a tosser you’re a w—–er/ And you’re just a Tory swine’. Comfort, after all, for the more unforgiving Thatcherites.
The man the BBC called the ‘hugely respected’ Muslim leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, hero of Ken Livingstone, has just clarified his position on suicide bombers in Palestine and Iraq. He denies that suicide bombing is ‘a legitimate right’, because ‘a right is something that can be relinquished’. It is much more. ‘It is a duty,’ he told a conference in Egypt.
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