Why on earth would we want to put up a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square? That’s the question that a number of politicians are asking after the possibility arose once again at the weekend. ‘Steady on,’ said Nicola Sturgeon. Labour’s Chris Bryant was (unsurprisingly, perhaps) rather more verbose. ‘What Mrs Thatcher did to communities like the Rhondda deserves recognition in the annals of callousness; not another statue.’ Down with the Tory fool behind the suggestion who just cannot stop reminiscing about the 1980s.
Except the suggestion came not from a Conservative but a Liberal Democrat MP. Jo Swinson wrote a piece in the Mail on Sunday in which she describes witnessing the very policies that Bryant is so angry about:
‘I grew up in the West of Scotland during the 1980s. Local steelmaking and coal mining industries were hit hard by Thatcher’s policies.
‘Her disastrous decision to use Scotland as a guinea pig for the implementation of the poll tax is firmly lodged in my memory, along with the protests it generated.’
So why, after using the very argument that opponents of a Thatcher statue make, does Swinson actually want one? Her point is that there are currently no statues of women at all in Parliament Square, and that adding just one, commemorating Millicent Fawcett, is hardly sufficient.
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