Baroness Thatcher's funeral went without hitch last week and it was a suitably fitting tribute to a great leader. The spontaneous applause as the hearse drove past the crowds on its way to St Paul's cathedral was particularly moving because applause is not usually associated with a funeral. I have a feeling Margaret Thatcher would have approved.
Happily the lefties seem to have stayed away, perhaps because they spent their welfare money on booze and couldn't afford a return fare to London but probably because they got the message that Thatcher's supporters far outnumber her detractors, many of them uncouth louts who were snotty nosed kids during her term of office.
The reason Margaret Thatcher was loathed by so many in the UK is that she put an end to the something for nothing culture that had been cultivated under Labour. She also had the guts to take on the trade unions. This was portrayed by the left wing press as an attack on the working man but it was nothing of the sort. It was simply a wake up call that if the UK carried on the way it did under a Labour government of the 1970's there would be no future at all for anybody. As I mentioned in last week's column the parallels between South Africa in 2013 and the UK in the late 1970's are uncanny.
The Labour party in the UK was (prior to Tony Blair) the party of the working man. The funding came from unions and the leaders of the trade unions were powerful political figures. Even after years of being screwed over by his own party's empty election promises a dyed in the wool Labour supporter would no more think of voting Conservative than an ANC supporter would vote DA.
The Conservative party was seen as the party of the "toffs" or upper classes but in reality its main support came from the expanding middle class who were enjoying some prosperity after the war. The Conservative party (or Tories) were friendly towards business while the Labour party clung to some nonsensical notion that all business owners were exploiters of the poor and should be taxed as much as possible. Any attempt to explain to them that wealth and jobs are generated by those who are prepared to risk capital by starting new business ventures fell on deaf ears.