Blair plans state funeral for Thatcher

The final proof that Blair is losing all touch with reality comes with the news that he intends to allow Margaret Thatcher to have a state funeral because of her "unique" contribution to British politics during the 1980s.

She made a unique contribution all right. She took unemployment to 4 million, destroyed Britain as a manufacturing base and set gay rights back with the introduction of Clause 28.

This would be the first state funeral allowed to a commoner since Winston Churchill, the man who saved Europe from the scourge of Nazism.

There has been quite widespread incomprehension at the decision.

Prof Richard Bellamy, an expert in the British constitution at Essex University, said the decision was "unusual". "The only two prime ministers that I can remember getting state funerals were Churchill and the Duke of Wellington.

"They could be seen as people who saved the country in times of dire need... It is hard to think of the Falklands as being in that category.

"The claim would be that she fundamentally altered the character of the British state, but we could say the same about Clement Attlee. I'm pretty gobsmacked that it's being considered. One can only assume that this is yet another example of Blair being totally out of step with the population, not to say his own party.

"I guess the fact that we have had a number of big funerals lately sort of lowers the benchmark; it becomes less of a rare event."

Glasgow Labour MP Iain Davidson predicted that the revelation would not go down well within the Labour Party.

He said: "Churchill at least was a unifying force. Thatcher was almost entirely a divisive influence."

Indeed, Thatcher was famous as a politician who did not believe in consensus.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

The idea of allowing a state funeral for such a divisive figure is unheard of. State funerals are supposed to unite the nation in grief, this one would split it in rancour.

I actually find myself in agreement with Gerald Warner who argues that this is Blair's final two finger salute to a Labour Party that he has come to despise.

Yet this is a political move by Tony Blair. He has always been semi-detached from his party. Recently they have come to regard each other with reciprocal loathing. As he prepares for the international lecture circuit, this gesture would put helpful blue water between himself and the party he despises, gaining him respectability among the geopolitical chattering classes.

Peter Kilfoyle amply sums up the way many of us feel:

Like her pupil, Tony Blair, she had a totally corrosive effect on the nation whilst in the grip of the arrogance of power. Few tears were shed when her own party brought her down. Too many had suffered from her narrow and vindictive approach to what should have been the common good. When the time comes, those who loved her will mourn her. The rest of us will simply remember.

I will remember. I will remember entire streets where I grew up where not a single adult male had a job. I will remember her describing working class miners as "the enemy within." I will remember her referring to the very people she had made unemployed as "social security scroungers."

Blair is playing with fire here. No-one likes to think of acts of protest taking place at someone's funeral, but Thatcher is such a divisive figure that were a state funeral to go ahead it is impossible to imagine that people wouldn't want to have their very different memory of this appalling woman recorded.

The woman who called Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" and considered General Pinochet a close friend is not worthy of such an honour.

Blair should remember that Thatcher's most famous appalling quotation was:

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

It is fundamentally wrong that he should ask the very society that she did not believe in to honour her in this way.

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