While josephmuscat.com was busy re-presenting GonziPN’s Budget, which, you might not be astounded to learn, was adopted unanimously by the House, thereby sparing Mr Speaker the hassle of having to reach for his, no doubt, well-thumbed copy of Erskine May, the Iron Lady was busy dying.

The Nationalist Party are on a bit of a double whammy with the Budget, when you think about it. If all goes well, as it is hoped it will, Muscat will get the credit, if not, well, it was the PN’s Budget, after all. We’re already getting quite a few doses of ‘don’t blame us, look what the PN left behind’, which, to be honest, is par for the course whenever there is a change in government.

If all goes well, Joseph Muscat will get the credit, if not, well, it was the PN’s Budget

Not that this will save Minister Mizzi (Konrad of that ilk)’s skin when his shiny new power station doesn’t come on stream as promised – he was so bullish about it pre-poll that his goose will be well and truly cooked if the clock ticks over and he doesn’t plug in.

Freedom of expression being what it is in developed democracies, while there was quite a bit of tut-tutting at the celebrations attendant on Margaret Thatcher’s passing, no-one was really exercised about the joy being expressed. The BBC even reported on it quite extensively. Can you imagine that happening here?

When Dom Mintoff passed away, there wasn’t any dancing in the streets but, at the same time, the reportage painted him in an aura of general adulation and fondness that certainly did not reflect reality.

This sort of tolerance is not one that is given much currency up this neck of the woods. Josephmuscat.com preached harmony, sweetness and light before the elections but, now that push has given way to shove, we’ve not seen all that much of it.

The President’s Speech at the opening of Parliament, with its gloating and its smugness, gave quite a clear indication of the extent to which the promises would be fulfilled.

Why anyone should have been surprised is unclear.

We can expect more of the same when the tomfoolery with the Constitution of the Second Republic starts to be discussed: the general trend of the Lil’Elves and Peculiar Pundits’ comments when the point is made that consensus should be the watchword is: “you lost the elections, you were whipped, now slink off and be quiet, let the people rule”.

But that’s quite a few months into the future, so let’s get back to the Iron Lady.

Precisely how a number of the young elements prancing around celebrating Thatcher’s death justified themselves, given that they weren’t even born when she was in power, is not entirely clear but prance and whoop they did, with gusto.

The most inane comment I heard was by Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein rehab, who blasted Thatcher’s memory because she let the hunger strikers die. This is rich; people who many see as terrorists go on hunger strike and Thatcher is blamed for “letting them die”. How, exactly, she was culpable for these people choosing to starve themselves was not explained by Adams, who chose to adopt the logic of your average idiot.

Similarly, union bosses whose intransigence and hunger for power led them into direct conflict with Thatcher managed to blame her for everything that was wrong with their constituencies. Britain’s manufacturing base was eroded, indeed partly because of Thatcher’s policies, but mainly because it became, quite simply, too expensive to manufacture there – a direct linear consequence of the spiralling cost of wages, brought about, you guessed it, by the very same union bosses now pouring spite over her. Do you detect a common theme here? People who carry as much blame as – if not more than – Thatcher, blame her in order to divert attention from the way they mishandled and misrepresented their members and comrades.

She was no saint, obviously, but she was a staunch believer in the power of the individual over the Nanny State, eschewing Government having its finger in every pie in favour of liberalisation and privatisation, policies which drew the scorn of union men all over the place, precisely because their bloated fiefdoms were dismantled thereby.

Socialism, especially of the sort practised in Britain in the pre-Thatcher era, involved government being the be-all and end-all of every endeavour. Private enterprise existed but, at every turn, it was shackled by having to depend on the State for essential services and to be allowed to trade. To be sure, the pendulum has swung quite far in the other direction, with predictable results, but the choice between self-reliance and dependence on Big Brother was never going to be a difficult one for me to make, speaking for myself.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20