Lost in Translation

Celebrate her death? No. Though as Glenn Greenwald put it:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn’t change simply because they die. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history.

A critical overview of her policies is more constructive than dancing. Ken Livingstone:

She created today’s housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefit rather than register them as unemployed because the Britain she inherited was broadly full employment. She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed, and the benefits bill, the legacy of that, we are struggling with today. In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong.

Even better, Simon Schama:

For the doctrine that market capitalism, cut free from the sentimentally invented, morally enervating, fiscally crippling obligations of state-run social institutions, whether in education or health, can be the elixir of high-flying growth, sleekly self-regulating, managerially energetic, and perpetually dynamic, seems, in the face of our flatlining economy, a dark, sick joke. The sclerotic old system which Margaret Thatcher dispatched has been, in the end, replaced by an equally inert and complacent new one. So perhaps the best tribute that could be paid to the spirit of her life in politics (if not the letter of its law) would be if someone, somewhere, could come along in British public life – hell, in Europe – with the Thatcherian gumption to say, again, but this time to the unswerving disciples: this does not work, this will not stand. You have had your time; you have had your chance. Now be off with you.

POTHOLES WINDOWS TO THE PAST
Resurfacing impedes archaeological discoveries
Spurred by the recent find of Richard III in a car park, councils across Britain have been easing off the repairing of potholes in the hope of uncovering illustrious bodies without going to the expense of digging for them. “It’s win-win for taxpayers,” said Elliot the Unready of East Sussex. “Anybody we find will bring tourists flocking. Meanwhile we save money to invest in better things, such as the arts.”

Although all monarchs are apparently accounted for except for Edward V, whose remains are believed to have been accidentally used as snuff by George IV during his regency, there is “a veritable treasure trove of minor royals and lost celebrities” lying just beneath the surface.

Refilling of this moderate-sized pothole in London was halted after the discovery of Lord Trafalgar Square in a compromising position

Leek morgue