Nostradamus and Thatcher

In the future, there will be calamities and misfortunes we cannot as yet imagine that will be blamed on the “Thatcher Legacy”. An army of revisionists is labouring away, examining the life and work of Margaret of Grantham in a bizarre reversal of the way commentators twist the writings of Michel de Nostredame to make them fit great events in history. Instead of twisting the narrative to fit history they twist history to fit their narrative. Thus they falsely prove with unerring accuracy and unshakable certainty that she is the cause all our present and future woes.

In the Thatcherdamus version of reality, she was the one who saddled all our hospitals with crippling debt. She was the one who appointed ATOS to process disability benefit claims. She was the one who appointed G4S to provide security for the London Olympics. She was the one who appointed Fred the Shred to run the Royal Bank of Scotland. She was the one who had John Prescott bulldoze thousands of council houses. She was the one who appointed Gordon Brown Chancellor of the Exchequer. That’s what they would have us believe, and much more besides.

The reality is, stuff happens. Some is good, some is bad. But the anti-Thatcher revisionists don’t acknowledge that bad things happened before Thatcher and that they were not her fault, or that good things happened after Thatcher and that she should get credit for them. They contort what actually happened to prove how for decades after she left office she could cause a Labour government with a huge majority in the House of Commons to pass legislation and make government appointments that perpetuated her legacy. Three elections in a row.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Nostradamus:

Most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus’s quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power. Nevertheless, occasional commentators have successfully used a process of free interpretation and determined ‘twisting’ of his words to predict an apparently imminent event.

Here’s how I would define Thatcherdamus:

Most rational observers maintain that the associations made between world events and Thatcher’s Legacy are largely the result of misinterpretations or misrepresentations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine connection. Nevertheless, occasional commentators have successfully used a process of free interpretation and determined ‘twisting’ of her record to attach blame to any apparently undesired outcome.

So if you’re a left-winger who’s unhappy with the mess the country is in today, and it certainly is in a mess, don’t try and distort history to fit your agenda. Look to yourself and ask yourself what you did while Labour held power under Blair and then Brown, that’s where you’ll find the blame. It isn’t the “Legacy” of someone who left office more than two decades ago, it’s Labour’s own ineptitude. But you knew that already, didn’t you? Nostradamus had predicted it.

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