Always
However, there is no doubt that her words are closer to the views of most Scots than are those of Lord Forsyth, who delivered the main address at Saturday’s dinner. And no matter how often the former Scottish Secretary says it, his declaration that Scotland and Britain desperately needed the Thatcher revolution will continue to fall on deaf ears north of the Tweed.
This undeniably, and pathetically, perverse judgement seeks to suggest that Margaret Thatcher somehow sought out this hapless nation for cruel and unnatural punishment. And this is where the poll tax nonsense comes in, with the myth perpetuated — and repeated again by Margaret Curran at the weekend — that Prime Minister Thatcher used Scotland as a “guinea pig” for the hated community charge.
The truth is that it was Scots — albeit Scots Tories — who begged for its early introduction to head off a crippling rates revaluation.
Forsyth’s was an epic, if overlong, tribute to the Iron Lady and, echoing much of what my colleague Simon Heffer said in this newspaper last week, he insisted that only those who had lived — ‘endured’ would have been a better word — through the desperate last years of Callaghan’s Labour government could fully appreciate what a difference the Thatcher victory in 1979 set in train.
Most of all it was her defeat of overweening and omnipotent trade unions that made Britain and Scotland a better place. And when all is said and done, the absolute proof of that particular pudding is that hardly a single comma of Maggie’s union reforms have been altered by eighteen years of Labour rule. And nowhere do I hear, either from Labour or from their social democratic allies in the SNP, even the tiniest whisper that the unions will ever again be granted the powers they once held but which they so thoroughly and disgracefully abused.
I am not sure if Scotland will ever grow up enough to accept that it needed Maggie as much as did the rest of Britain; there will still be the Margaret Currans and my taxi driver friends, havering about how she killed ‘our’ shipyards and steel mills.
As with everything, it depends on the spin.