Time, like an ever-rolling stream

It is, as eagle-eyed readers of my previous missive will have noted, New Years Eve. Hurrah!

A cursory glance at the TV schedules suggests that the way to celebrate this is with footage of Scottish people singing. Not wanting to deprive you, digital comrades, here we are:



As fortune would have it, Thatcher did die this year. And parties were had:



Predictably, the moralists came out of their coffins even as Thatcher was put into hers. Isn't it wrong to celebrate death, they urged. The religious left, to which your host finds himself attached by creed if not by the details of politics, were especially tiresome on this score. Doesn't all death diminish us, they asked. Shouldn't we refrain from politicising the passing of one of our fellow human beings? A funeral is no time for protests, let alone celebrations. They stood, pious and sombre, as the establishment roared.

What these people failed to recognise was that this was never just a funeral for the frail old woman who succumbed to a stroke this year. It was always from the word go a political event. From the word go this death was narrated by Thatcher's political heirs: the State funeral (the first for a British premier since Churchill), the nostalgia, the silencing of dissent, all invoked Thatcher in death in support of austerity in the present. Like one of the undead, she exercised power beyond the grave, digging a subtle knife into those suffering under policies of which she was the remote architect. Ironically, it was her supporters in life who would not allow her to rest in peace, for she was needed in death.

All of this was entirely foreseeable, and was pre-empted by the party-goers. "No," they said, "we will not allow this story about the Thatcher years to pass unchallenged. We will not celebrate what she represents, we will celebrate the opposite of that". And celebrate they did, a joyful collective refusal to be bundled into State-orchestrated grief. And however much Owen Jones may ultimately be right that the ultimate prize is the death of Thatcherism, not of Thatcher, will all need a party from time to time.

There is a politics to remembering the dead. That was clear in the case of the other great political departure of 2013, as Nelson Mandela's one time foes raced one another aboard the mourning bandwagon. In death, the radical Mandela died absolutely; an ideologically cleansed global statesman took his place.

Next year, marks the centenary of World War I. We will be invited to remember, to misremember, or somehow recall not world leaders, but millions of conscripts, slaughtered in the cause of national boundaries. The question will be whether we are content to see them called into a horrid afterlife by politicians intent on bolstering national unity in the face of austerity, and on justifying present-day wars, or whether we can wrestle back the friends, husbands, daughters, girlfriends, lovers, sons, the millions upon millions of ordinary, wonderful, largely non-heroic, flawed, beautiful, wasted, human beings, and allow them, finally, to rest in peace. There is no glory to be had.