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FEATURESLADY THATCHER AND THE END OF HISTORYJOE HENTHORN RELFECTS ON THE SPEECHES THE IRON LADY GAVE IN LANCASTERmargaret thatcher’s coffinpasses through ludgatecircus towards st. paul’sPhoto by Duncan RimmerThatcher’s dead! And it’s almost impossible to sayanything that hasn’t already been said about it.Every aspect of her life and death has beenanalysed by the media over the course of the lastfew weeks, down to the tiniest detail (you haveto feel for us student journalists, unable to pressthe pause button on current affairs during theholidays). Though I soon got to wondering; didMrs. Thatcher ever come and visit Lancaster University?If so, did she like it? Did she have a flickthrough SCAN, and would she rather be in Countyor Cartmel? And most importantly, would she arguefor or against the introduction of a multi-nationalsandwich chain opposite Bowland Bar (actually,the answer to that one is fairly obvious)?Anyway, I did a bit of digging, and found thetranscripts of some speeches she made on twoof the more notable occasions that she visitedLancaster. They are two utterly innocuousfootnotes in the history of her life, perhaps mostnotable for matters meteorological (‘the sun wasshining on this particular part of the British Isles’when she came to visit, according to the BBC)than for any obvious political reason. But theyare a useful way in to some more recent debatesthat have been raging across our campus - andthe country more generally – about the value ofan education in the arts.The content of her speeches gotme thinking of Michael Gove’s newnational curriculum for History. It’s a brilliantlyterrible cocktail of dead-end facts and nationalismthat borders on racism, but perhaps the mostimportant thing about it is that it situates Thatcheras the ‘End of History’, the last figure in a hugelist of ‘Great English Heroes!’ to be ‘learned byheart’. After all, what’s the point in History afterThatcher? We all know how the story pans out– Maggie and Regan high-five each other, shesmashes down the Berlin Wall with nothing buther handbag, and capitalism goes on to solve allof the world’s problems. Or at least, that’s whatMichael Gove would like you to think. And it’sdangerous, because teaching like that is nothingshort of indoctrination. Thatcher becomes the Endof History, and people don’t complain.Thatcher, on the other hand, would disagree. Or,at least the February 1970 version of her would.That’s when she came to this very campus andgave a speech to the inventively-titles ‘LancasterUniversity Conservative Political Centre Committee’.She was speaking in opposition to Labour’srecently introduced Education Act, which she didnot believe could ‘provide education which wassuitable to the age, aptitude and ability of thechild’. It’s an interesting statement, since it’s thesame criticism a lot on the left are now making ofGove’s policy, which wants to teach kids as youngas five about the notion of ‘the state’. She continues:‘the objective of education is not merely aneconomic objective but its main objective mustbe towards a greater responsibility and towardsa higher quality of life both individually and as acommunity’. Education is not for purely economicends, but for a higher communal quality of life?!This Thatcher seems unrecognisable from the onewho didn’t believe in something called society.She seems, actually, kind of alright.When she came back oop north in 1974 though,as part of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions’ series atLancaster and Morecambe College, her ideas hadchanged. ‘There are too many youngsters at universityreading sociology or politics which peopledon’t think will be the most interesting or usefuleducation for them in later life’, she told anaudience that probably had its fair share of politicsstudents, ‘and perhaps too few people doingsome of the practical skills which would in facthelp more than those theoretical subjects’. Ah,History, politics, sociology, the ‘theoreticalsubjects’... they’re the stuff of Gove’s (andThatcher post-1974) nightmares. Thatcher’ssolution, when she was in office, was to simply ignorethem, marginalising their influence in classrooms.Gove’s novel approach seems to be to borepotential history students into oblivion.History and subjects like it are all essentialdisciplines for anyone who believes in theimportance of thinking critically moregenerally. And the thing is, when the next lot ofUniversity cuts come, these subjects will probablybe the ones to suffer. Because for Thatcher-influencedmanagers the value of an academic subjectis equal to its ability to make huge amountsof profit, rather than its ability to create, inThatcher’s words,’a higher quality of life bothindividually and as a community’.[The two speeches mentioned in this article are both available on‘Margaret Thatcher: Complete Public Statements 1945-1990’, a CDheld in the library – A Floor, Purple Zone, 43/0928]