Is it culture or politics that makes someone delight in someone’s death?

Posted 10 Apr 2013 by Walaa Idris


I am sure when the time comes; no Tory leader will need to advise his MPs to respond respectfully to the death of a former Labour Prime Minster or figurehead. For Ed Miliband to feel the need to urge his MPs to respond to Lady Thatcher’s death in a respectful manner is shocking. And it says more about Labour, the kind of people that follows and supports it than the great lady and her legacy.

Don’t get me wrong, the capacity to hate and wish ill on those we hate is in all of us. It’s as old as and as common a feeling as the ability to love, feel rosy and fluffy about those we admire. However, neither feeling is an issue here; the issue is the ability to exercise restraint, common human decency and appropriate self-control befitting the occasion itself. This ability is not genetic but learned, taught from an early age and perfected by practice then passed down the generations. Which makes one wonder whose responsibility is it, the society, the state or the family? My bet is on the family.

For years now, we’ve been hearing about the Tory being the nasty party. Recent actions, from holding street parties, to not respectfully lowering flags in some Labour held local authorities not to mention some of the comments on social and the regular media from prominent Labour politicians showed a nastiness from the left prehistoric in its venomousness.

No amount of discontent and dismay merits dancing on anyone’s grave. No religion, culture or any civilised society condone the tasteless celebrations of someone’s death. And no respectable group or organization should accept and allow any of it to be done in their name. It’s discourteous to everyone but mostly to our nation, to Britain. And that’s what pains me, not disliking Thatcher and her politics, but the ugliness and its vigour is embarrassing and impossible to reconcile with as a human-being.

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