Commenting on the news: Laura-Jo Russell, MSc Forest and Nature Conservation and Tomas Banks, MSc Environmental Sciences, both English. Laura-Jo: ‘I watched the funeral on the BBC. Some people on street turned their back on the coffin. One strange thing was that Queen Elizabeth looked a bit too happy. She was smiling at the funeral and I was thinking: you should be sad.’ Tomas: ‘I didn’t watch the funeral but I read about it in newspapers. She’s a politician from before my generation, so I’m not touched by it directly. But I know some music from the time when she was in charge. Like a little song called "Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher". It’s about her famous legacy that she stopped the free milk at school. I also like some movies that look back upon her time. So you can say I mainly know her from popular culture.’ Laura-Jo: ‘She changed Britain immensely, and changed the world for women in Britain. She really divided the country. In the north everybody hated her. But she’s popular in the London area. She’s very conservative. The rich people really liked her but the poor didn’t. But even you didn’t really agree with her politics, you can’t deny she’s an incredible woman. I didn’t like her, but I did admire her. I think my mum would agree with me, but my nan not. My nan is a conservative, a big fan of Thatcher.’ Tomas: ‘We talked a lot about Thatcher on Facebook. There’s a lot of jokes going around. British people do make jokes about everything, everything could be for a joke, really. I think her demise means an end of an era for an earlier generation. I don’t know if the future will be any better or worse. I do know however that we need an election pretty quickly to get rid of the current government.’
Meanwhile in… England
In the news: In London the funeral of the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who died at 87, took place on April 17th. Few of the expected protests were found among the thousands of spectators.
