So I’ve mentioned that I found the British left’s long-planned celebration on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death to be quite endearing. American liberals seem a bit more subdued - the thing they most regularly seem to snipe about her was her refusal to yield to the 1981 Irish hunger strike. The strike, in which imprisoned Irish republican insurgents lead by Bobby Sands refused to eat until they were recognized as Special Category Status political prisoners - domestic POWs, essentially - and not common criminals, ultimately failed after 10 died.

I think this is actually a little odd, given the American left’s complaint about the use of military tribunals and military imprisonment as part of the “war on terror” for acts of insurgency, especially when committed by American citizens or on American soil.

Now there are some distinctions to be noted. One is that SCS would improve the position of the strikers - whereas the use of the tribunal/Guantanamo system rather than standard civilian process is generally considered to leave internees worse off.

In fact, SCS was introduced after a previous period of arrest and imprisonment without trial and tortuous interrogations, similar to the initial state of the American WoT system. Later on, republican militants were processed by the formal justice system, with trials and convictions.

(Thatcher’s steeliness here, like her war in the Falklands and her moves to undermine Scottish political and economic autonomy, were part of an effort to finally put a brake on the trend of post-WWII decolonization before the once-mighty British Empire was reduced to a pre-1707 rump of England and Wales)

Civilianization and SCS were two different solutions to the same problem of unchecked authority, and honestly in demanding the benefits of both the strikers were really overplaying their hand. So liberals who want American civilianization (and not SCS-style formalization of extrajudicial internment, with protection against abuses) should consider that that’s exactly the position Thatcher was defending.

Two is the fact in the midst of the strike Bobby Sands had been elected as an MP (for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, a nationalist constituency) and the claim that he should have been given greater deference, having been democratically sanctified by an electoral majority.

Following this logic, though, would lead at the least to a doctrine of parliamentary immunity, and further on to a doctrine of nullification, by which local majorities would be empowered to grant exemption to or suspension of national laws. I think there’s something to be said for local nullifying forces - the Roman tribunes seem like a cool institution, and I’ve previously appreciated the historic role of elected county officials as populist nullifiers in America.

But it’s a position typically anathematized in modern American liberalism, and some of the writers knocking Thatcher for this - like Charles Pierce, a man fond of Homeric epithets who seems to have chosen the Sands thing for use with her, specifically take nullification as one of their bête noirs.

In the end I’m with Thatcher on this one because Blazing Saddles was, in fact, a farce, and allowing people to extract concessions by holding themselves hostage is fundamentally pathetic.