! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.
Progress
Maggie’s funeral was on the telly today while I was cooking my lunch and it occurred to me that these kids protesting about her time in power before they were born are going about it all wrong.
If they really want to make a statement they need to converge on London, pile up bags of rubbish in the street and stop everyone from working for more than 3 days a week. They could maybe spend all their benefits on junk and then take out some payday loans to pay their bills.
That’ll send a clear message to everyone how badly they yearn for a return to the golden age of pre-Thatcher socialist England.
Maggies funeral was on while I had breakfast and was still being repeated long after I went to bed.
By definition, the sort of people who would have liked to have protested are now getting on in years and are also too poor travel down to London just to turn their backs on a hearse. My mum was livid at the glorification of the “achievements” of Thatcher. She’s elderly and crippled with arthritis so she couldn’t go and protest but she did order “Ding dong the witch is dead”.
To see the Thatcher effect you need to go further back than the 70s, to the time between the first and the second world war and the Troops who came home to grinding poverty. In 1933 there were 3 million unemployed. It wasn’t until 1930 that workhouses were abolished but they were renamed Public Assistance Institutions and over 100,000 people lived in them. That was in a time when the UK population was around half of what it is now. Most city housing was sub-standard and rents were high – slums were commonplace.
As for health-care, there was the National health insurance, but this was only for workers and not for their dependents – the payments were minimal. Hospitals and doctors charged for their services and the poor could not afford treatment.
After the war it all changed. It’s usually forgotten that half of the war cabinet were Labour party ministers and that Churchill was chucked out of power after the war. People had had enough and hadn’t forgotten Chamberlain’s pre-war government, nor the poverty faced by soldiers coming back from WW1.
Attlee’s Landslide victory meant that now decent council housing would be available and affordable, health care was free and universal and National Assistance was introduced. It wasn’t perfect but it was far better than anything we’d had before.
Thatcher hated it all, so she set about trying to turn the clock back, using the profits from North Sea oil to fund the work.
A third of our manufacturing output was wiped out, not for economic reasons, but for political ideology as she set out to destroy the unions and she used the Police as her own private political enforcement agency, at a time when crime rates doubled.
Unemployment was also (at least) doubled – she changed the way the figures were counted on an almost monthly basis to hide the real figure. Local democracy was destroyed and Quangos were introduced. The gap between rich and poor was widened. Whole communities were forced back into poverty.
Banks were de-regulated and Credit controls were abolished so debts and negative equity became commonplace.
Essential industries were privatised which meant that overseas shareholders were now more important than UK residents.
Abroad she supported apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s government in Chile
And lets not forget that it was Thatcher who signed the Single European Act
So if you want to see what Thatcher wanted you have to look back a long way – if you want to see her legacy you have to look at a Britain now. No jobs, the poor and the sick actively punished, ridiculously high utility bills, and we all know the fall-out from the failure of the banking system
Five million people are on housing lists while housing benefits are subsidizing private landlords.
We’ve had three major economic collapses since the war and all came after Thatcher.
But I think what sums it up is that a wealthy old lady, with an even more wealthy family dies at the Ritz and is given £10 million publicly funded funeral with blanket TV coverage during a time of recession.
Thatcherism was a direct creation of militant, left wing, unrestrained trade unionism. Even in 1978-9 with a general election looming and a tottering labour government the trade union leaderships still went on their own merry way causing the Winter of Discontent which effectively discredited the Labour government and the post war consensus. When you have power you must exercise it responsively otherwise there is a reaction.
And Maggie Thatcher was the face of that reaction.
At the time I thought it to be truly irresponsible; even at 17 years of age I could sense the coming storm. Years later, after being exposed to revolutionary socialism at the Poly, I came to realise that it might well have actually all being part of a careful plot to bring down the old traditional conservative (small c), right wing, leadership of the labour party and replace it with those committed to more revolutionary socialism.
Indeed a careful perusal of all the leaflets they tended to circulate plus an occasional delve through the more left wing journals held in the library led me to the conclusion that secretly many of the radical left were cheering Maggie on. The worse she made it the better chance they had of persuading the poor dumb workers that a socialist revolution was actually in their best interests.
Learnt an important lesson there. Socialists are the champions of the working man – SO LONG AS HE DOES WHAT HE’S BLOODY WELL TOLD!
The very instant he starts to think for himself his former champions will drop him like he was red hot – in our society – or else send him to a Gulag in less happy societies.
Revolution I’ve come to realise just replaces one set of middle class numpties who order you around and screw up your life with a less pleasant set of middle class numpties who order you around and screw up your life. Only this lot will claim to be doing it for your own good even as they put you up against the wall.
Hi Dave
I know what you mean in a way. I used to go to a lot of left wing meetings in the 80s and many of them were like that scene in the Life of Brian in the amphitheater with the Peoples Front of Judea slagging all the other groups off. I read a lot of leaflets written by people who claimed to speak for the workers but who hadn’t done a single days work in their life.
At the end of the day though, one thing that both sides forgot was that their were real people being effected by what was happening. My beliefs come from my background – working class Thames Watermen, dockers and farm laborers who never wanted to smash the state, but who wanted somewhere to live, some food on the table and an education for their kids. It’s why most of them joined unions in the first place. There were poor but they certainly not dumb.
There is a lot of talk about the winter of discontent and how bad it was and I can’t argue with that. What I can do is put it into perspective and remember the centuries of discontent the poor had to endure before that, and the punishment handed out by Thatcher afterward. And Thatcher punished the working class as a whole and not just those in unions.
A government, should be public servants and should fear the people – not the other way around.