Thatcher: other voices
As the media is dominated by pro-Thatcher voices, here are the views of some who speak for so many of us:
Ken Loach says: “Margaret Thatcher was the most divisive and destructive Prime Minister of modern times.
Mass Unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed – this is her legacy. She was a fighter and her enemy was the British working class.
Her victories were aided by the politically corrupt leaders of the Labour Party and of many Trades Unions. It is because of policies begun by her that we are in this mess today.
Other prime ministers have followed her path, notably Tony Blair. She was the organ grinder, he was the monkey.
Remember she called Mandela a terrorist and took tea with the torturer and murderer Pinochet.
How should we honour her? Let’s privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid.
It’s what she would have wanted.”
And Ken Livingstone pointed out: “Of course she was popular, she was offering people their homes at a cut price. But she didn’t build any houses.
She created today’s housing crisis, she produced the banking crisis, she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefits rather than register them as unemployed because the Britain she inherited was broadly at full employment.
She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed and the legacy of that, the benefits bill that we are still struggling with today.
In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact she was fundamentally wrong.”
Here is just one section of Paul Routledge’s assessment in The Mirror
“She decimated our basic industries of coal and steel. Shipbuilding virtually disappeared, along with much of heavy engineering. She tried to destroy our free trade unions through repressive legislation, and damn well near succeeded.
She branded miners fighting for their jobs and communities as “the enemy within”, a foul slur on decent working people and their families for which she will never be forgiven.
She made mass unemployment respectable, and used it as a tool of government. The dole queues were “a price worth paying” under her regime – once described as “an elected dictatorship” by one of her own ministers.
She created a new underclass of jobless men, took away their status as breadwinner in the home and forced millions of women back into the workplace so that families could make ends meet. If she was a women’s champion, I am Meryl Streep.
She sold our basic utilities – gas, water, electricity and telephones – and prices soared. She flogged off the buses and railways, and fares went through the roof.
She sold off the council houses and built no new ones, so there are now more than two million families on housing waiting lists.
She enthroned the profit motive, and unleashed the spivs and speculators in the City of London. She surrendered economic policy to the mysterious dark forces of “the market”, which led UK plc into one recession after another that led to the mess where we are today.
She imposed the hated poll tax on the nation, first in Scotland where she made the Tories unelectable for more than a generation. She then thrust it down the throats of the English, prompting the worst riots in London since the disturbances of the early eighties.
She took us into war with Argentina over the FalklandsIslands , when her popularity ratings were rock bottom, to save an isolated British colony – and her own political face.
On the back of that operation, she won a cynical landslide in the “khaki election” of 1983.
Her enthusiasm for war initiated a new era of British militarism that has yet to run its course.”
Gerry Adams TD made the following statement:
“Margaret Thatcher did great hurt to the Irish and British people during her time as British Prime Minister.
“Working class communities were devastated in Britain because of her policies.
“Her role in international affairs was equally belligerent whether in support of the Chilean dictator Pinochet, her opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa; and her support for the Khmer Rouge.
“Here in Ireland her espousal of old draconian militaristic policies prolonged the war and caused great suffering. She embraced censorship, collusion and the killing of citizens by covert operations, including the targeting of solicitors like Pat Finucane, alongside more open military operations and refused to recognise the rights of citizens to vote for parties of their choice.
“Her failed efforts to criminalise the republican struggle and the political prisoners is part of her legacy.
“It should be noted that in complete contradiction of her public posturing, she authorised a back channel of communications with the Sinn Féin leadership but failed to act on the logic of this.
“Unfortunately she was faced with weak Irish governments who failed to oppose her securocrat agenda or to enlist international support in defence of citizens in the north.
“Margaret Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81.
“Her Irish policy failed miserably.”
And finally, this is what Labour Party leader Ed Miliband had to say – not managing to articulate our views on Thatcher’s record effectively.
“I send my deep condolences to Lady Thatcher’s family, in particular Mark and Carol Thatcher.
She will be remembered as a unique figure. She reshaped the politics of a whole generation. She was Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. She moved the centre ground of British politics and was a huge figure on the world stage.
The Labour Party disagreed with much of what she did and she will always remain a controversial figure. But we can disagree and also greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength.
She also defined the politics of the 1980s. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and I all grew up in a politics shaped by Lady Thatcher. We took different paths but with her as the crucial figure of that era.
She coped with her final, difficult years with dignity and courage. Critics and supporters will remember her in her prime.”
9 comments
9 responses to “Thatcher: other voices”
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Bye Bye Milliband you just wrote your political death note. Good riddance. Now lets get the Left back.
It’s ok Ed. She can’t see you now. So you can get off your knees and start to be a man. You have lost a lot of life long Labour supporters with your refusal to act as a real Opposition Leader if the Left.
The Labour party are like a rabbit in the headlights. They have no policies, no values and have taken the working class for granted for years. its time for change. A real party that works for all its citizens to provide better equality. We need to stop the rot. Ending of lottery money wages and bonuses and tax cuts to the rich. The argument that the brightest talents will leave the country is absurd. This country needs people who care and support our communities and assist to make a better life for all. the alternative is unrivalled poverty, high unemployment, civil unrest and high crime rates.
Left unity lets roll.
As someone who was both a local Cllr & unemployed in the eighties when Thatcher was in power ,I observed first hand the breakdown of local communities ,the run down sections of towns/cities starved of resources ,to ensure tory friendly developers made a nice killing off the backs of a run down building or piece of land.
Thatcher not only stated “there is no such thing as society”,she coldly put it into practice ensuring bed & breakfast costs rocketed ,as families who aspired only to want a warm decent home to rent were denied it ,as they did not fit into the tory homeowning ideology ,so families spent months in b&b whilst the owner of these seedy establishments made a killing off the backs of the poor, sounds vaguely familiar in 2013 to me !
The country cannot afford another rerun of history its time the Left unified & put the needs & aspirations of working people back at the top of the political agenda ,we will not get it from the establishment parties ,its essential therefore that Left Unity goes from strength to strength in many local communities up & down the UK.
Peter………….
Yep, Blair, Ed, and all the New Labourite neoliberals are truly “Thatcher’s children” politically. We need a figting socialist party which will fight for OUR class as singlemindedly as Thatcher fought for the capitalist class.
One of the ironies of the outcome of the Thatcher era victory over the working class , and the restoration of wealth differentials not seen since Victorian times, is that it is NOT actually Thatcher and Tebbits’ lower middle class grammar school types which have reaped most of the rewards, but the aristocratic Public School toffs like Dave, Gideon and Boris who now use their inherited wealth and elite crony connections to colonise all the top positions of business, state ,and Church. NOT quite what Thatcher and her lower middle class chums anticipated !
Ed Miliband is a hypocrite. He hammers Cameron, Osborne and co. for their nasty policies (though offering no alternatives) and at the same offers warm words towards the architect of all we see happening. Amazing. Lets hope the passing of Thatcher can be a catalyst for the rise of Left Unity, and a complete new direction. There is such a thing as society, but thanks to Thatcher, only just.
Margaret Thatcher has brought out a certain amount of the ghoul in a very large number of good socialists, including me. We are all going to pay for that. We need to try to rein it in. We need to explain who is responsible for these unwholesome sentiments. We have to focus our justified anger on the right targets. And that target is not the rotting piece of meat that is a recently deceased carcass whose mind had departed this world, along with its memories and personality, a very long time ago.
On Twitter, I have seen people I respect, whose tweets I have ReTweet a fair bit over the years still making the case for dignity in the face of provocation by the BBC, SKY News and Channel Four News. They are echoing the arguments that I have myself made, at considerable length a lot for several years now on twitter and elsewhere. I respect those individuals. Nevertheless, I need to point out to them that they are fighting a losing battle.
I think it was Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks who first said that ideas become a material force when they grip the masses. That is certainly true. The genie is out of the bottle, comrades. Masses of working class people have lost their ability to calm down in the face of the incessant lies of the broadcast media. Socialists need to make the best of this situation. We need to give expression to what is positive about it (and a great deal is very positive indeed), while focusing this justified anger. Who should we be directing it towards? Before answering that question, comrades, let us think about what we are surrendering here.
There is an unwritten contract within society. In return for allowing others a certain amount of time to grieve when a member of their family or their friends die, we earn the same space when this happens to us. This is something most of us are going to face unless we die while still children. The overwhelming majority will face this ordeal more than once. Civilization is built upon such rules. Humanity will drive itself insane if we can’t give each and every one of us space to grieve even for those we fell out with and never found the time to rebuild relationships; possibly more for such people than for others. Can we really expect to end this truce for all time? I know I could not. Is Margaret Thatcher’s death an exception to this rule? Partially it has become an exception and we need to explain why exactly that is.
Many comrades are not even thinking this through. They want to celebrate what is deemed a victory. But what exactly are they celebrating? The victory of living longer than Margaret Thatcher did? Alzheimer’s took her mind and personality away from us long before she was declared dead.
Is there anything to celebrate here? While the form of much of this is of celebration, what is positive is something different. It is an expression of resistance to the values embodied in that piece of meat whose heart has so recently stopped beating.
Ed Miliband and Tony Blair refuse to stand up to the media lies because they share so much of Margaret Thatcher’s values. But the working class does not. The voters may have suffered to a large extent from the mass media being in the pocket of the richest 1%, but experience teaches them that there is something fundamentally wrong with the perspectives of those out-of-touch hacks at Channel Four News, the BBC, SKY News.
The outrageous bullshit dumped into the living-rooms of tens of millions of viewers about Margaret Thatcher won’t pass without resistance. But it needs to be shaped by socialists as much as possible. To the extent the BBC, Channel Four News and SKY News expect the voters to suffer in silence as our taxes are wasted celebrating the disgusting political career of Margaret Thatcher, to precisely that extent there will be resistance to this. If the editors of current affairs at the channels are incapable of predicting that then they are pathetic idiots. In reality, of course, they do expect it but hope to tippex it out of history, or to smear all those participating, identifying every particularly bad example of bad taste and focusing on that, trying to intimidate the rest of us into sullen silence once more. Socialists are not going to allow these Thatcherite bastards to get away with this. Any breaking of the taste barrier is primarily the fault of these broadcasters who are making such tastelessness possible and to a certain extent inevitable.
Channel Four News, the BBC and SKY News are provoking these acts of tastelessness. They are, thus, responsible for the setting of a precedent when it comes to ignoring the grief-stricken. Socialists need to accept the problems with such an unraveling of this social contract. We have to try to rein in the worst excesses of tastelessness, doing so with sensitivity to those who are going through a cathartic experience, one they find it difficult to control. This is hardly all their fault. Socialists have to explain why we are witnessing such tastelessness, while trying to minimize it. We have to do this because of the long-term consequences that can have for all of us, for society as a whole.
Having said all of the above, I for one am going to download “Ding Dong, the Witch is dead.” This will be the first song I have ever downloaded. I am going to do that to let the BBC, Channel Four News and SKY News know that they are not going to get away with their pathetic drivel. I am also doing it because, despite some misgivings about the use of insults about Thatcher that make reference to her gender, I think the Witch is dead falls on the correct side of the taste barrier. No one complains about the Wizard of Oz. Thatcher’s gender is made reference to by a shower of Tory and Blairite idiots who want feminists to celebrate her for being the first woman prime minister. Why? She hated everyone who fought for women’s liberation. Her friends refer to her as the Iron Lady. They even try to explain that she was sexually attractive. I do not care if she is to some people, anymore than I care about how other female politicians look. There are male witches, and I don’t see this reference to Thatcher’s sex as important one way or the other.
I won’t to suggest that Left Unity has to unite around how to respond to the death of Margaret Thatcher. A lot of the debate on this site could have been written before Thatcher died. However, we are witnessing a major crisis of the British establishment. They are all over the place: Royals, cops, Tories, UKIP, Lib Dems, Labour leadership, BBC, SKY, Channel Four News… They expected to celebrate the victory of Thatcherism and it has exploded their face. The BBC has to deny us the right to buy what we want and have this reflected in the charts. Cops are threatening us for signing songs with the words ding dong in it. Cops are boasting about our right not to be arrested if we turn our backs in protest to Thatcher’s supporters, satirised as our right to face the direction we want under British ‘democracy’. The establishment closing ranks to defend good taste has utterly backfired. All the people see is a shower of rich liars denying the victims of Thatcher a voice. I say Left Unity is missing a trick by not tapping into this in a more centralised way. We should have specific proposals about what to do on the day of Thatcher’s funeral. I have proposed a few ideas myself on my blog. I think many of them are worth considering and would welcome feedback, additional ideas. Let a thousand flowers bloom. We need to discuss how to get around the police restrictions, how to stop provocations by the cops, politicians and ‘journalists’. We also need to try to stop things falling into the hands of those who will let their emotions determine everything without any thought for the consequences. That is why spontaneity of anarchism could explode in our faces, and by helped along by agent provocateurs who will lead inexperienced youths into the kinds of actions that will get them lengthy prison sentences. If anyone is interested, here is the link to my proposals for what protestors can do on the day: http://derekthomas2010.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/how-do-we-protest-during-maggie-thatchers-funeral/
Liverpool Trades Union Council
Press statement
Wednesday 17 April 2013
Why we won’t mourn for Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher died on 8 April 2013 and the vast majority of ordinary people greeted her passing with undisguised joy.
The right wing media have tried to portray this response as the disrespectful behaviour of a minority. It isn’t. It is a fitting response to the death of a Tory prime minister who spent the entire 1980s wilfully attacking the poor and the working class, in Britain and abroad.
During her reign countless people lost their lives directly as a result of her policies – miners killed on the picket lines, ten Irish prisoners driven to death on hunger strike by her refusal to recognise their human rights, sailors on the Belgrano torpedoed on her order as their ship sailed away from a war zone, people driven to suicide by her selfish economic policies that increased inequality massively in Britain.
And of course in this city 96 Liverpool supporters died at a football match. She was up to her armpits in a conspiracy to blame the victims and their families for a tragedy that her hateful policing policies caused. And we have only just got an official recognition of how this cover up increased the terrible suffering that the families and survivors of this terrible event have had to endure for 24 long years.
Did Thatcher mourn for her victims? No. And we don’t mourn for her.
In Britain she destroyed industry after industry to break the power of the trade unions – in steel, in the mines, in the print and on the docks. She passed the most undemocratic and draconian anti-union laws in the west. She deregulated the banks and directly caused the regime of financial piracy that led to the recent financial crash.
Thatcher openly targeted our city – a city with strong trade union and socialist values –imposing savage cuts and then ousting a democratically elected Labour council that fought her. She launched her attacks on Liverpool after the Toxteth Rising in 1981, determined to make us pay for having fought back and determined to carry out a policy of the “managed decline” (her words) of our city.
After she had waged her neo-colonial war against Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas in 1982 – a war designed to shore up Britain’s military prowess on the world stage and protect the interests of Britain’s bosses who could smell oil reserves in the South Atlantic and saw the islands as a potential future basis of operations – she returned to war on people she called “the enemy within”, trade unionists, workers, poor people and above all the miners. After all, the excuse that Argentina was ruled by a dictator didn’t wash given her lifelong support for the murderous General Pinochet in neighbouring Chile. This was a dictator she was happy to lavish praise on and arm to the teeth. He killed at least 30,000 Chilean trade unionists after his coup in 1973.
Thatcher spent untold millions killing Argentinians and then in 1984/85 bludgeoning British miners into submission after a year-long strike, and all for the same aim – to ensure that the country would be a land of plenty for the rich elite both at home and abroad. Mining communities were wrecked by her pit closure programme and criminalised by a police occupation of their villages when they fought back.
And having won both battles she went on, in her third term of office – to impose an unjust local tax on everyone – the poll tax. She brazenly piloted it in Scotland first in act of vengeful spite against a people who had rejected Toryism outright. This was one battle she lost as we fought back with all our might. Make no mistake, it may have been the Tory men in suits who moved against her in parliament, but they were only able to do it because we had made Britain virtually ungovernable through the great Poll Tax Rebellion.
During her time in office and even before she became prime minister Thatcher – who famously said, “there is no such thing as society” –did her best to harm all of those who stood for justice and equality. She took free milk away from schoolchildren. She sold off council houses creating a terrible shortage of affordable homes, she privatised industries and utilities so her loud mouthed mega rich friends in the City of London could make killing after killing on the stock markets. She closed down industries and then allowed a heroin epidemic to flourish in the ghost towns her policies had created.
She sponsored a wave of racism claiming Britain was being “swamped by immigrants” – and then unleashed a reign of racist terror by the police on black communities across the country, notably in places like Brixton and Toxteth. At the same time she propped up Apartheid racism in South Africa branding Nelson Mandela a terrorist to the very end. She used the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s as an excuse to attack lesbians and gay men, bringing the anti-gay law, Section 28. And in case students thought they were getting off lightly she laid the foundation stone of the long campaign to transform education from a right into a privilege for the rich by introducing student loans.
There is not one thing that Thatcher did that was good. Her life was a blot on our landscape. We are well rid of her – and we are outraged that at a time of major cuts in welfare she is being given a multi-million pound send off. What hypocrisy, what an insult to the poor of this country who are having to cope with the bedroom tax and the benefit cuts as over £10million is spent burying a person the majority of people in this country despise.
Which brings us to the main point we should all remember as she is dispatched – Thatcher may be dead but her legacy of sacrificing the livelihoods, the rights and communities of the working class on the altar of profit lives on in her descendants. Cameron and his gang of Etonian toffs are trying to finish off the job Thatcher started. It is our job to stop them and hurl Thatcher’s legacy back in their face. Which is why on the day of her funeral Liverpool Trades Union Council renews its commitment to stopping the cuts, axing the bedroom tax, saving the NHS and supporting workers’ struggles here, across the country and across the world.
Don’t mourn Thatcher, organise against Thatcher’s heirs.