Despite all the gushing plaudits and tributes dedicated to her, after former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died on 8 April 2013 when the entire establishment made extensive efforts to fabricate a national mourning, portraying her as some sort of hero. street parties spontaneously broke out across the country. fireworks were lit. there was dancing in the street. Ding-dong the witch is Dead blasting out of stereos.
Thatcher has since gone down in history as one of the most anti-working class Prime Ministers in Britain's history., and twelve years after the death Grantham’s most infamous daughter many of us are still unable to forgive her for the devastation she wrought to our communities, the damage she caused to our industries, our whole way of life.
Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, England, in 1925. She was the first woman president of the Oxford University Conservative Association and in 1950 ran for Parliament in Dartford. She was defeated but garnered an impressive number of votes in the generally liberal district. In 1959, after marrying businessman Denis Thatcher and later giving birth to twins, she was elected to Parliament as a Conservative for Finchley, a north London district.
During the 1960s, she rose rapidly in the ranks of the Conservative Party and in 1967 joined the shadow cabinet sitting in opposition to Harold Wilson’s ruling Labour cabinet. With the victory of the Conservative Party under Edward Heath in 1970, Thatcher became secretary of state for education and science.
In 1974, the Labour Party returned to power, and Thatcher served as joint shadow chancellor before replacing Edward Heath as the leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975. She was the first woman to head the Conservatives. Under her leadership, the Conservative Party shifted further right in its politics, calling for privatization of national industries and utilities and promising a resolute defense of Britain’s interests abroad.
Thatcher angered some people even before she was prime minister. While working as education secretary in 1971, the government stopped schools giving free milk to schoolchildren aged 7–11. Labour and the press branded her “Mrs Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher”. The name stuck.
She also sharply criticized Prime Minister James Callaghan’s ineffectual handling of the chaotic labor strikes of 1978 and 1979. In March 1979, Callaghan was defeated by a vote of no confidence, and on May 3 a general election gave Thatcher’s Conservatives a majority in Parliament. The next day as the UK’s first female prime minister, Thatcher immediately set about dismantling socialism in Britain.
Her belief in individual responsibility and minimising government intervention became known as Thatcherism. The policies she brought in caused destruction to Britain’s industrial, social and political landscape.
While prime minister, Thatcher championed free-market policies, believing the economy would benefit from less government control. She sold many government-controlled businesses, a process called privatisation. Under Thatcher, the financial industry ,banks, stock traders and others benefited massively. The Canary Wharf financial district was built in London’s former docklands with help from her government, despite the protests of locals on the Isle of Dogs.
Between 1979-1981, Thatcher’s radical deflationary policy destroyed 2,000,000 jobs, with many of those being in the north. Destroying Britains manufacturing sector, which still hasn’t recovered. She raised interest rates to 15%, making ordinary home owners who were already suffering, unable to pay their mortgage. Leading to swathes of poverty.
In 1983, despite the worst unemployment figures for half a decade, Thatcher was reelected to a second term, thanks largely to the decisive British victory in the 1982 Falklands War with Argentina.
However Due to her right to buy scheme, and the subsequent lack of affordable housing being built - Thatcher was instrumental in the housing crisis that we all face today. She abandoned the post war consensus, and allowed - for the first time - privatisation to occur in the NHS. A practice that has stood the test of time, continuing through successive governments.
She fought against the miners, not giving a hoot, or an inch of compromise, then put her sights on our welfare state, whilst leaving an entire generation to be thrown on the scrapheap.She privatized numerous industries, cut back government expenditures, and gradually reduced the rights of trade unions.
Being kind, she was just a sower of destruction, not an ounce of compassion within her, a creator of mass unemployment too, a fosterer of division with her cruel policies. A liar too, about Hillsborough, who also bombed retreating ships.While systematically eroding the notion of a welfare state that cares for people from cradle to grave, Thatcher boosted the coercive power of the state. This was most obvious in the Miners’ Strike, during which she characterised the miners as ‘the enemy within’ and sanctioned massive police brutality against pit communities,
In 1984, coal mining was a government-controlled industry. Thatcher wanted to make it more profitable, and quickly, so she decided to close 20 mines. This led to a year-long strike by miners and their trade unions becoming one of the most inspiring but bitter class struggles in British history. In classic Thatcher style, she refused to change her mind. "I am not a consensus politician. I'm a conviction politician,” said Thatcher in 1979.
Her crusade against the unions was inhumane.She fought against the miners, not giving a hoot, or an inch of compromise. She had secretly and cynically prepared for battle by stockpiling two years’ worth of coal before announcing the closures. And she was hellbent on defeating “the enemy within” by any means necessary, even if it meant turning the full force of the state against its own people.
For the first time in a postwar national strike, British police were openly used as a political weapon.Paramilitary riot police placed mining communities under total siege. A scab workforce was organised to break the strike, and billions were spent to keep the power stations running without coal. The full weight of the courts was used to sequestrate the funds of the miners' union and break its resolve. Civil liberties were forgotten as miners were beaten and arrested even when standing still. Agent provocateurs and spies were deployed. State benefits were withheld in order to starve the miners back to work. And the media was used to churn out a Niagara of lies against the miners.What had begun as an industrial dispute degenerated into a clash of ideologies and civil class war. For twelve months, the miners and their families held out against unprecedented onslaughts and unimaginable hardships in order to save jobs and preserve communities.
The pit closure programme was carried through remorselessly. It tore the guts out of the industry and out of the mining communities. The mining industry was decimated. The strike may have been defeated but years later I remember the courage and sacrifice made during this bitter struggle and the spirit of revolt they unleashed, and those who remained defiant to the end, and acknowledge the miners who were arrested and locked up on trumped up charges.The communities that never fully recovered from the financial blow of the strike.
Those who fought for the survival of a humane society here in Wales and across Britain, and a vile government under Thatchers direction who used the powers of the state in almost all its entirety to defeat the miners and to teach the whole working class a lesson. Closing the pits caused the loss of thousands of jobs, devastating mining communities in Wales, Scotland and northern England.It was economically more viable to keep pits open than to shut them down, but she went ahead and did it anyway, purely to crush the NUM.
Her promotion of massive cuts, deregulation and privatization inspired other enemies of the working class like US President Ronald Reagan. Before she had even taken office, Soviet journalist, Yuri Gavrilov, dubbed her the "Iron Lady", another nickname which has stuck until today.
Then there was her approach to Northern Ireland which demonised resistance to the British imperialist state and bolstered discrimination against Catholics.I can't forgive or forget how she refused to negotiate with hunger strikers led by Bobby Sands and allowed Republican prisoners starve to death in Northern Ireland’s H-Block prison. In October 1984, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb exploded at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton. Thatcher narrowly escaped harm.
Thatcher left behind a record of cruelty and ruthlessness not only in Britain but also in such far-flung places as El Salvador, Grenada, Argentina, South Africa. In these places and more she unleashed British military power against peoples fighting for justice and dignity, or she backed the violence of the U.S. government in doing the same. Thatcher forged a close political and military alliance with the U.S. under presidents Reagan and Bush Sr, and while she shafting all and sundry she still managed to be friends with right wing dictators like Pinochet and P.W Botha.
Her whole twisted ideology was to try and tear up the post 1945 consensus and privatise our public services, sell of our nationalised industries, whilst smashing up Trade Union rights, embarking on a systematic path of of destruction. Carving up the land, shifting the balance of social economic wealth between the rich and poor, very much detrimental to the latter.
Thatcher outraged the LGBTQ+ community when she introduced "Section 28" which banned the "promotion of homosexuality" by local authorities. At the height of the AIDS pandemic, the law encouraged anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and stigmatization, particularly in schools.
She was also responsible for the selling off of thousands of council houses and 20 state-controlled companies including British Telecom; the vicious attacks on Trade Union rights.
It was because of her constant attacks on weaker members of society ( yes she was a bully) that I was drawn to movements that helped protect these people and the poor from a government deaf to reason and blind to compassion. I noticed who her friends and allies were, her support for fascist like repressive regimes ( South Africa, Chile) and the hidden hands of big business and corporate power backing her in the shadows. I began to see what she and her party stood for as evil, plain and simple.
At the time , I was daily incensed by her actions in particular with her devastating attack on the miners who dared to take her on. She chose to crush them and anybody else that stood in her way. I remember the bitter summer of 1984 when mining communities were battered and beaten. Where she utilised the police and the powers of the state in brutal fashion. Her attempts to turn our country into fortress Britain with her constant undermining of our civil liberties. So we marched and took to the streets determined to get rid of this horrible woman who proudly declared that she was not for turning, not prepared to listen.
Despite this in 1987, an upswing in the economy led to her election to a third term, but Thatcher soon alienated some members of her own party because of her poll-tax policies and opposition to further British integration into the European Community.
Massive anti-Thatcher riots erupted in 1990 when she introduced the hated "poll tax" which forced the poor to pay the same as the rich for local services. Many refused to pay the tax altogether and the controversy was a major factor leading to her demise..The eventual abandonment of the charge represented a great victory for the eighteen million non-payers of the poll tax and in the process reduced the ‘iron lady’ to iron filings.
In November 1990, she failed to received a majority in the Conservative Party’s annual vote for selection of a leader. She withdrew her nomination, and John Major, the chancellor of the Exchequer since 1989, was chosen as Conservative leader.
On November 28, Thatcher resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by Major. Thatcher’s three consecutive terms in office marked the longest continuous tenure of a British prime minister since 1827. In 1992, she was made a baroness and took a seat in the House of Lords
In later years, Thatcher worked as a consultant, served as the chancellor of the College of William and Mary and wrote her memoirs, as well as other books on politics. Though she stopped appearing in public after suffering a series of small strokes in the early 2000s, her influence remained strong.
In 2011, the former prime minister was the subject of an award-winning (and controversial) biographical film, The Iron Lady, which depicted her political rise and fall. Margaret Thatcher died on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87.
Despite her pulse stopping, she is still hated and always will beI. can never forgive her. She remains one of the most divisive figures to have emerged, responsible for creating misery and suffering to millions, while selling of what belonged to the people.She was callously indifferent to the suffering of those she made jobless or snubbed as she set out to destroy entire industries in an appalling act of political and social vandalism
Sadly her awful legacy lives on, in the toxicity that is carried on by those still here spreading the same stinking doctrine as hers. The scars and pain she caused remain as the rich get richer and the poor, poorer.
In the 1980's both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher allowed the richest to buy all our Public Resources, then the billionaires used all the money stolen from you to buy the Government. That is how we got to the hell we have now. The witch might be dead, but the stench of Thatcherism still unfortunately, fills the air, her dark legacy still daily spread,
Thatcherism continues to shape all the mainstream political parties, to varying degrees, to this day. Sir Keir Starmer has invoked her and she was Kemi Badenoch's political heroine and her political heirs are trying to extend the damage she did in ways she only dreamed of with the same destructive policies impacting on the lives of millions of working class and poor people.
Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are Margaret Thatcher's greatest political achievements after war criminal Tony Blair that is. They are tthe guardians of her neoliberal legacy. working for the oligarchy and not for the people, Starmer has turned the Labour party into one of War, Genocide, Continuity Thatcherism, Wealth and Corporations - we need to build an opposition to it that represents the people not the powerful.
From benefit cuts to the economy, to his stance on the genocide of the Palestinian people who doesn’t hate Keir Starmer in the same way we hated Thatcher? When I see Starmer smile, and his lackeys smile I see Thatchers smile. her sneer, her total lack of compassion. It's amazing how many Starmerites who probably despised Thatcher are prepared to adopt Thatcherism under Starmer.
he legacy of Thatcherism.One of aggression and authoritarianism, that leaves me to bitter this day. Sell off everything we own, devalue and demean any human impulse other than greed, refuse to behave as if society is a thing, let alone a place we have to live, stare in wonder at the abject mess you've made of a once great country.
Back in Thatcher's day we had a right wing press that supported and colluded with her, but many diverse coalitions of resistance bought about the end of her time in power, today we have the internet and with it the rise of alternative forms of social media. We can beat the those like her again, outside all is not lost, when they try to push us down , we must push back, and united we can again defeat them.
Hubert Humphrey once said that “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
We must carry on fighting for a fairer, more just society and as the banner says below ' Thatchers Gone- Now Lets bury Thatcherism ' and will add Thatcher's awful legacy once for all.
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