Six years after Margaret Thtacher's 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. 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.
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.
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, and an approach to Northern Ireland which demonised resistance to the British imperialist state and bolstered discrimination against Catholics. She also let Republican prisoners starve to death in northern Ireland’s jails,
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.
I can never forgive her. She remains one of the most divisive figures to have emerged, responsible froo creating misery ad suffering to millions, while selling of what belonged to the people.
She is still hated and always will be, despite her pulse stopping, her awful legacy lives on, in the toxicity that is carried on by Theresa May's rotten tory party, still here spreading the same stinking doctrine. The scars and pain she caused remain as the rich get richer and the poor, poorer.
The witch might be dead, but the stench of Thatcherism still unfortunately, fills the air, her dark legacy still daily spread, 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.It is surely time I think, that we bury her awful legacy, once and for all.
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.”
