Ishina, Britain was fairly fucked before Thatcher came to power, and not just economically. The Notting Hill riots and punk rock (1976) were not the products of a happy house.
As I've said before, I loathed her. Despised might be more accurate. Her determined philistinism, a lack of empathy so acute that she didn't even recoil emotionally against apartheid... I could go on, but I'll leave that to others.
The coal mines were doomed, as were the tin mines of Cornwall and the copper mines of Jordan 5000 years ago. Above the excavated ruins of a fantastically rich Jordanian mining town there are still seams of copper visible to the naked eye. In a poor country, why on earth don't they mine them?
Was Scargill really more of a democrat than Thatcher, who won unfixed elections and shuffled off obediently when defenestrated by her own party?
Tired of hearing about the coal mines. Coal mines are a red herring.
Such talking points cannot be entirely divorced from Thatcher's wider ideological campaign and absolute wholesale and rapid decimation of the underclasses and opposition power bases. Employment wasn't the only front the lower classes were assaulted upon. Employment, primary and secondary education, healthcare, social housing and care, inflation and taxation and other costs of living - all these things and more. It's not just loss of job. It's loss of future, loss of stability, loss of options, loss of recourse and ability to change one's situation, loss of respect and dignity, loss of hope, loss of spirit. It's soul destruction. It's beaten shitless with the Tory truncheon and left to bleed and rot in whatever hole they could crawl into.
I mean, open your eyes and ears. There are people who have lost an entire decade of their life up here in the North and are still dazed and reeling from it. These people are still living you know. Thatcher didn't just close a few pits. She sucked out the soul of whole communities and many never recovered. Consider the snowball effect of a 10% increase in people below the poverty line for example. That's
millions of people. Consider also that the nature of this beast means it is never felt uniformly across the whole nation. It's the underclasses that take
all of the brunt of it. It's a catastrophe borne entirely by the poorest and most destitute people, levelled almost entirely at areas where they make up the most population or where they earn a living. For a moment, hold in your mind the idea of people, formerly in employment and earning a good living, having to knock on the doors of their neighbours to beg for food hand outs. Let that thought marinade.
The reason why the fallout of Thatcher's death is divisive is not because she was a divisive figure. It's because she
literally divided the nation. The haves and the have-nots. Oh I'm sure Thatcher was fantastic for the up-and-comers, the Randian macho-fuck opportunists, the already well off, the homeowners with a nice little nest egg, and the 'job creators', or those lucky few on the lower rungs who managed to seize a leg up. But her reign was living hell for so many of the other half. And if you want to say much of this was already in motion before she came to power, consider how much
worse it got under Thatcher for those people. The only way she could have caused more damage is if she dropped actual bombs. And after she'd finished making communities derelict, maybe there isn't much difference.
Perhaps there really is a more innocuous explanation for each individual point of contention. Perhaps it is just an extraordinary coincidence that all these things happened, and
peaked, under her watch. Perhaps these things were determined prior to her step up to power, or by factors beyond her control. But I find it much more likely that they are simply the fruits and logical consequence of her ruthless, inhumane, draconian,
excessive public policies.
With her death, it's the meanness of spirit of those rejoicing I can't stand, the grave dancers all piously calling out her meanness of spirit. They are right, but they should look in the mirror too.
I don't buy it for a second that anyone is genuinely put out by the meanness of spirit. We have thicker skin than that. It just smells like cheap and easy moralising to me.
And you're gonna have to put up with it anyway, for as long as we have to put up with David Cameron's cartoon concern face telling us how much of an amazing female icon and British heroine she was.
Topic: Margaret Thatcher Died