I wouldn’t normally talk ill of the recently departed. But this is an exception.
I wont lie. On hearing the news of Maggie Thatcher’s death yesterday I felt a little rush of excitement. I had an extra spring in my step all day. I gleefully dug out some old anti-Thatcher tunes and gave them a spin. On social media I saw others of a similar viewpoint doing the online equivalent of punching the air. The wife and I popped open a bottle of fizz last night to hold our own little private celebration. Ding dong indeed.
Why should a politician who has been out of office and on the margins of influence for over 20 years still hold such sway over so many peoples’ emotions? Well, I guess you had to be there, man, when she was the figurehead that oversaw the dismantling of huge swathes of our country and threw so many lives on the scraphead in the process.
Being from London, I suppose I personally benefitted from Maggie’s aggressive neo-liberal politics, as did many who grabbed hold of the coat-tails of the deregulation of financial services and the privatisation of state assets by either working in The City, or providing services in London and its commuting hinterland – whether it be as retailer, plumber, plasterer or whatever. But I never felt Thatcher and her chums were doing right by the country as a whole.
Maybe this short scathing epitaph from Ken Livingstone might explain my antipathy:
“She created today’s housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefit rather than register them as unemployed because the Britain she inherited was broadly full employment. She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed, and the benefits bill, the legacy of that, we are struggling with today. In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong.”
There’s plenty of commentaries and lists of her evils already out there since yesterday, scattered amongst the predictable fawning and hagiography to be expected from the Establishment, which had been ironically led by that so-called nest of socialists at the BBC. But the best one I’ve seen that sums up my general view is here:
http://thequietus.com/articles/11886-margaret-thatcher-obituary
And here’s some more strong words (I’ve edited and paraphased in parts) from another unidentified online commentator that I concur with:
“Her task was straightforward – the capitalist class faced a crisis of profitability in the 1970s and her job was to crush the elements (“the enemy within”) that were organised and persistently insisting on a greater share of those profits, that she believed stood in the way of her class’s narrow interests. These elements of course were the working class, particularly those away from the capital and communities dependent on manufacturing and state owned industries.
Firstly fiscal monetarism was unleashed to ramp up profitability in the domestic service sector – especially the financial sector – through reduced corporate taxes and regressive personal taxation, privatisation of the utilities and a windfall from North Sea oil to underfund it.
This was accompanied by selling-off council housing stock and other state assets, which duped some into believing they were accumulating wealth and sharing in an explosion of “popular capitalism”, when in fact all most “Sids” achieved was very short-term small gains funded by expanding their household debt, which eventually resulted in a stark reversion to greater inequality between a few economic winners and the majority of long-term losers.
Now the right wing meme is that it was done to save Britain. No it wasn’t. It was done to save and improve the profits of the elite and to destroy the working class. Ruining lives for naked profit.
Even her death in the Ritz hotel is dripping in ironic symbolism. A quintessentially upper class British institution owned by two Monaco based brothers who through the Daily Telegraph extol the virtues of Britain whilst fundamentally undermining it through the offshore wholesale tax avoidance unleashed by Thatcher’s initial deregulation.
For me Thatcher was definitely not a great Briton. She was a determined class warrior and champion of the rich. To hell with her and to hell with her social, political and economic legacy”
Amen to that.
A few hundred words a day doesn’t seem that much.
Well, when I say per day, I mean two or three times a week. Unless I’ve something better to do.
But as I’m mostly busy doing nothing (working the whole day through/trying to find lots of things/not to do) right now, I have decided to put index finger to keyboard on all that interests – or appals – me. It will be a mixed bag: politics, business, culture, social history, maybe some indulgent creative writing, and sport. Especially sport, and most particularly football, where all the other categories can collide in both a beautiful diversion or crassly ugly train wreck from time to time.
Right now 500 a day feels a bit daunting. A little bit Jack Torrance in The Shining…sitting in front of his typewriter bashing out the same ominous line time after time as his muse and mental well-being go flying out of the window.
OK, maybe I’m not quite that bad. So note to self: hyperbole, cliches and tropes should be avoided where possible.
And let’s face it, there’s plenty to write about just now. In business, globalisation has produced as many headaches as sinister oligarchs, whilst the financial services sector from where I’ve mostly earned my crust is in all sorts of moral trouble.
In the domestic political arena, the leading lights of our 3 main parties seem rather too similar and neo-liberal to me, but the opposition to austerity away from the Westminster village – from other philosophies and movements – is mostly floundering, disconnected from the masses, and down on its knees.
Culturally, we’ve have some amazing high spots in TV drama, massive challenges presented to old media by the new digital age, but nowhere near enough excitement or interesting innovation elsewhere.
Social history might teach us a thing or two about our current community ailments, with the divide between the haves and have-nots (disgustingly translated as strivers and shirkers by the haves) seemingly heading back towards the bad old days before the welfare state and a sense of social fairness being in the interests of all.
And in sport, we are seeing obscene amounts of money sloshing around at the pinnacle, whilst playing fields are neglected or sold off, and many local amateur clubs struggle to engage many beyond the wealthier types who can afford the subs for themselves and their offspring.
So here’s me in a nutshell: fifty-two; in decent health; sitting asset rich in a lovely late Victorian home with a decent income but still feeling cash poor; a lovely wife I’ve known for 30 years, a teenage daughter I’m proud of, a dopey chocolate labrador dog, and a massive maine coon cat; independent socialist tendencies of the champagne variety that sits a bit awkwardly in my comfortable middle class neighbourhood; a happy working class upbringing; prefers BBC4 and broadsheets to ITV and tabloids; long-suffering “little” Leyton Orient fan; likes a good walk and a pint of ale; prefers a fry-up to posh or healthy food yet knows it’s only good for the soul and not the body; loves a good read of both book or online trivia.
So they’ll be no personal complaints or white-whines based on envy in this blog. Just views on the news, and mostly for myself. But you’re welcome.
citywitness 