I’m not normally a fan of Elvis Costello, but this song he wrote about Thatcher really sums it up for me.
On quite a few fora that I frequent, especially those with a large contingent from the UK, there are quite a few non-Brits surprised at the vehemence expressed by those of us who suffered under Thatcher now that she’s dead, or those of us celebrating the fact. I think it’s one of those things where you had to be there at the time. There’s a daily mash satirical post here which is pretty much accurate. If you’re from the north of England or Scotland in particular, and especially if you lived through the 80s in the UK, you’re almost certainly one of those getting ready to either dance or piss on her grave, and for good reason.
Thatcher set out to destroy manufacturing in the north of England in the guise of “doing something about the unions.” She stockpiled coal for several years before announcing she was going to destroy the coal industry, which she duly did. She then destroyed the steel industry too. When I was at school in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, there were basically three options when you left school – work down the mines; work in the steel industry; leave the area (usually to go to university somewhere – and this was by far the smallest number of these options). By the time I left school, there were effectively two options – leave the area in search of work or be unemployed for the rest of your life. My family was one of the lucky ones – only two thirds of my relatives worked in one of the two industries (the rest worked for British Telecom). Some of my friends’ families were entirely employed by one of the two industries that Thatcher destroyed. Some of my friends’ parents have never worked since then, and many of the kids I went to school with are either still unemployed or have left the area.
Thatcher didn’t just destroy the lives of my relatives and friends. She destroyed whole communities. The phrase “pit village” was coined because you’d find entire villages and even small towns that revolved around the local pits. When you close those pits down, you close the entire village down. The local pub shuts because no-one can afford to drink there any more. The local shops selling “luxuries” (ie non-basic needs) also shut down because no-one can afford to shop there any more. It’s bad enough when one of the pits shuts down, but usually that means the villagers have to travel to other nearby mines instead. When you shut down every single mine in the north of England, you destroy those communities entirely.
I was in my late teens when the Battle of Ogreave took place, and I was there. It was a peaceful gala and protest at the bussing in of scab labour at Orgreave pit, with striking miners and their families in attendance. In the afternoon, a full scale riot took place, between burly miners and mounted police in full riot gear. When I got home, the news was all about how the striking miners had attacked the police, who had to charge them again and again to try to take control of the situation.
That was complete and utter bollocks. The photos they showed depicted miners and policemen fighting. What they didn’t show were the scared, huddled kids, some only toddlers, who were about 20 feet behind the wall of furious miners, and who the mounted police had, unprovoked, charged at.
That was Thatcher’s Britain.
I could go on about the race riots (and the institutional racism of the authorities) that she caused. I could talk about the national industries and services that she privatised in order to make a few of her cronies rich at the expense of increasing prices (all in the name of “competition” and the promise of lower prices which somehow never seemed to come), the transport network where one week I would pay 5 pence on the bus downtown each saturday to go wargaming , which after the deregulation suddenly became first 25 pence, then a pound in the matter of a couple of months. I could talk about how when she took power, we had full employment in the UK. Within a few years, it stood at 3 million and counting (12% of the population). I could talk about how the percentage of those living below the poverty line rose from under 10% when she took power to over 22%. I could talk about how inequality skyrocketed under her regime. I could talk about the poll tax, a regressive system that not only ensured the rich didn’t have to pay as much as the poor, but that those who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay it were disenfranchised – and I’m far from alone in thinking this was the intent behind it. I could talk about her love of the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile, or her labelling of Nelson Mandela as a “terrorist” as part of her support of Apartheid South Africa.
That’s why this is a happy day. It’s a small victory, and the damage she did still hasn’t been repaired, nor will it, probably, given her influence on both the modern Tory party and (more shamefully) on the Blairite Labour party, but it’s a victory all the same. Those who think us petty or vindictive for celebrating her demise, consider what she did to my family, my friends, my country. To paraphrase Frankie Boyle, give everyone whose life or livelihood she destroyed a spade, and we’ll dig a hole deep enough to hand her over to Satan in person.
