Margaret Thatcher 1925-2013
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ALB wrote:Again, with the miners strike, was it necessdary to close down all pits that were not making the going rate of profit (rather than just those that weren't making any profit at all)
Just received this from an ex-miner and socialist who was involved: Here is proof for certain that the coal mines were closed down to smash the power of the unions.The benchmark set for keeping a mine open was set at 13p per. gigajoule, which was (allegedly) competitive with imported coal. Wearmouth Colliery, in Sunderland, was producing coal with this calorific value. Coal quality was good and boreholes proved coal quality improved the further east we mined, and east was the only direction we were mining. Coal samples showed that we would produce coal with a calorific value of 11p per.gigajoule, thus mining Wearmouth,s coal would be more economic than importing coal. Only one coal seam was being mined, the coal was over 8ft. thick, and the 4 ft wide conveyor belt could not cope with the sheer amount of coal being cut, so the coal extraction had to be slowed down. There were other coal seams, as yet untouched, with even better quality coal. This mine reeked of profit, yet it too was closed. Pure maddening industrial vandilism.
If one positive thing from Thatcher’s lonely demise can emerge, it would be that some class consciousness be rekindled among the long suffering working class of Britain. The foul lot in power now are continuing what she zealously started. ConDemning future generations to more intense exploitation as conditions are squeezed further in the pursuit of making Britain profitable for investors once more.The battle lines were drawn on Wednesday when parliament paid tribute to the former prime minister. We were treated to the site of so called "Red Ed" Miliband falling over himself to praise Thatcher, in order to show the capitalist elite he is as much on their side as she was. His vomiting, sycophantic, syllables all over her memory in an attempt to convince us he is a "conviction politician" in the mould of the Iron Lady herself, should be embarrassing enough to those who may dare suggest Labour are an alternative to the current miserable ConDem coalition. Time to wake up!
Just got back from Trafalgar Square. A couple thousand people there, rain, lots of police. Very good natured protest party – music, dancing, drinking of champagne. Miners there with their NUM North East Area banner.
She hated the working class, but , many members of the working class supported her too
mcolome1 wrote:She hated the working class, but , many members of the working class supported her tooToo true, I'm afraid.
Glenda Jackson, Academy Award winning actress turned Labour MP: “When I made my maiden speech a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place but Thatcherism was still wreaking, as it had wreaked for the previous decade, the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents.Our local hospitals were running on empty. Patients were staying on trolleys and in corridors. I tremble to think what the death rate for pensioners would have been this winter if that version of Thatcherism had been fully up and running this year.Our schools, parents, teachers, governors, even pupils, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising in order to be able to provide basic materials, such as paper and pencils. The plaster on our classroom walls was kept in place by pupils artwork and miles and miles of sellotape. Our school libraries were dominated by empty shelves, very few books, and those books that were there were being held together by ubiquitious sellotape and offcuts from teachers' wallpaper used to bind those volumes so that they could at least hang together.But by far the most dramatic and heinous demonstration of Thatcherism was certainly not only in London, but across the whole country in metropolitan areas, where every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless. They grew in their thousands. And many of those homeless people had been thrown out onto the streets from the closure of the long-term mental hospitals. We were told it was going to be called Care in the Community. What in effect it was was no care at all in the community.I was interested to hear about Baroness Thatcher's willingness to invite those who have nowhere to go for Christmas. It's a pity she did not start building more and more social houses after she entered into the right to buy, so perhaps there would have been fewer homeless people than there were. As a friend of mine said, during her era London became a city Hogarth would have recognise. And indeed he would.But the basis to Thatcherism – and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperate, desperately wrong track that Thatcherism took this country into – was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice – and I still regard them as vices – under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward …What concerns me is that I'm beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis of the spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side. That is not happening now. And if we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from.” Glenda Jackson, the Labour MP, is now tearing into Lady Thatcher. She is the first MP in the debate whio appears not to feel constrained by what she is saying and she attacks Thatcher aggressively from the start.Thatcher's policies were heinous, she says.More people would have died this winter under her policies, she says.Referring to Whittingdale's anecdote about Thatcher inviting people to Chequers, she says homelessness increased when she was in power. You had to step over homeless people on the streets of London.But the worst thing is that things Jacksons was brought up to believe were vices, like greed, were treated as virtues.She says Diane Abbott felt duty bound to pay tribute to Thatcher as the first woman prime minister.But Jackson says she was raised by women, because during the second world war all the men were away.The women who ran the country then, even putting out fires, would not have recognised Thatcher's qualities as those of a woman.
Morrissey:"Thatcher is remembered as The Iron Lady only because she possessed completely negative traits such as persistent stubbornness and a determined refusal to listen to others. Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the Ivory Trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own Cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone – and was sailing AWAY from the islands. When the young Argentinian boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs up sign for the British press. Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes. She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women's movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a Prime Minister could actually be female. But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it. Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity,"
"Napoleon Bonaparte shows he had perceived the truth of the Materialist Conception of History : 'Mohammed's case was like mine, I found all the elements ready at hand to found an empire. Europe was weary of anarchy, they wanted to make an end of it. If I had not come probably someone else would have done like me… A man is but a man, but often he can do much; often he is a tinderbox in the midst of inflammable matter, his power is nothing if circumstances and public sentiment do not favour him' "
So, you are saying that Thatcher was the personification of what capitalism in Britain required in the 1980s: an iron fist to push through policies that weakened the unions (and so workers' ability to resist a worsening of their conditions) and cut social spending both to allow profitability to be restored so that capitalist growth could continue? And that once this had been done her style of government no longer met British capitalism's requirements; which made it possible for "the men in grey suits" to remove her? Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure who "the someone else who would have done be" would have been.
Marx and Engels wrote in chapter 6 of 'The Holy Family' : “Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who dispose of a certain practical force”. Thatcher began to attend lunches regularly at the Institute of Economic Affairs(IEA), a think tank founded by the capitalist Anthony Fisher, a disciple of Hayek. There she was influenced by the ideas of free market capitalist economists Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Thatcher became the 'certain practical force' of the capitalist class ideological movement opposing state capitalism, the welfare state, and Keynesian economics. "Thatcher was the personification of what capitalism in Britain required in the 1980s"The 'someone else' could have been Keith Joseph but his chances of standing for Tory leader in 1975 were damaged by a speech in 1974 where he warned about single parents "who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5", and "The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened". Thatcher is Joseph's surrogate. Joseph introduced ideas of Milton Friedmann to Thatcher.In 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' Marx writes that: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves”
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