stevead1966
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Reply on RevLeft Forum:The SPGB Way Forward by SteveHegel1844: The Socialist Party of Great Britain believe that parliament can, and should, be used in the course of establishing such a socialist society. This position is based on our understanding that before socialism can be established there has to be a majority actively in favour of this, and that it is essential for this majority to win control over the machinery of government/ the state before trying to establish socialism. Since control of parliament is obtained via elections based on universal suffrage, a socialist majority can win control of the machinery of government through winning a parliamentary majority via the ballot box. Two ideas prominent to liberal democratic political ideology are that we live in a society which is both democratic and free. If this is not the case but if we live in a society where there is a semblance of democracy and freedom, what better way is there to challenge that ‘democracy and freedom’ than by using the accepted legitimate channels and thereby being able to call its bluff. Capitalism cannot be gradually reformed into socialism. There is no gradual parliamentary road to socialism through a series of piecemeal reform measures introduced by a reformist government. Anarchists are right to say this. We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain say it too. The socialist political party (of which the SPGB is just a potential embryo) will not be something separate from the socialist majority. It will be the socialist majority self-organised politically, an instrument they have formed to use to achieve a socialist society. There is nothing to prevent workers who want socialism selecting one of their number to stand as a candidate to go to parliament as a socialist delegate, pledged to take instructions from socialists voting for them organised in the socialist political party. The dangers of a capitalist class coup ? On the eve of a socialist election victory most workers would already be convinced of the need for socialism and would have organised themselves in unions and other bodies ready to keep production and administration going after the election victory. Socialist ideas would also have penetrated into the armed forces. Should some of the pro-capitalists think of staging a coup: any wavering elements, especially in the armed forces, would tend to side with those who have the undisputed democratic legitimacy, i.e. in this instance those who want socialism. Even the anti-parliamentarian Anarchist Federation in 1996: “ The majority of military personnel are working class, and however indoctrinated they are, we doubt that they will be prepared on the whole to shoot down their friends, neighbours and relatives. Examples from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the Romania of 1990 show that the army will switch sides when it becomes clear that the people will no longer tolerate their government and are prepared to take to the streets to prove it” (Beyond Resistance, p. 19).The Socialist Party of Great Britain believe that Socialism will entail the immediate abolition of the State. Marx wrote of "storming heaven" which is the break up of the bourgeois political state, in this instance he was talking of the 1871 Paris Commune. The State in the example of the Paris Commune of 1871 offers many examples of the working class taking over and what is effectively the abolition of the bourgeois state; Engels: “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” – run by the workers in the interests of the workers, Commune no longer a state, absence of a standing army, self-policing of the quartiers. Bakunin on the Commune: “a bold, clearly formulated negation of the state”Kropotkin: “by proclaiming the free commune, the people of Paris proclaimed an essential anarchist principle, which was the breakdown of the state”. The working class conquest of political power will entail what Marx wrote to Dr Kugelman it will “smash the bureaucratic military state machine”I will quote Lenin now… Lenin in Lessons of the Commune: “the Proletariat, which had seized power, carried out the democratisation of the social system, abolished the bureaucracy, and made all official posts elective”and “Commune replaced the smashed state machine with a fuller democracy, transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy”.Parliament can, and should, be used in the course of establishing such a socialist society, the majority of the working class will win control over the machinery of government/ the state before trying to establish socialism and proletarian socialist democracy.Marx wrote in 1872: “All socialists understand this by Anarchy: once the aim of the proletarian movement, the abolition of classes has been attained, the state power which serves to keep the great productive majority under the yoke of an exploiting minority small in numbers, disappears, and the governmental functions are transformed into simple administrative functions”. In 1847 'The Poverty of Philosophy', Marx writes:“there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society”.Edouard Vaillant, Communard:“If socialism wasn't born of the Commune, it is from the Commune that dates that portion of international revolution that no longer wants to give battle in a city in order to be surrounded and crushed, but which instead wants, at the head of the proletarians of each and every country, to attack national and international reaction and put an end to the capitalist regime”
I am reminded of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his links to capitalists such as Sir Eric Miller who owned Peachey Property Corporation and became the predominant freeholder for high-end leasehold properties in London. He was appointed to the board of Labour Party Properties and served as Treasurer of the Socialist International. Miller later committed suicide while under investigation for fraud. Also Joseph Kagan, Baron of the Gannex mac ! He was later imprisoned for theft and false accounting aka tax evasion.Lets not forget Tony Blair and New Labour, this is when the Labour Party finally came out of the closet and declared that they ran capitalism in the interest of the capitalist class which is the only realistic way it can be run. Blair : ‘Britain needs successful people in business who can become rich by their success, through the money they earn’ -Speech to the CBI, 1995. 'Penal rates of taxation do not make economic or political sense. They are gone for good’ -Speech to CBI conference, November, 1995.The best is from Mandleson: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,” 1998
SteveHegel1844 wrote:"Lenin's own words in a speech on Economic Construction in 1920 were also revealing when he said: 'the Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at times best realised by a dictator, who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed. At any rate, the principal relation toward one person rule was not only explained a long time ago but was also decided by the Central Executive Committee.”Lenin speech of 16 March 1920 to the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party:Section 4 on Economic Development“Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory, and that the will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary. At any rate, the attitude towards the principles of corporate management and individual management was not only explained long ago, but was even endorsed by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee”The translation used by SteveHegel1844 is not exact replica of translation used in Marxists.org/archive but on a practical interpretative basis it is identical.Lenin uses extracts from his article 'The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government' of April 1918 in his speech of 16 March 1920: “Large-scale machine industry—which is precisely the material source, the productive source, the foundation of socialism—calls for absolute and strict unity of will … unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry. “We must learn to combine the ‘public meeting’ democracy of the working people—turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring nood with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work.”, the task of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet leader, of the dictator, during the work. . . .”Ismail wrote: “management in Soviet industries, calling for the combination of democracy and discipline with regards to directives and decisions made, This has nothing to do with the Party and its leadership. He was speaking of the necessity of discipline (never divorced from the objective needs and control of the working-class) to rehabilitate the economy”SteveHegel1844: The foundation of socialism or in this instance of Bolshevik Russian 'State Capitalism' in the economy has everything to do with democracy, the Party, leadership.Fundamentally, as socialists we believe in the democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, for if everyone owns, then everyone must have equal right to control the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth.
Firstly, Lenin always opposed the First World War unlike reformists in the Second International in Western Europe. He promised to take Russia out of the First World War and he kept that pledge in 1918. Lenin's article 'The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism' from 1913 is a concise exposition of Marxism and well worth reading, he concludes it with “Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism”Mr Otter: “Steve Clayton puts too much emphasis on the spilt between the Bolshevik & the Menshevik”.Steve: Emphasis on the split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik cannot be underestimated. Lenin argued that an effective political party must have a sound and clearly defined theoretical basis. Lenin quotes Lassalle letter to Marx of 1852: "Party struggles give a party strength and life … the best proof of the weakness of a party is its diffuseness and the blurring of clearly defined borders … a party becomes strongest by purging itself.". Lenin in 1901 had the mistaken high opinion about the German SPD which combined a socialist objective with a programme of popular immediate demands (reformism). The SPGB has been described by a Leninist party as “Menshevik” in contrast to 'Bolshevik'. Some of the Menshevik Programme of July 1919: peasants should retain, on a collective or individual basis as they may freely decide, the public and privately owned lands which they seized and parcelled out at the time of the Revolution; the state should retain control of major industrial enterprises that are fundamental to economic life; Workers’ unions should be wholly independent of any state bodies; Freedom of the press, of assembly and of association should be restored; Terror shall be done away with as an instrument of government; the death penalty be abolished , and likewise all investigatory and punitive organs independent of the courts, such as the Extraordinary Commission (CHEKA); Party institutions and cells should be deprived of state authority, and party members of all material privileges. Also please see Martov criticism of Bolshevism in his 1919 work 'The Ideology of Sovietism'.Mr Otter: “in Sukhanov's account of the conference there is a record of one delegate – whose name did not appear in the "short" translation I read, (the Russian original was seven volumes, the translation published in the '50s was in one volume,) – & he objected (also before the Bolshevik/Menshevik split) that the draft party statements “treated the party as subject, and the [working] class only as object." Which he rightly said was a fundamental departure from Marxism. It has been suggested that the delegate concerned was Sukhanov himself”Steve: I have not read the minutes of the conference. I agree that this would be a departure from Marxism. The ontological basis of Marx's philosophy is the overcoming of the subject-object divide see 1844 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' (EPM). Feuerbach said “Man is himself at once an I and Thou”. The overcoming of alienation is the reconciliation of the relationship between Subject and Object. Marx in EPM: “ The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by man and destined for him… in effect, I can only relate myself in a human way to a thing when the thing is related in a human way to man”. The proletariat are the future of humanity, the overcoming of the subject-object divide – proletarian class consciousness is the subject-object of history. Lukàcs: only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat possesses the ability to transform things.Mr Otter: “It is worth remembering that in the State & the Revolution Lenin predicts that the time must come, (if socialism is to be achieved, ) when the working class will rebel against the workers' state”Steve: Lenin's belief in the future is; 'if socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years.'Mr Otter: “Lenin – after the revolution – stressed that what had been achieved was "workers' -dominated state capitalism, in transition to socialism”, Steve: I question that this state capitalism is workers-dominated but is run by a Party elite/bureaucracy, a Nomenclature. Lenin's introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy) in 1920 is a market economy, it is State Capitalism which is the wages system under new management, profit, commodity production and workers still being robbed of their surplus value. Lenin in 'The Chief Task of Our Times': “Reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us”.Socialist Standard, August 1918: ‘Is this huge mass of people, numbering about 160,000,000 and spread over eight and a half millions of square miles, ready for socialism? Are the hunters of the north, the struggling peasant proprietors of the south, the agricultural wage slaves of the Central Provinces, and the industrial wage slaves of the towns convinced of the necessity and equipped with the knowledge required, for the establishment of the social ownership of the means of life? Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place, or an economic change has occurred immensely more rapidly than history has ever recorded, the answer is “No!” ’. Marx 1859 Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself”. The Russia of 1917 was not an advanced industrial capitalist nation ripe for transformation to socialism. Lenin's 1917 April Theses argues that Russia is "passing from the first stage of the revolution which, owing to insufficient class consciousness of the proletariat placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest peasantry, "it is not our immediate task to 'introduce' socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers' Deputies.". Again, the Russia of 1917 was not an advanced industrial capitalist nation ripe for transformation to socialism.Mr Otter: “workers '-dominated state capitalism, in transition to socialism, but with severe bureaucratic deformations”Steve: The 'severe bureaucratic deformations' include the following; Privilege of Party membership leading to elitism and Nomenclature, War Communism prohibited strikes -the only weapon the proletariat have against bosses (Even Bolshevik bosses), Red Terror – repression, setting up of Cheka, NKVD, OGPU – implemented by Dzerzhinsky on September 5, 1918, described by the Red Army journal Krasnaya Gazeta: "Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood", suppression of Kronstadt rebellion – Emma Goldman: "The dictatorship under Stalin's rule has become monstrous, that does not, however, lessen the guilt of Leon Trotsky as one of the actors in the revolutionary drama of which Kronstadt was one of the bloodiest scenes", Lenin is father to Stalinism.Mr Otter: “ Then in 1916, after writing his (Lenin) Philosophic Notebooks & the publication of "The State & the Revolution," (a pamphlet which went counter to all his previous thinking on the role of the party leadership,) he broke with the internal Leadership of the Bolshevik Party, was indeed expelled from the party. He said, in 1917, "the party-masses are a myriad times more revolutionary than the party leadership, and the non-party masses a myriad times wore so than the party-masses," that totally inverted everything he had said about the role & make-up of the party. Unfortunately no doubt, after the Revolution he made it up with his party & reverted to his former theories” Steve: I do not know if Lenin was expelled from the Party in 1916. In 1915, in Switzerland, at the Zimmerwald Conference he led the minority who failed, against the majority pacifists to achieve the conference adopting Lenin's proposition of transforming the imperialist war into a class war At the next conference in 1916 at Kienthal Lenin presented a like resolution and the conference concluded a compromise manifesto. (Christopher Read biography of Lenin). Lenin's 'Philosophic Notebooks' contain the fragment 'On the Question of Dialectics' where he writes “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence (one of the “essentials,” one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics.” This idea was used by Chinese communist philosophers to develop their 'One Divides Into Two' philosophical concept in 1964 which looked at the uniting of capitalism with socialism. This idea received short shrift in the Maoist Cultural Revolution after 1966 but after Mao's death in 1976 and up to today we have the restoration of full market capitalism in the Chinese 'communist' state, all justified by 'One Divides Into Two' from Lenin's 'Philosophic Notebooks'. Lenin 'The State and the Revolution' contains the iniquitous statements regarding work in socialism: According to Lenin “He who does not work shall not eat” is a necessary principle under socialism, (from St Paul II Thessalonians 3:10 “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat”). This leads to Stalin and the 1936 USSR Constitution; “The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.". Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed follows St Paul and Lenin as well: “it is necessary to resort to the customary norms of wage payment – that is, to the distribution of life's goods in proportion to the quantity and quality of individual labour”. St Paul, the founder of Christianity, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, the USSR Constitution, and Thatcher, arch class warrior for the capitalist class, in her notorious 'Sermon on the Mound' in Edinburgh in 1988: ““We are told we must work and use our talents to create wealth. 'If a man will not work he shall not eat'”. As socialists we say “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.Martov: “One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part “ in response to Trotsky's “Go where you belong from now on into the dustbin of history".
SteveHegel1844 response on RevLeft forum:Le Socialiste: "Lenin; in fact it can be argued that he, among other major theorists of the period, drew inspiration from Marx and Engels"-SteveHegel1844: The ideas of Lenin in What Is To Be Done? are in contrast to what Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 where they described the proletarian movement as 'the self conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.’ Marx drafted the general rules of the International Working Men's Association in 1864 which began categorically with the line 'that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ In 1879 Marx and Engels felt the need to distribute a circular where they stated: 'when the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry; the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, cooperate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.'Le Socialiste: "There are many reasons to criticize some of what emerged from Lenin and other theorists of the period, but these criticisms shouldn't have to hide behind false representations of what these figures said and did" -SteveHegel1844:Dictatorship of the Bolshevik (Communist Party) over the ProletariatPrivilege of Party membership leading to elitism and NomenklaturaWar Communism prohibited strikes -the only weapon the proletariat have against bosses (Even bolshevik bosses)New Economic Policy – market economy – state capitalismRed Terror – repression, setting up of Cheka, NKVD, OGPU – implemented by Dzerzhinsky on September 5, 1918, described by the Red Army journal Krasnaya Gazeta: "Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood"Suppression of Kronstadt (the reddest of reds) rebellion – Emma Goldman: "The dictatorship under Stalin's rule has become monstrous, that does not, however, lessen the guilt of Leon Trotsky as one of the actors in the revolutionary drama of which Kronstadt was one of the bloodiest scenes"Suppression of peasant anarchist army of Makhno in UkrainePersecution/prohibition/imprisonment/execution/exile of all non bolsheviks, left opposition, anarchists"Lenin's own words in a speech on Economic Construction in 1920 were also revealing when he said: 'the Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at times best realised by a dictator, who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed. At any rate, the principal relation toward one person rule was not only explained a long time ago but was also decided by the Central Executive Committee.'Le Socialiste:"Revolutionary socialists, it is understood, must be inseparable from and responsive to the real shifts, struggles and movements of the working-class" and "The vanguard is not some monolithic, omniscient entity, subordinating its members (indeed, the working-class itself) to its “leadership.” The party plays the role of a guiding organization in relation to the self-emancipatory activity of the masses. As Trotsky noted: "Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam." SteveHegel1844: Lenin wrote that: 'Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness', and that socialist ideas came from 'the educated representatives of the propertied classes' or 'revolutionary socialist intellectuals.', Luxemburg identified 'the two principles on which Lenin’s centralism rests are precisely these: the blind subordination, in the smallest detail, of all party organs to the party centre which alone thinks, guides, and decides for all. The rigorous separation of the organised nucleus of revolutionaries from its social-revolutionary surroundings.'Again: the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves (Marx) – Martov:'the proletarian class considered as a whole is the only possible builder of the new society.'Marx 'Theses on Feuerbach': The materialist doctrine that men are the products of conditions and education, different men therefore the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets that circumstances may be altered by men and that the educator has himself to be educated. This doctrine leads inevitably to the ideas of a society composed of two distinct portions, one of which is elevated above society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.'Martov correctly pointed out that if this thesis is applied'. . . to the class struggle of the propertyless, this means the following. Impelled by the same ‘circumstances’ of capitalist society that determine their character as an enslaved class, the workers enter into a struggle against the society that enslaves them. The process of this struggle modifies the social ‘circumstances.’ It modifies the environment in which the working class moves. This way the working class modifies its own character. From a class reflecting passively the mental servitude to which they are subjected, the propertyless become a class which frees itself actively from all enslavement, including that of the mind.'Le Socialiste: "I do not think Leninism is a dead-end"SteveHegel1844: if Lenin was just an orthodox Marxist as he claims, why would there need to be a separate doctrine called "Leninism"?Leninism is a dead end, it leads into cul de sacs filled with numerous trotskyite splinters, Stalinists, Maoists, worshippers of Che, Castro, state capitalism, the wages system and commodity production, the proletariat still being robbed of their surplus valueThe three things that ruined the working class in Europe and the World in the 20th century; Social Democracy ie Labour Party reformism in Britain and elsewhere, secondly, the First World War, and thirdly probably the most insidious – Leninism and the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917 – diverted the working class away from the socialist message of Marx and Engels into a stalinist cul de sac.
May Day March and Rally in London Wednesday 1st May 2013
Large turnouts from Sri Lankan Frontline Socialist Party (Marxist-Leninist) with banners and framed portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Guevara, Worker Communist Party of Iraq, Worker Communist Party of Kurdistan, MKLP (Turkish Marxist Leninist Party). Trots I came across were SWP, SPEW, WRP, Socialist Appeal, Workers Fight (Internationalist Communist Union), 'Socialist Voice' which represents the International Socialist League. Also the Revolutionary Communist Group with paper 'Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!' Old Stalininst CPGB now CPB there selling the 'Morning Star'. A dozen Stalinists from Harpal Brar's CPGB (Marxist-Leninist) marching behind their Stalin banner and selling copies of 'Lalkar' and 'Proletarian'. I spotted a lone Stalinist selling 'Socialist Revolution' newsletter which represents the AUCPB (All Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks). Trade Unions there included PCS, UNITE, RMT, CWU, UNISON, local trades
union councils from Islington, Ealing, Bromley, Hammersmith & Fulham, Wandsworth Stop the War Coalition, Keep the NHS Public, Islington Pensioners Forum, Justice for the Shrewsbury Pickets (1972 UCATT dispute see Ricky Tomlinson), Free Bradley Manning group. We walked behind a William Morris banner, well, William Morris was on the reverse, on the front was Hammersmith & Fulham Trades Union Council, later we were walking between the Anarchist Federation (lots of black and red flags) and the Worker Communist Party of Iraq. At Trafalgar
Square Christine Blower (NUT), Len McCloskey (UNITE), Paul Nowak (TUC Assistant General Secretary), Jeremy Corbyn MP (attacking UKIP as the "BNP in blazers") were among the speakers. Tony Benn was unwell and could not attend. The General Strike is their answer to cuts, austerity and "callous capitalism" (this latter description to blame for deaths of Bangladeshi garment workers). The speakers talked a good class struggle but… in practice…Thatcher bonfire in Goldthorpe in South Yorkshire:http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/grimethorpe-2/
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”
"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' "
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,"
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.
