THE DEATH OF MARGARET THATCHER : AN OBITUARY OF ANOTHER KIND

So sad! So very sad really! On the day that Margaret Thatcher died, thousands of disabled people would hear the news that they were losing their crucial disability living allowance benefits. So very sad! How she would have loved to hear it too. She who’d taken away free school milk from the poorest children. And if she’d heard about riot police in Bristol attacking young people with batons just because they were out on the street celebrating her death, how she would have rejoiced. It was so very much her way of doing things.

So sad she missed it all really. Never mind. Let the removal of Disability and Housing Benefits to the most needy stand as a monument to her name, same as bankers bonuses and bank swindles, corporate tax avoidance, robbery in the City of London, attacks on the Trades Union Movement and of course, her lovely friendship with Rupert Murdoch and their lovely police. Yes, let all these things stand as a glowing tribute. A lasting memory to her dear name. Such a lovely lady! Especially if you’re a scrubby little scrote from Essex.

Really? Don’t you remember her always telling you what was what? And oh what a treat it is to see the whole Tory Rat Pack come out of its box and unanimously coo! Oh what a lovely lady she was! She’d have known what to do with them all in her time, yes she would. A smack on the bottom and back in your cage Geoffrey!

She’s dead. Big deal. So what’s her story?

Margaret Thatcher was a child in the middle. She detested her cold mother and loved her Tory councilor greengrocer daddy who always spoiled her with sweeties. As Daddy’s girl she came to dislike the idea of family as an organic unity with its sense of a collective togetherness. That was something else and so was she. A solitary child. A little individualist. Her individualist childhood without maternal warmth explains much and lays down a pattern for later as her Tory shopkeeper father drove her to become an achiever who loathed the collective idea of family and in time social class, the Trades Union Movement and ultimately the notion of Society itself. ‘There is no such thing as Society’ she once remarked. What for others was a collective concept was for her millions of discrete individuals all working hard to achieve and better themselves just as she had done.

She made the philosophy of individualism her very own political theme. Gave council tenants the opportunity to buy the homes they lived in. Privatized property owners. This set off a gigantic property boom during which house prices rose on a daily basis like an ever expanding bubble. It was a time when the entire population of Essex and the South-East of England endlessly occupied itself looking in estate agents windows to see how much more their house was worth by the hour. It fostered a get rich individualistic conduct which made as much money as work, enabling millions of people to borrow money from banks on the strength of increased values and begin a wonderful time of spending!

Industrial production, as the collective activity of industrial labour had to become marginalized as a class activity along with trades unionism. Their collectivist structures were anathema to her deep psychological sense of individualism that came to characterize her political outlook. Something had to be done to replace them. A new type of economy was required. Fortunately the theory of monetarism was not only ready and waiting but entirely in keeping with her mentality.

On the day of the Big Bang the City of London had all its controls removed. Stockbrokers and share dealers ran speculative riot. The ‘City’ was already perfectly structured for rampant go-getting individualism so on that special day with the controls taken off traders ran wild with other people’s money. It was a time of rampant speculation, takeovers and unashamed piracy. Companies were bought and sold wholesale or merged on promises to pay and millions of workers busy making things soon found themselves unemployed across countless occupations, from mining, shipbuilding and engineering to metalwork and all the automotive trades. All of it happening alongside the juicy fortunes made by her new financial heroes, the individualist piratical speculators who only cared for themselves. A philosophy of libertine individualism ran riot to a chorus of champagne corks popping all over the financial square mile. Her visceral psychology had come home with a vengeance. Soon it spread from the City of London to the mind of the public. It created her very own private electorate filled with the idea that making money was everything and greed no longer a sin. On the contrary, it was a much maligned virtue! 

Soon, with her insistent little foot and contemptuous manner to anything European she became the nation’s favorite lady. One who’d have her way with everything as it had been once before when she was daddy’s favourite girl. She bought people with the right to own personalized property and shares on the cheap in the privatization of State property, railways, electricity, gas, water, British Airways and the bus services. These no longer belonged to a whole people but millions of private individual persons. Shareholders! A once collected people, recently unified by war, were turned into private individual owners. She bought what was once their collected sense of self and sold it back to them on the cheap as little pieces of paper! People became less concerned with each other and increasingly more with themselves, with their own material worth. Her impulsive visceral individualism changed the psyche of a nation. Its emotional nexus was greed!

Of course there had to be losers but that was okay. They were mainly industrial workers up north holding fast to their communities and trades unions. People and things that ran contrary to the new selfishness so had to be suppressed. With the aid of the press, essentially Rupert Murdoch and the Sun newspaper, the police and a deeply reactionary judiciary, they were sneered at, vilified, threatened and attacked on a regular basis. Meanwhile good friends and supporters like Jimmy Savile and other creepy-crawlies were regular guests at Christmas!

It must be clearly remembered and understood. She recreated the entire population of the south of England in her own image and won three straight General Elections in a row. A large majority of people supported her, admired her and gave her their devotion. Became her kind of people. Made in her own image. In love with her forceful individualism. In love with themselves. This was a new self-satisfied, smug lower-middle class . Working people who’d bettered themselves and abandoned what they once knew. Wanted to be materially better than what they once were and she gave them the chance. Just as long as they were prepared to forget everything else. What they once were! Their emotional bonds. Their solidarity. They had to be psychologically privatized. Made cold. Without emotion or warmth, same as a greengrocer’s nickel and silver.

Just consider how this greedy-to-better-themselves south of England working class with lower-middle class aspirations, many of whom worked as clerks or other kinds of dogs bodies in the City of London, along with a small army of tradesmen, must have regarded the industrial working class elsewhere who dug for coal or actually made things? These men and their wives were part of another world being forced into decline as finance and the City of London were on the rise. With Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy of monetarism squeezing industrial production into decline and one set of factory closures following another, this old ‘industrialism’ and its northern working class stalwarts were viewed with loathing and contempt. Like they were already an anachronism out of a past time. It was little wonder that the attitudes of the police towards the striking coal miners up north along with their wives and families were so deeply hostile, callous and brutal. After all, many of them brought in to crush the Strike came from Essex and the South-East of England!

Interesting then to hear Ed Miliband, current leader of the Labour Party, stand up in the House of Commons on a day of political tribute to the deceased, praise her strengths and state his respect for what she did. Interesting too that David Cameron, current Tory Prime Minister, should state his admiration for her because ‘she made Britain strong again’. A rationale which someone on Labour Party benches should have pointed out might just as easily have been made in the case of Hitler and Germany Alas, no-one did! As for their  leader respecting her actions there are simply no words to measure his party’s decline as a force for decency and social equality. So Mr Miliband, you respected her legal crippling of the Trades Union Movement and endless attacks on the working people they are supposed to represent. Respected too her liberation of the City Of London for its endless piracy and swindles, the consequences of which so many people in Britain suffer today!

Yes Margaret Thatcher has died and the eulogies are flowing. A sea of eulogizing and tributes already gushing out of that great sewage faucet of old Tory colleagues, disgusting Labour Party political creeps who discarded values of fairness and decency long ago and journalist hacks from the gutter press stables. Yes, she taught them all well. Made them all in her image too and that indeed is her legacy. That so much of this country is less warm, less humane for her cold sterile childhood. That so called ‘steely determination’ in her never really came from any honorable convictions. Only a need to find her place in a broken family environment.           

Finally, regarding these tributes, perhaps the most disgusting of all comes from Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Stalinist bureaucrat with whom she once famously declared she could do business. Of course she could! At the time of the Coal Miner’s Strike he promised her supplies from Russia to help break it if needed, after which, as we know, he handed his country over to gangsters, speculators and on the make criminal exploiters who stole whole industries and indeed, most of that country from its citizens before taking their loot and leaving for Cyprus where the Germans later gave them a haircut.

IF YOU’VE FOUND MY OBITUARY TO MARGARET THATCHER INTERESTING AND ENJOYED READING IT  PLEASE RECOMMEND IT TO YOUR FRIENDS: DON’T LET THE PEOPLE WHO SUFFERED AND STRUGGLED SO MUCH DURING HER TIME PASS OUT OF HISTORY IN VAIN.

“The weight of this sad time we must obey,

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”

Exeunt, with a dead march.

 

Shakespeare  KING LEAR