Thatcher The Milk Snatcher Passes Away
By Countercurrents.org
09 April, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Margaret Thatcher, the most hated British prime minister of the 20th century, died on April 8, 2013. Victims of her vicious 1980s onslaught against the working class refused to show any sorrow over the final demise of the frail 87-year-old after a stroke [1].
Spontaneous exultation broke out across Britain as news of her death spread like wildfire.
The strongest waves of satisfaction were in former mining and industrial communities ravaged by Thatcher, and among labor movement activists throughout the land.
Following vocal protests, No 10 shelved plans for a state funeral, announcing that she will receive a ceremonial funeral at St Paul's Cathedral.
Thatcher blighted Britain during her ruthless rule from 1979 to 1990.
She once regarded herself as the indestructible goddess of rapacious capitalism, often deploying the royal "We" during her arrogant diatribes.
Overseas she was a friend to tyranny who attacked Nelson Mandela and the ANC as terrorists but praised mass-murdering Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for "bringing democracy to Chile."
In the UK, Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths said:
"The Thatcher governments inflicted enormous damage on the fabric of British society.
"Many working-class communities were torn apart by mass unemployment, poverty, drugs and alcohol abuse as the result of Tory policies.
"She and her regime waged war against organized labor at home, privatized valuable utilities, locked Britain into the EU and revived the readiness to engage in imperialist wars abroad."
Thatcher once branded coalminers striking for their livelihood the real "enemy within" - but Mr. Griffiths said she was the "enemy within who faithfully represented the interests of financial big business.
"She leaves a challenge to the labor movement to rebuild productive industry, restore social justice and regain trade union and other democratic rights."
Spontaneous celebrations took place in Yorkshire, where 50 mining communities were destroyed by Thatcher and her allies after the strike.
Mick Appleyard was a miner and elected National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official at Sharlston, near Wakefield, a typical Yorkshire mining village whose economy was totally dependent on the pit and which was wrecked by its closure after the historic 1984-5 strike.
"She killed my village," he said. "Sharlston is now a low-wage, menial wage economy, for those who are lucky enough to find jobs.
"Our young people are on the streets. There's nothing for them. They turn to drugs and drink because there's nothing else."
And NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen, who was a young miner during the strike, said: "She deserves no respect from the NUM, or any of the working people she put on the dole.
"It's a shame her policies have not died with her - the ones Cameron is continuing.
In another report in Morning Star, Roger Bagley wrote [2]:
As Tory prime minister from 1979 to 1990, she pursued crazed monetarist economic policies, destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs, slashed public spending and devastated Britain's industrial heartlands.
Her star-struck Tory supporters hailed her as a goddess of wealth creation and conquerer of socialism, while millions of angry working-class people saw her - inaccurately - as an evil fascist witch.
Far from adopting fascist economic policies for Britain, she was in fact a fanatical believer in the gospel of unbridled free-market capitalism.
Together with right-wing US president Ronald Reagan, she sowed the seeds of today's global capitalist crisis, and lit the torch of obscene profiteering and greed which was later eagerly taken up by Tony Blair and new Labor.
Thatcher stormed to three successive election victories and ruled for 11-and-a-half years as prime minister.
Her grip on power was aided and abetted by a rabid Tory press - and by serious divisions on the left.
A trendy revisionist fad developed among sections of the left, including some members of the Communist Party, whereby it was suggested that the class struggle was out of date, Britain did not really need its large-scale manufacturing industries and that trade unions should accept their decline amid "the forward march of labor halted."
Thatcher launched a full-scale onslaught in 1984 against Britain's miners, branding the mineworkers' union and left-wing trade unionists as "the enemy within" and mobilizing the police and secret service to harass, infiltrate and destabilize the left during the year-long miners' strike.
She also attacked pensions by cutting the link with earnings, introduced vicious anti-union laws, sold off huge swathes of council housing, abolished the Greater London Council and tightened the central government stranglehold over local authorities.
Yet she managed to con millions of working people into voting Tory.
Some were duped by the quick buck to be made from shares issued to the public following privatization of large public companies such as British Telecom, British Airways, Rolls-Royce, British Steel, gas, electricity and water supply.
These valuable national assets were all sold off dirt cheap amid a sordid "loads a money" spectacular.
Former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan publicly accused Thatcher of selling off the "family silver."
He protested that her government had "got away with the selling of assets on a colossal scale, assets that can never be replaced."
The authoritarian Thatcher steamrollered her policies through a spineless Cabinet at Downing Street without any real discussion.
She avoided promoting women to senior government positions and she ruthlessly purged her male ministers again and again, while the Thatcherite faithful denounced her hapless Tory opponents as "wets."
For some reason, she spared her deputy, the bumbling old-style Tory gent Willie Whitelaw, from the purges. She famously declared: "Everyone needs a Willie."
To consolidate her grip on power, she substantially changed her voice and bearing. She took speaking lessons, deepened her voice and adopted a slower and more deliberate style.
Thatcher believed she was invincible. She frequently referred to herself using the royal "we." She hugely relished Soviet journalists' description of her as the "Iron Lady."
But when the Tories finally summoned up the courage to revolt against her in November 1990, she left Downing Street in tears.
She narrowly escaped death in 1984 when an IRA bomb ripped through the Tory conference hotel in Brighton, killing five people.
On the world stage, two of her greatest heroes were president Reagan and Chilean dictator and mass murderer Augusto Pinochet.
Thatcher refused to support sanctions against the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa and condemned Nelson Mandela and the ANC as "terrorists."
One of her defining moments was ordering the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano with the loss of 321 lives during the Falklands war in May 1982.
The British submarine HMS Conquerer torpedoed the Argentinian warship, even though it was outside the British-imposed "exclusion zone" at the time.
Tory leader David Cameron felt it wise to publicly repudiate Thatcher's infamous declaration that "there is no such thing as society" and he also personally apologized to Mandela for her "terrorists" slur.
But upon winning power, Cameron bared his real Thatcherite fangs and carried to new extremes the Tories' class war assault on the workers, the poor and the sick - launching vicious policies which Thatcher in her day could only dream of.
Margaret Hilda Roberts was brought up in a narrow-minded, austere, petit-bourgeois home in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the daughter of Tory-inclined grocers.
Her father Alfred Roberts was a local councilor for 25 years, representing the Ratepayers Association and the Chamber of Trade.
She graduated from Oxford University with a chemistry degree and married wealthy businessman Denis Thatcher in 1951.
In recent years, she became confused and semi-detached from bourgeois society after suffering strokes and dementia.
The ruling class continued to fete her and the Queen attended her 80th birthday party.
New Labour prime minister Gordon Brown disgraced himself by welcoming her to Downing Street for the unveiling of a portrait in November 2009.
Millions of her working-class victims loathed and despised her to the end.
The Iron Lady in quotes
"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."
"(Victorian values) were the values when our country became great."
"A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us."
"I want a capital-earning democracy. Every man and woman a capitalist. Housing is the start. If you're a man or woman of property, you've got something. So every man a capitalist, and every man a man of property."
"I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end."
"I don't mind how much my ministers talk, so long as they do what I say."
"I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election."
"There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as quislings, as traitors ... I mean it."
"Scabs? Their former workmates call them scabs? They are lions. What a tragedy when a striking miner attacks his workmate. Not only are they members of the same union but the working miner is saving both their futures."
"I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it in one of the papers this morning - Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels."
"And what a prize we have to fight for - no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark divisive clouds of Marxist socialism."
"I like Mr. Gorbachov, we can do business together."
"I was brought up very, very seriously. I was a very serious child and we were not allowed to go out to much entertainment. Going out to a film was a very great treat."
"I don't think I ever went to a dance until I went to university. Dancing was frowned upon by my parents - dancing was forbidden."
Source:
[1] Morning Star, April 8, 2013, Peter Lazenby and Roger Bagley, “The woman who tore Britain apart”,
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/131498
[2] Morning Star, April 8, 2013, “Obituary: Thatcher 1925-2013”,
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/131507
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