Acres of newsprint, hours of broadcast time and unimaginable amounts of online words have already been devoted to the controversial legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday aged 87.
So much so that I feel like I’m back in the 1980′s already. Considering David Cameron and his generation of Conservatives are Thatcher’s children perhaps it was inevitable this decade would return to haunt us.
On hearing of Baroness Thatcher’s death I tweeted that I wasn’t going to celebrate while Thatcherism was alive and well. That said, it was somewhat uplifting to read that the Wizard of Oz Judy Garland song Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead has entered the music charts.
At least that is easier to listen to than Elvis Costello’s 2001 dirge Tramp The Dirt Down, which imagined the passing of the former Prime Minister.
The tune that best sums up Thatcher’s time, in my opinion at least, is 70′s Baby Early 80′s Child by Nightmare on Wax featuring Roots Manuva, which reflects on issues like the Sus Laws, the Brixton riots, the recession and the miners strike as well as London inner city life at the time.
This was the Thatcher I remember. Watching from my bedroom window as a National Front march filed past and seeing NF graffiti sprayed on walls everywhere. Hearing stories of police oppression and listening to the despair of working class.
I was nine in 1979 and could barely comprehend why my parents were so upset at her election, but by the time she won again in 1981 I’d reached my teens and came to see Tory rule as posh people being mean-spirited towards the poor.
The slow crushing of the miners and then the Wapping print-workers and the pitched battles of the Poll Tax seemed to represent an effort to subjugate the under-class beneath the will of the rich.
Everything I saw backed up this theory. If you weren’t a share-owning Loadsamoney yuppie you were nobody in Thatcher’s Britain. From Cardboard City in Waterloo, where seemingly hundreds of homeless slept together, to the demonisation of single parents, it was a cold hard world where the recession and despair was reserved for half of the country while the other half thrived.
As industries collapsed communities were plunged into hopelessness and unions were crushed. It felt like war had been declared on working people with the aggressors being Thatcher and her ilk.
Added to that she called Nelson Mandela a terrorist despite the widespread knowledge of the terrors of apartheid South Africa and claimed Britain was being “swamped” with immigrants, yet not a word that I can remember about the Sus Laws.
My overriding emotion when I think back to these times is one of resentment that all this happened. If you were poor you were made to feel poorer. As jobs and opportunities vanished the power transferred to the bosses class. They had the whip hand over ordinary people and could bend us to their will. We had to like it or lump it.
One of Thatcher’s lasting legacies has been an unacceptably high level of ‘structural’ unemployment that has remained ever since, even through the good times.
It’s almost as if the political classes decided that in order never to return to the days when the trades unions could bring Britain to a grinding halt over a dispute the country must maintain an under-class and unemployment in order to keep the power with the capitalists.
That, in my book, is class war. Albeit not the variety we normally associate with the phrase. That is how I shall remember Margaret Thatcher; a class warrior. We, the masses, were on the defensive, seemingly powerless to stop the juggernaut of capitalism rolling over us. And increasingly desperate as the years rolled by with no end in sight to Tory rule.
The 1980′s seared a wound on my very core against Thatcherism. I became tribal, not towards Labour particularly even though I joined them, but against Conservativism. Every Tory looked like a Thatcherite to me, their motives were viewed with deep suspicion.
If I have mellowed over the years its’ not been by much. I filter their policies and words through the prism of two essential questions: does this benefit the rich, and does this harm the poor? The answer to many of the present Tory policies is ‘yes’ and ‘yes.’ And that takes me right back to the 80′s.
So while I won’t condone those dancing on the streets after hearing of Thatcher’s death I won’t condemn them either. Because the psychological scars Thatcher inflicted upon Britain’s working class need to be healed, and if dancing them away is what does it for some people then so be it.
After the Tories were finally defeated in 1997 I tried to forget about Thatcher, but when close friends exclaimed that they felt sorry for her after watching Meryl Streep’s depiction of an old woman suffering from dementia I tried hard to suppress a welling up of anger from my gut.
How can they feel sorry for that [insert appropriate words here]? Dementia or no dementia, she deserved no sympathy in my book. But I kept such feelings firmly under wraps. It was hardly worth getting into a tizz over someone from so long ago in the past, surely?
It did make me realize that perhaps even after all these years I’d never really gotten over Thatcher. Her name still provoked strong negative emotions.
Today hearing Tony Blair condemn those who celebrated Thatcher’s death on the streets I wondered where Blair was during her rule? Anyone who lived at the sharp end of the 80′s would understand their reaction.
As far as I’m concerned she can’t be buried fast enough. The knowledge that she’s finally six feet under will hopefully allow me to recover from Thatcher. That will be the moment when I say, “okay, that’s Thatcher’s gone, now there’s really no excuse for Thatcherism!”
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
