Breaking news: Margaret Thatcher has died

[MadImmortalMan]

Here's the comments I mentioned. From the Independent's letters.

Much will be said over the next few weeks about the "achievements" of Margaret Thatcher. These will probably divide between Daily Mailish eulogies and Guardianesque whines. My view is that she was a bad thing for Britain.

She started the transformation of this country into a politically correct police state. Her government behaved with an almost gloating disregard for constitutional norms.

She brought in money-laundering laws that have now been extended to a general supervision over our financial dealings. She relaxed the conditions for searches and seizure by the police.

She increased the numbers and powers of the police. She weakened trial by jury. She gave executive agencies the power to fine and punish without due process. She began the first steps towards total criminalisation of gun possession.

She did not cut government spending. Instead, she allowed the conversion of local government and the lower administration into a system of sinecures for the Enemy Class. She gave central government powers of supervision and control useful to a future politically correct government. Her encouragement of enterprise never amounted to more than a liking for big business corporatism. Genuine enterprise was progressively heaped with taxes and regulations that made it hard to do business.

Big business, on the other hand, was showered with praise and legal indulgences.

Indeed, her privatisation policies were less about introducing competition and choice into public services than in turning public monopolies into corporate monsters pampered by the state with subsidies and favourable regulations, corporate monsters that were expected in return to lavish financial rewards on the political class.

She hardly cut taxes. She ruthlessly pushed the speed of European integration. Her militaristic foreign policy and slavish obedience to Washington mostly worked against the interests of this country.

The one war she fought that might have some justification was only necessary because her own colleagues had effectively told the Argentine government to invade the Falkland Islands.

Before her, trade unions were run by working-class people who used the strike and violence to achieve their ends. She ensured that the unions were taken over by the usual Enemy Class graduates.

Forget Margaret Thatcher as some hero of our Movement. She was, at best, the midwife of the New Labour Revolution. She did not just make the world safe for New Labour – she created New Labour.

Without her precedents and her general transformation of our laws and institutions, Tony Blair presiding as Prime Minister would have been impossible.

Dr Sean Gabb, Director, Libertarian Alliance, London W1

Now THAT'S a neoliberal. 

[Sheilbh]

It doesn't just need to be that. I can see how a lot of people may be disgusted by her questionable record on human rights (support for Pinochet or apartheid, anti-gay policies) without being affected by it.

Just to say I think her policies were generally anti-gay and Section 28 was disgraceful, but her government's response to HIV/AIDS was probably the most robust and effective in the Western world. It stands in contrast both to Reagan and to Mitterrand in that respect, despite her own social conservatism.

[Josquius]

One of them, today, when I mentioned that most of the celebrators at the street parties didn't even look as if they'd been born when Thatcher was PM commented that that also meant they "hadn't experienced the alternative to her that was the Seventies".

There was, definitely, a post-War consensus in Britain on many issues (unwise as I think it was in many respects.) People seem to think that it was broken down by Thatcher. I personally think that it broke down in the Seventies, certainly by the middle of the decade. The poison in British politics that still bubbles up today was born in the Seventies, a decade when the Miners, for example, did successfully hold governments to ransom.

It was the poison built up in the Seventies that burst in the Eighties...and the Eighties pretty much exhausted all sides leading to twenty years of what may in the future be termed the Major-Blair consensus.

I think that people like Shielbh don't really understand how draining the Seventies were on the British psyche simply because they were born after it was over; I can barely get a sense of it myself due to my earliest memories and the hold it has on the previous generation of all my relatives, not just my immediate family. It was a decade when if it could go wrong it did go wrong, where Britain flailed about aimlessly, where the Unions sometimes seemed to run the country...where a generation that had grown up on tales of the War and the semi-dignified retreat from Empire faced the shame of their government needing to ask for the help of the IMF.

History is written by the victors and as such 70s Britain is regarded as being much worse than it was. People I know who were around in the 70s speak quite positively of it.
A lot of stuff was fucked up certainly, the Yom Kippur war was a massive blow to the UK, the entire world economy was in a dodgy place, Heath (iirc) had amongst other things ballsed up the handling of the north sea oil and gas which meant we wouldn't be seeing any payments from it until the 80s.
To mention Heath actually its strange that the 70s get painted as the labour alternative to Thatcher when it was the tories who had defined them. A much fairer comparison than the 70s is the 60s, which by all accounts was a rather progressive time. And as I said earlier things wouldn't have stayed the same forever, she wasn't the only one capable of change.

[garbon]

Lots of people speaking positively of bygone eras.

[garbon]

I'm guessing a part where they haven't had any street parties to celebrate the death of a former president?

That's your bar for "extremely respected?"  I thought you had a better command of the language than that.

Point conceded.

Hey I said the same thing, provided a counterexample and wasn't even snarky to you!

[Viking]

It doesn't just need to be that. I can see how a lot of people may be disgusted by her questionable record on human rights (support for Pinochet or apartheid, anti-gay policies) without being affected by it.

Just to say I think her policies were generally anti-gay and Section 28 was disgraceful, but her government's response to HIV/AIDS was probably the most robust and effective in the Western world. It stands in contrast both to Reagan and to Mitterrand in that respect, despite her own social conservatism.

I read in a different obit that she voted for decriminalisation of sodomy when she was an MP. While Section 28 is stupidly worded, has no real effect on anything and seems to be a pathetic case of harmless pandering to the base it sent a clear anti-gay message that legitimized discrimination. It was banning something that wasn't happening and certainly won't. Banning the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle? WTF? That just takes the cake for stupidity in legislation.

She certainly objected to the concept of a gay group identity (she objected to all group identities outside of citizenship).

[Sheilbh]

I read in a different obit that she voted for decriminalisation of sodomy when she was an MP.

She did, one of the few Tories who did.

While Section 28 is stupidly worded, has no real effect on anything and seems to be a pathetic case of harmless pandering to the base it sent a clear anti-gay message that legitimized discrimination. It was banning something that wasn't happening and certainly won't. Banning the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle? WTF? That just takes the cake for stupidity in legislation.

I think that's the wrong way round actually. It was quite carefully worded and had more effect than it should have. For example lots of bits of education (governors, head teachers and teaching staff) were exempt but schools tended to take a very cautious approach. So there were numerous examples of teachers feeling they couldn't really say anything if a kid told them they were gay, or suffering homophobic bullying in case they were caught 'promoting homosexuality'.

Also lots of charities get some funding from local authorities for specific programs, this meant that local authorities couldn't fund, say, the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard or a charity my uncle founded that worked with male sex workers because they would be classed as 'promoting homosexuality'. The trouble is the people who needed those charities needed them because they would certainly be judged and probably face homophobia if they just went to the police or someone in the NHS.

Those are just a couple of examples but there were many more. By the time New Labour abolished section 28 it didn't matter because other bits of Labour legislation had made it far less relevant, but at the time and through the 90s it was very significant for the gay community.

She certainly objected to the concept of a gay group identity (she objected to all group identities outside of citizenship).

Except 'our people' which she tended to use in quite an exclusive way, rather than, say, MacMillan's expansive 'most of our people have never had it so good'.

[Admiral Yi]

History is written by the victors and as such 70s Britain is regarded as being much worse than it was. People I know who were around in the 70s speak quite positively of it.

For a mine worker it must have been a Golden Age.  Masters of the Universe.  Say jump and the government says how high.

[Sheilbh]

For a mine worker it must have been a Golden Age.  Masters of the Universe.  Say jump and the government says how high.

Again this isn't true. They were among the worst paid workers in Britain, they moved up a few notches after the 72 miners' strike. But even then they weren't one of the militant unions and their pay deals I don't think ever exceeded government wages policy. But they were the union governments feared because of the example of 72 (till then, their only post-war strike).

They became far more militant later on.

[Admiral Yi]

Among the worst paid of *all* British workers?

[Josquius]

History is written by the victors and as such 70s Britain is regarded as being much worse than it was. People I know who were around in the 70s speak quite positively of it.

For a mine worker it must have been a Golden Age.  Masters of the Universe.  Say jump and the government says how high.

Who said anything about miners?

[Sheilbh]

Among the worst paid of *all* British workers?

Yes, well the men at least. What you getting at though?

Edit: Incidentally I'm not a 70s revisionist, there's a trend at the minute with Dominic Sandbrook and others. Though he's a great writer.

[Admiral Yi]

Who said anything about miners?

I just figured the people you knew who had been through the 70s were from your home town.

[Admiral Yi]

Yes, well the men at least. What you getting at though?

I'm wondering if the comparison is only with unionized industrial workers or if it includes people like shop clerks and trash collectors and such.

[Sheilbh]

I'm wondering if the comparison is only with unionized industrial workers or if it includes people like shop clerks and trash collectors and such.

Probably not shop clerks because they were often women. Miners were one of the lowest paid of manual workers in Britain - and that was the lowest paid sector.

Edit: Also how does mining class as industrial?

In the UK binmen were unionised. Their strike was one of the more visible in the winter of discontent: