the stinking corpse of margaret thatcher

7/28/2019 The Stinking Corpse of Margaret Thatcher

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The stinking corpse of

Margaret Thatcher

Introduction

The long awaited death of Margaret Thatcher and her subsequent

funeral has brought out the expected gushing tributes, some of

which border on the unhinged. One obscure former British

Conservative politician described the situation in the country in

1979, when Thatcher came to power, as the same as in Greece now

which is a travesty of the facts; she also went on to say how

Thatcher had helped make the world the place it is today. Every

possible retired politician and minor celebrity has jumped on the

bandwagon of paying their respects trotting out the line that shewas a great friend, mother, leader and lot more nonsense. All the

mythologies that have grown up around Thatcher (she won the Cold

War; emancipated the poor to become entrepreneurs etc.) in the

past have reappeared in the obituaries with knobs on.

On the other hand, the same people are horrified that there are

people in Britain who are celebrating her death. The liberal press

who have written handwringing editorials condemning Thatchers

record as divisive (To call her policies divisive is to miss the point;

they were meant to that) but at the same time qualifying that with

weasel words of admiration, are outraged at the disrespect shown to

her. For my part, it is only good that people havent forgotten the

class war that she engaged in against the working class in Britain or

the completely avoidable Falklands war or the relentless war against


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the Republican community in the 6 counties, her support for the

South African apartheid regime and labelling Nelson Mandela a

terrorist, amongst many other things that could be mentioned.

This opposition makes it even more absurd that she is getting a

state funeral that is costing $10 Million at a time when vicious and

continued cuts are being made across the country. The logic of the

funeral is that it hammers home to the proles that the woman

responsible for the destruction of thousands of lives did her job in

reversing the gains of the post war period, destroying working class

communities and making the country safe for the rich again.

Before Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, as the political entity she became, didnt just

appear out of the blue. Prior to being headhunted by sections of the

right in the Tory Party to stand against Ted Heath after his defeat

in the 1976 General Election, her only notable appearance in the

public eye was when she cut off the supply of free milk to primaryschool children, earning herself the name Thatcher the milk

Snatcher. However, she was well known within the party for her

robust right wing views.

The context to Thatcher becoming leader of the Tories, then PM

wasnt just dissatisfaction with Ted Heath for losing two elections in

a row but also about the policies he had tried to implement. Moreimportantly, there was a broader argument not just confined to

Britain that can be only understood against the background of the

previous decade and the slow ending of the post war boom. The

ruling class towards the mid to late Sixties was beginning to feel the

pinch as profits began to drop (The world wide rate of profit began

to decline from around 1968) and were resenting what they saw as

top heavy state interference and control in industry (Its worth


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pointing out that a substantial part of British industry was

nationalised. For instance, the mines, gas, electric, railways, post and

telecommunication and the steel industry were all under state

control). There were also strict controls over the banks and financeindustry, as well as tight restrictions over the amount of money that

could be taken abroad,

At the same time, with a Labour government in power in Britain,

albeit one that was trying to implement wage control, there was a

perception that that the tide was going too far in the direction of

the working class. This view was heightened by the increase instrikes, often unofficial, that was bumping up wages and improving

conditions. As the Seventies began, strikes and militancy increased

and Heath was persuaded to loosen regulatory powers over the

banks, especially secondary banks, in relation to credit and lending.

Whether Heath was stupid or nave or both is open to conjecture

but he thought this move would lead to a German style economywhere banks invested directly into businesses thus ensuring a solid

base for research, development and growth. Instead, inevitably, he

created a credit led boom where money was doled out with few if

any controls. The result was an economy out of control with rampant

inflation which was only made worse by the 1973 oil crisis. By the

time Heath realised his mistake it was too late. This toxic mixture in

the economy allied to a series of confrontations with an increasinglyconfident working class caused a sense of crisis exacerbated by

power cuts and the 3 day week.

Heath called an election in early 1974 explicitly on the question of

who rules the country? The government or the trade unions? As

Heath lost the election narrowly to Labour under Harold Wilson, we

can assume the answer was the unions rather than Heath. The


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following five years have now become part of the Thatcher

mythology as mentioned earlier: Labour led the country into a bigger

crisis than already existed under Heath. The reality is somewhat

different. In capitalist terms, Labour did relatively well andimmediately began to get inflation under control.

Things were stirred up more in 1976 when through the machinations

of Washington and the governor of the Bank of England, Wilson was

bounced into going to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for

assistance to halt the run on the pound. The IMF wanted stringent

cuts in the welfare budget before they would bail the country out.Wilson refused to cut as severely as they had wanted but he still got

the loan. However, deep cuts were made and Labour began to

enforce a limit on pay rises despite the still high inflation, meaning

that any wage increase below the level of inflation was essentially a

pay cut. The inevitable result was a series of strikes by low paid

workers that were dubbed the winter of Discontent by the press.

Extensive TV coverage of rats in the street because of strikes by

binmen and overflowing mortuaries due to action by hospital porters

stoked up the sense of crisis in the run up to the election.

Chicago and beyond

Perhaps inevitably in this atmosphere, and with the judicious use of

the race card taking the wind out of the sails of the fascist National

Front, Thatcher became Prime Minister and the Monetarist

experiment began. Funnily enough, this is another part of the

mythology, as Wilsons successor as Labour Prime Minister, James

Callaghan, had already implemented deflationary measures as well as

significant cuts to state expenditure, as had his predecessor;

Margaret thatcher just went further, as did her later successors,

Tony Blair and David Cameron.


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Monetarism, essentially the same failed economic policies that led to

the Great Depression of the 1930s had become popular again

through the work of Milton Friedman, he of the absurd theres no

such thing as a free lunch statement. From his position at theUniversity of Chicago and his weekly column for Newsweek

magazine, he began to spread the gospel of the free market as a

counterpoint to the Keynesian state interventionism that had

become the dominant economic theory since the depression. For the

capitalist class, Friedman was a godsend; here was someone who

advocated the lessening of state intervention in the economy until it

did only the bare minimum, the lifting of all exchange controls and

the repeal of laws restricting economic competiveness.

Friedman also struck a chord in that his theory raised the possibility

of dramatically reversing the gains made by the working class in the

post war period. The world capitalist class wasnt just suffering

from decline in their profits but was also pissed off at their right to

rule being questioned around the globe. Its easy to forget now but

the spectre of communism in the shape of the Soviet Union was still

around and it became easy for lazy politicians to begin to equate

state control with communism, something the U.S. right still does.

The USA itself had just been humiliated in Vietnam by the Vietcong,

national liberation movements were beginning to take power in Africa

and on the doorstep of Britain, there was an on-going civil war.Monetarism with its built-in anti-working class impulse fitted the

capitalist class like a glove, best illustrated by the aftermath of the

CIA supported bloody coup in Chile on September 11th 1973 where

acolytes of Friedman, implemented a shock and awe version of neo

liberalism that rolled the state back over the heads of a defeated

working class. No wonder that the murderous General Pinochet

became a good friend of Thatcher. Britain wasnt an aberration,


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monetarism was a world-wide response; from Reagan in the USA to

the Labour Party in New Zealand, the capitalist class resorted to its

fall-back position of making the working class pay for the crisis.

Old medicine, new doctor

Once in power, the first British female Prime Minister let the forces

of the market crash into the British economy causing in 1979-1980,

the worst recession there since the 1930s. By 1983, inflation was

down to 4% from the 10.5% it was at the election but unemployment

had doubled to three million. Whole swathes of manufacturing were

decimated as well as the steel industry despite a defensive strike bythe steel workers. Thatcher aware of the significant role of the

miners in bringing down the Heath government in 1974, appointed

the butcher of British Steel, Ian MacGregor, as head of British Coal

to hasten the already growing programme of pit closures. Together

they also put a plan together to provoke a strike in the coalfields

with the aim of crushing the union and destroying the industry.

Alongside the economic devastation caused by the new regime,

reaction began to raise its head immediately. While Thatchers

notorious statement about people feeling swamped by an alien

culture helped ensure the collapse of the National Fronts (NF) vote

at the election, there was a dramatic rise in racist attacks. This was

exacerbated by many attacks being completely ignored by the police

so black and Asian people just stopped reporting them as there was

no point. Even worse, with the entry of Thatcher into No. 10, the

police saw it as a green light to crackdown on what was seen as black

crime, i.e. mugging and drug dealing, backed up by a racist press

campaign (In case Im accused of being a liberal here, later analysis

showed that in areas of high black concentration, the majority of

muggings were committed by blacks but so were most of theirvictims). The police started using the old SUS laws to stop and


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harass anyone who was black as a form of preventive intimidation

which in effect became a form of social control. The outcome was

the wave of riots that swept England in the summer of 1981 with a

ferocity that shocked middle England. The long term outcome interms of ruling class strategy was the co-option of ethnic minorities

which later became Multiculturalism.

In the artificial state of the six Counties, Thatchers reactionaryimpulse had serious and tragic consequences. As the Eirigi article,Thatcher is dead: capitalism and imperialism are nothttp://www.eirigi.org/latest/latest090413.html, puts it and is worthquoting at some length, as it is better than I could write:

Margaret Thatcher viewed the Six County statelet as a colony of

Britain and treated it with the same disdain and contempt that all

imperialists have for their territorial possessions and for all those

who reside therein.

The embracing by Thatcher and her ministers of a previous British

governments policy of Ulsterisation, normalisation andcriminalisation led directly to the hunger-strikes of 1980 and 1981,

and the long drawn out agony endured by prisoners families and by

communities across Ireland as, one by one, ten men died in a defiant

and defining prison struggle.

From1979 until 1990, Thatchers policies in Ireland gave rise to the

primacy of policing and the policies of shoot-to-kill implemented by

the RUC and by covert British Army units; gave a central role to

MI5 within the Six Counties in formulating counter-insurgency

policy; led to the formalisation of the policy of collusion and the re-

arming of unionist death-squads and their direction by the British

state; the use of lethal plastic bullets; and the introduction of an

unwritten policy of immunity, still in existence, for members of state

forces and their agents involved in the murder of Irish citizens.


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Thatcher epitomised the mindset of the right-wing political and

military establishments in Britain who, like others before, believed

that the use of force, coercion and terror could bring about the

defeat and demise of a legitimate popular struggle being waged inpursuit of Irish freedom and a yearning for the creation of a society

wherein all citizens would be treated equally.

While she failed in achieving her objective through those means,

Margaret Thatcher also came to a more circumspect conclusion that

if the popular struggle could not physically be defeated, it should be

a brought to a point where that struggle could be compromised,

neutered, bargained with and, ultimately, directed into adisempowering and divisive cul-de-sac.

Thatchers instinct, shown in her response to the IRA, the riots, theminers strikeas well as Argentinas invasion of the Falklands was touse force, intimidation and every part of the strong arm of thestate. While not particularly astute herself, she had enough lowcunning to surround herself in each particular circumstance with

those who had the ideas and vision to accomplish what she wanted.She also wasnt afraid to jettison erstwhile allies if she felt theywerent up to scratch. For those writing her obituaries, these traits

add up to a sign of her leadership qualities but for those at thereceiving end of her vision the consequences could be fatal.

Sweeping away the pAST

Thatchers attitude to the Hunger Strikers and Republicans in

general mirrored that of her attitude towards the miners and

anyone else who stood in her way. She claimed to have sympathy for

the deserving poor; by that she meant, those who meekly accepted

their fate and didnt attempt to change their circumstances by

anything other than the state sanctioned legitimate way. In reality,

she had the mindset of a capitalist class warrior, summed up by her


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phrase during the miners strike, that the miners and their

supporters were the enemy within.

For Thatcher herself, her key achievements were probably the

victories in the Falklands War, which turned around her fortunes in

the eyes of the public and led to her winning the 1983 election, and

in the Miners strike. In terms of class struggle, the latter was by

far the most important but the former showed up her callousness

and indifference to the lives of ordinary people. An unnecessary war

over a small rock was prolonged by her refusal to discuss any

diplomatic solution though it would have been possible. The death of323 sailors on board the General Belgrano was a deliberate move,

the rules of engagement were changed to accommodate it and the

Belgrano was outside of, as well as moving away from the exclusion

zone that was designed to show onlookers that she was ruthless to

the core and had no qualms about justifying killing her enemies.

If the war cemented Thatchers reputation as a strong leader on theworld stage, the real pivotal event of her premiership was her

defeat of the miners during the epic 1984-85 strike. It was the

culmination of her earlier changes to the trade union laws and her

victory over the steelworkers and others. The architect of that

attack, Ian MacGregor took the helm and ably assisted by a motley

crew of state assets, agents and renegades, not mention a

militarised police force took on the union movement and won. Thisisnt the place to go over the entrails of the strike but suffice to

say that the usual, and expected, betrayal by the leaders of the

trade union movement and the Labour Party all helped in the defeat.

So did Thatchers use of the divide and rule tactic in regard to the

on-going dispute with Liverpool City Council. This time to avoid a war

on two fronts, she made concessions to them; the following year, it

wasnt necessary so she was free to defeat them.


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It was never a foregone conclusion that the strike would lose but

the lack of backing, but Thatcher either bought off the other

parties, e.g. NACODS or Liverpool City Council or as in the case of

the TUC and Labour Party, victory seemed worse than defeat. Therewas also a flaw at the heart of the strike; the refusal by Scargill to

call a strike ballot. While the principal of refusing to call a ballot on

the grounds that miners were already on strike for their jobs was

fine in theory, it was, in the context of the situation on the ground

in some areas, a tactical mistake. Far better would have been to

carry on the strike while balloting the whole union. It could have

prevented the split in the NUM and also provided momentum for

activity at the beginning of the strike. Another mistake was reliance

solely on the tactics of the miners strikes of the 1970s without

looking to develop new ways of struggle with of course some

exceptions. Of particular note, were the Miners support groups, the

Women against pit closures group and the unofficial hit squads who

sabotaged coal stocks amongst other things.

The aftermath of the strike with the decimation of mining

communities as a result of mass closures spread the message that

Thatcher was invincible, though of course that wasnt true. For

Thatcher, the defeat of the NUM was a personal triumph, signalling

to every other group of workers that resistance was futile. That

message was more quickly absorbed by the trade union bureaucrats,whose goal became, even more urgently, the election of a Labour

government.

Thatcher now became more and more and more convinced of her own

invincibility, with the privatisation of state controlled industries

going ahead, the sale of council housing and the beginnings of an

economic boom. Her goal of destroying the notion of working class

solidarity and turning everyone into aspiring individuals seemed well


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on the way. Ironically, it was this overconfidence that brought about

her downfall. The introduction of the Poll Tax, a straight tax that

didnt take into account income or house value meant that a

millionaire would pay the same as a pensioner. The obvious unfairnessof this meant it was always going to be difficult to implement.

However, Thatchers antipathy to the Scottish working class made

her decide to introduce it in Scotland first as a pilot scheme then

roll it out to the rest of the country. This moment of hubris was a

step too far; a large campaign of non-payment began to grow in

Scotland and when the tax was imposed in England and Wales, thesame thing happened again. The culmination of the protests in a huge

police-engineered riot in Trafalgar Square in March 1990 shook the

establishment in general and the Tory Party in particular. Hadnt

Thatcher promised that this sort of thing was gone for good? The

riot aside, and there were smaller ones around the country, the

campaign of non-payment was focused in local working class

communities; exactly the type of thing that Thatcher had tried to

destroy. Her infamous quote, Theres no such thing as society came

back to haunt her as local groups fought off evictions for non-

payment of the tax.

By now, it was clear that Thatcher was bonkers, referring to herself

as we and becoming increasingly distant from her colleagues; so it

was no surprise when she was eventually ousted from her leadershipand replaced by the grey John Major and shuffled off into the

sunset. Once she had left office, the mythologies around took root

and grew even more quickly than before and were still being trotted

out at her funeral.

Mythologies


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Thatcher never did anything original in her time in office; she just

turned the clock back to before World War Two and applied the

normal capitalist template of attacking the working class. It was the

period from 1945-1970/2 that was the anomaly, not what Thatcherdid. She may have done it in her own particular way but she wasnt

unique. She wasnt a particualry strong leader either; witness the

concessions she made in signing the Maastrict treaty for example.

Neither did Ronald Reagan and her win the Cold War; The Soviet

Union was in sharp economic decline before the 1970s and the hype

of the new Cold War in the early 1980s jsu increased the pressure.

The East European satellite states showed signs of economic and

political crisis from the the late 1970s and the Solidarnosc events in

Poland were an ominous sign.

What thatcher did do, was situate herself as the figure who could

make a difference with Gorbachev, partly due to his Iron Lady

comment, partly due to her long time anti communist stance but also

due to her self-assumed mantle of champion of freedom. As ever

with Thatcher, the Empresses clothes are threadbare.

The most pernicious myth of all is that Thatcher, as a woman,

opened up an empowering new space for women; as husband Denis

was a millionaire, this might be expected to only apply to those with

sposes with similary large bank accounts. In reality, it is an insult to

all the women who have struggled to survive in capitalism and foughtfor a better way of life.

While Thatcher is no longer with us, the stinking corpse of the

system still is.

the stinking corpse of margaret thatcher

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