Breaking News - Margaret Thatcher Is Dead

It is 12.50 BST and the BBC Radio 5 has just announced the death of Margaret Thatcher. Before all the tributes start pouring in to the 'Iron Lady' and all that stuff, I want to record the views of someone who opposed Margaret Thatcher throughout her reign of terror and have been a sworn opponent of Thatcherism from the day it was born as a slogan.

I remember the early 1980s very well. I was an undergraduate during the first three years from 1980 until 1983, but not of the kind that mounted challenges to see how many people could fit into a telephone box, for the local TV news silly slot, during rag week japes appreciated only by the middle classes.

No.... I was more the kind of student who had two small children to support and a need to survive on what would now be seen as a gift from Heaven, a student grant. Nevertheless times were tough and by the time I graduated in 1983 they were getting tougher under the Thatcher regime.

I was rewarded for obtaning an honours degree in 1983 with two years of unemployment despite numerous attempts to find work at the height of the structural unemployment that was at the heart of Thatcherism.  I don't therefore simply disapprove of Margaret Thatcher or disagree with her politics (although I do both of those things as well), but between me and her it is highly personal. She and her hangers on and her advisors and allies did me and my family a lot of harm. The desolation of poverty and unemployment drove me to become active and to found an unemployed action group in the midland town where I was then living.

The action group comprised of around 20-30 members (not including the children of members) and in the early to mid 80s we did a lot to resist the worst effects of Thatcherism, the isolation and the maginalisation of the voiceless, jobless, invisible masses The sort of thing the unemployed activists did included:-

Mutual child care arrangements

An Unemployed Action Group Allotment where we grew free food for members.

Mutual credit and small short term loans at no interests between members.

Community education events including day schools and music.

Squatted a derelict school building for 6 months.

Negotiated council accommodation for homeless families

Put on Open Day at the Squat with food, crafts and music

Raised the profile of the Unemployed making the previously invisible, very visible.

Billetted flying pickets (soon to be made illegal) at the Squat during the Miners Strike.
Building a BMX track for local kids

Turned out on the picket lines in the early morning.

Ran a food stall for striking miners familes every Saturday for the entire year of the strike....and a lot of other things too, we were never out of the local newspapers for one reason or another. Hidden we were not.

When I wasn't involved in doing that I was getting a CND bus to RAF Molesworth a US airbase in Cambridgeshire to protest against Cruise Missiles and demand their removal (which eventually happened for geopolitical reasons anyway). The opposition was not simply about domestic issues confronting the US military and British civil police was getting involved in foreign policy and geopolitics. The resistance was on many different fronts.

Then of course there was the Poll Tax, the policy that finally brought Thatcher crashing down...I was very active in the anti-poll tax union and that was one of the main reasons my phone was tapped at that time maybe it still is... who cares, nobody except loan sharks ever call me anyway lol.

I was at the famous Poll Tax demonstration that became a rather spectacular riot in central London on Saturday 31 March 1990. It was the massed ranks of the British people who opposed this unfair tax that finally drove Margaret Thatcher, snivelling into her hankie, out of 10 Downing Street in November 1990, just seven months after Trafalgar Square looked like a medieval battlefield.

We the opposition never stopped attacking Thatcher and the government she had gathered around her. She was the enemy and our detestation could not have been felt more deeply after her attacks on us as individuals and upon our communities and neighbourhoods. Many of those mining communities she decimated have never fully recovered from what Thatcherism has done to them.

To me and to all of my former comrades in the anti-Thatcher alliance, she was the Queen of Greed, the nanny that the public schoolboys in her Cabinet masochistically gave themselves up to be spanked by. All that the Thatcher government's ever stood for we utterly rejected and absolutely despised.

It is not an exageration to say that within my social circles we hated Margaret Thatcher and all she stood for with a burning passion during the 80s and 90s.

So how do I feel today, the day she has died?

Nothing much really, I don't hate her anymore and as that wonderful 17th century Metaphysical poet John Donne once wrote (here in its original form which was not a poem)

 "No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee...."

So that's how I feel about Mrs Thatcher's death, she had an effect upon my life and it was not a good effect for which I have never really forgiven her and I have no qualms about that, but we move on.

She was a warmonger, a bully and an overbearing presence, but like us all her death was inevitable and I'm prepared to shrug my shoulders and move on, but please don't try to tell me about her virtues, they have never impacted upon me at all, they have never driven anyone I know to desperation in the way her policies often did.

The government we have now is an potentiation of the toxins first distributed on this side of the Atlantic by Margaret Thatcher and it is they that take up all my loathing energy quotient now, no time to worry about old scores with a poor demented woman in her 80s, she's gone and that is it. No tears from me and no eulogy either.

My Thatcherite Years