Not much doing

Given that I was in town after work and I'd heard there was a gathering on the mound at half five which I thought might give me a chance of a blip. No sign of much happening by twenty to six though. Not like Glasgow which was much more active.

On the subject of today's news though, I'm not going to be wildly celebrating someone's death, however at the same time I'm never going to forget her actions or her legacy which we are all reaping just now.

The Glasgow Coalition for resistance have summed a lot of it up far better than I can so here's some of their words:

1) The woman whose anti-Trade Union policies reduced the power of collectivism to zero, and who decimated the employment rights of working class people everywhere. As a result, employers were legally permitted to replace proper meaningful jobs and apprenticeships, and exploit workers on perverted government schemes, paying them just £25 pounds per week in the process. Right-wing, extremist social and economic policy, espoused by the likes of Friedrich Hayek & Milton Friedman was to become the order of the day, and at it's peak, over 3.6 million people would be out of work and on the dole.

2) The woman who massively widened the already obscene gap between the rich and the poor, as her supporters in big business, the newly privatised utilities, and the arms and defence industries made billions. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the word 'underclass' entered the public vocabulary for the first time. For millions of people, Thatcherism represented nothing more than crippling unemployment, homelessness, poverty, crime, drug abuse and hopelessness. For the elite Thatcherism represented an opportunity for the rich to get even richer by asset-stripping the country, as the orgy of greed that was Deregulation, was spun to look like something that the nation should be proud of, rather than the obscene, carpet-bagging, feeding frenzy that it actually was.

3) The woman who actively promoted selfishness, and disdain for those less able, with her infamous 'no such thing as society' mercenary attitude, and who almost worshipped greed and opportunism as virtues. On 23rd September 1987, she told journalist Douglas Keay: "People say 'I am homeless, the Government must house me', and so they are casting their problems onto society, and who is society ? There is no such thing ! There are individual men and women, and no government can do anything except through people. People must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves". Dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, sink or swim, and I'm alright Jack - the very essence of Thatcherism, and her cold-hearted, wicked, vindictive, self-serving policies. Despite having no mandate to govern in Scotland, where she was rejected at the ballot box three times; three times she returned her illegitimate administration to power. And for eleven and a half years, her despotic, vindictive and spiteful policies were imposed upon the working class peoples who openly and democratically rejected her. Hell hath no fury like a dictator scorned, and she was to exact an awful toll for such rejection. People who drew strength from their working communities, were to have those communities erased before their very eyes. The weeds would relentlessly grow, where for centuries there was working life.

4) The woman whose atrocious employment policies favoured those who kept her in power, at the expense of the working class people who actually generated the wealth. During her reign 250,000 people in Scotland lost their jobs as coal mines closed and industrial giants such as Ravenscraig Steel Plant were shut. A highly skilled industrial workforce, was annihilated at the stroke of a pen. Heavy industry, at the time was inefficient, heavily subsidised, and in need of modernisation. Instead of operating on the patient, Thatcher switched the life support system off. The subsidies could be used as tax breaks elsewhere, to reward those middle and upper classes, who kept her in power. Secure, full-time employment in manufacturing, engineering, and heavy industry was replaced with low paid casual, temporary contract work in the call centre, fast food, and service sectors. In the process, worker's rights were eroded to almost zero. An almost fanatical anti-Europeanism ensured that it would be many, many more years before Britain entered parity with the rest of the European Union on worker's rights and minimum wage levels. In many cases, parity is still a long way off.

5) The woman who led a campaign demanding that General Augusto Pinochet be set free, after he was detained in the UK under an international arrest warrant from Spain, who were seeking his extradition to face charges of war crimes. The vile dictator, was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of workers, socialists and other political opponents; presided over mass executions, torture and rape; and was openly described by his evil admirer, as 'a bastion of democracy' and the man 'who brought democracy to Chile'.

6) The woman who called mass-murdering dictator Suharto 'one of our very best and most valuable friends'. Suharto, with the full backing of obscene capitalists like Thatcher, waded to power through rivers of blood, as more than a million people were slaughtered and the whole population was held in fear of their lives for over 30 years. In the genocide that decimated East Timor, Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, gunned down innocent men, women, and children with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns, fired from British-supplied Tactica 'riot control' vehicles and received military training in counter-terrorism techniques from the British SAS. Such were the levels of premeditated violence meted out by the Kopassus in East Timor, the elite Special Air Service Regiment of the Australian special forces ceased training with them.

7) The woman who ruthlessly and brutally ordered the sinking of the General Belgrano, to undermine impending peace talks and enter the Falklands War, to boost her flagging ratings at home. After being tracked for nearly 36 hours by the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror, the Belgrano was was sunk by three torpedoes on May 2nd, 1982, despite being well outside a 200-mile exclusion zone, and heading in the opposite direction from the Falklands. Nothing short of wanton pre-meditated mass murder, in order to facilitate a political goal, and cynically attempt to regenerate flagging ratings. War is VERY good for business, and Thatcher viciously and ruthlessly capitalised on this premise. If a few thousand Argentinian men need be needlessly slaughtered in the process, then so be it. The working classes did have some uses though, and to sustain her war for ratings, 258 British soldiers were sacrificed as cannon fodder. Sueing the British Government at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in July 2000, human rights lawyer Teresa Moya Dominguez, representing the families of the 323 murdered sailors, stated : "It is now the right moment in history for this. What we want fundamentally, is for the sinking of the General Belgrano to be recognized as a war crime."