UK: Margaret Thatcher

[migrendel]

Let me just say that Margaret Thatcher is perhaps the most hated international figure within American socialist circles, so she's stirring up passion on both sides of the Atlantic. Let's start with her extreme low points: the Community Charge and Section 28. The Community Charge was too much for even the most free-market absolutist Tories, because any tax which has the primary effect of oppressing the poor must be rejected by anyone of good will. To say that Richard Branson should pay as much as the lower classes in Sedgefield, Rhondda, and the Jarrow is lacking in common sense and despicably unreasonable. Section 28, however, continues to gall me. If a person of ability can be precluded merely because they take a male lover shows what little stock Thatcherites put in their own beliefs. They think a person should advance if they work hard and make good. But they place a caveat in that if someone admires others of the same gender. Norman Tebit was about as repugnant as they come. If places like Brixton are burning to the ground, perhaps it's not being done for kicks. Perhaps young people don't have a job or university to get up for in the morning, put their energy into, and come home tired and feeling good about being productive in the evening. Comments like the "Cricket Test" one seem to indicate the increasing prescence of British Fascism. As for the mining communities, Maggie should have helped their plight, even though some pits really needed to be closed because we can't compromise the environment. Socialists, from Olof Palme with his nuclear energy plan that led to his defeat by Thorbjorn Faldun in 1976 to British Laborites today, often fail to realize that if we lose our air, land, and water, we lose our lives. The Falkland Islands War was indefensible. Fighting to defend the last remnants of imperialism and racism, concepts that cost millions their lives, was irreconcilable with apparent wisdom in the year of grace, 1982. The sinking of the General Belgrano was also a war crime that should have had her before a tribunal in The Hague. She's just a miserable harpy that should save time and energy by having a dance floor installed on her grave.

[migrendel]

Margaret Thatcher's dogmatic commitment to the free market prevented her from seeing the forest for the trees. When she was going about controlling inflation by controlling income taxes and the money supply, she failed to notice that the British economy was suffering under a tripled unemployment rate, at its peak 14%. Similar figures were to be seen during the poll tax imbroglio. When she privatized British Steel, she had her ruthless aims of turning a profit in mind rather than the fact that British Steel had served its nation's people before her extreme Monetarism. Actions such as that made her the most unpopular PM since polls were taken early in her term. Such extreme incompetency would indicate that both Michael Foot and the leaders of the Alliance would be better choices for leading the nation, as would Neil Kinnock, Jim Callaghan, or anyone else you could think of in the Labour, Social Democratic, or Liberal parties.