Margaret Thatcher death party - Trafalgar Square, London, 13 April 2013

Repost - information only

An Analysis...
The Guardian live stream confirms 3,000 attended last night's "official" Thatcher death party in London's Trafalgar Square - which, for those critics who claim this event was "insensitive", to put the moral issues in perspective, is only slightly more people than were murdered by Thatcher's great friend, the monetarist pioneer General Pinochet, and alot less than died of superbug infections after the Tories privatised the cleaning of NHS hospitals! All in all a good turn-out for an event that was conceived 20 years ago by an activist group that doesn't exist any more, and all the more impressive for people making the effort at short notice and in the pouring rain.

At present the BBC and Daily Mail etc are wildly under-estimating attendances and seem to be down-playing the level of confrontation, of anger and of disruption, mindful, no doubt, especially in The Daily Blackshirt's case, of how their hysterical opposition to anti-Thatcher protests helped draw attention to articulate and well-informed criticism of Thatcher's poisonous legacy, thereby seriously damaging the carefully-manufactured spectacle of adulation, which the far-right media hoped they'd be able to manufacture and to retrofit on history (not to mention, again in The Daily Mail's case, helping draw attention to their own track-record of outright Fascism). As the Met Police themselves confirmed on TV, (quoting almost verbatim) the police won't be able to search everyone at Thatcher's funeral, and the "reputational damage" caused by even one protestor with a tin of paint or box of eggs will be massive, but in some senses the metaphorical can of paint has already been thrown.

Despite the fact that most critics of Thatcherism endured and lived through the bullshit from day one, a few (notably BBC) reporters grasp at straws, trying to imply it's somehow odd that younger critics of Thatcherism didn't live through Thatcher's personal reign. The implication that younger people aren't entitled to an opinion about events they're still living with, amounts to an attempt to discourage young people from learning about history (which is, of course, exactly what the right-wing would prefer young people do). However it's now very clear that, as a result of the monetarist politics pursued in both Thatcher's UK and Reagan's USA, de-regulation of the financial sectors and attacks on unionised industry placed employees, taxpayers and ultimately entire economies at the mercy of financial crooks, but Thatcher's legacy also lives on in employment practices that allow for instance the exploitation of interns. Once radicals fought to secure workers a decent living wage, now, as a direct medium-term outcome of Thatcher's attacks on organised labour, many young workers struggle for the right to earn ANY wage! In many cases the same corporations that cheat on taxes are actively subsidised by the ordinary parents who support those interns, and that same legacy also damages the lives of salaried employees, as, day-in-day-out, cowed and hen-pecked staff acquiesce to ever-increasing pressure to neglect their families and work late into yet another evening...

Meanwhile the right-wing media are trying to airbrush history, dishonestly re-packaging a Prime Minister who bitterly opposed the Anti-Apartheid movement, as someone who somehow deserves credit for helping bring down Apartheid.

We care about history because we care about posterity... Keep up the pressure... Fight Back!

William Godwin
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