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 she was 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

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 primary school 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. More importantly, 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

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 finance industry, 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 in strikes, 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 economy where 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 increasingly confident 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

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 and immediately 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.

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 the University 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,

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 by the 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 their victims). The police started using the old SUS laws to stop and

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 in terms of ruling class strategy was the co-option of ethnic minorities which later became Multiculturalism. In the artificial state of the six Counties, Thatchers reactionary impulse had serious and tragic consequences. As the Eirigi article, Thatcher is dead: capitalism and imperialism are not http://www.eirigi.org/latest/latest090413.html, puts it and is worth quoting 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 and criminalisation 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. From 1979 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 rearming 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.

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 in pursuit 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 a disempowering and divisive cul-de-sac.
Thatchers instinct, shown in her response to the IRA, the riots, the miners strike as well as Argentinas invasion of the Falklands was to use force, intimidation and every part of the strong arm of the state. While not particularly astute herself, she had enough low cunning 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 they werent up to scratch. For those writing her obituaries, these traits add up to a sign of her leadership qualities but for those at the receiving 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

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 of 323 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 the world 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. This isnt 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.

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. There was 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

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 unfairness of 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, the same 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 nonpayment 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 leadership and 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

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 Thatcher did. 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 fought for a better way of life. While Thatcher is no longer with us, the stinking corpse of the system still is.