margaret thatcher

[IanEye]

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[Seamus OBlimey]

Dancing on Maggie's grave: How the Left 'celebrated' Baroness Thatcher's death with smashed shops and anarchy in the streets
Two women arrested for burglary after being found inside a shop
Barnardos shop front smashed in Brixton, south London
One policeman seriously injured after being pelted with bottles in Bristol
Death could propel Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead into the top 40
Glasgow, Liverpool and Derry were also the scene of celebrations
Petrol bombs were thrown at police in Derry amid celebrations
More parties are being planned for funeral date of Wednesday 17 April

By Jill Reilly

PUBLISHED: 08:58, 9 April 2013 | UPDATED: 19:24, 9 April 2013

Hundreds took to the streets as macabre ‘Thatcher death parties’ were held late across the country last night, organised by critics of the 'Iron Lady.'

In Bristol, seven police officers were injured - one seriously - as violence erupted at a street party of 200 people and officers were pelted with bottles, cans and rubbish.

Riot police were deployed in Brixton, south London, as the crowds, which had been drinking since 5pm, started to become more aggressive, while in Liverpool flares and fireworks were set off outside Lime Street Station.

etc..

Mail

[justdrew]

If something is broken, you fix it, not destroy it.

here's a little shot of her empty rhetoric. It's bullshit, but it's like crack.

and it highlights what I TRY to harp on... We need solutions not endless critiques of the other "sides" problems. and a basic narrative structure that is practically the SAME...

[JackRiddler]

Ha, I wrote this in early May, 1997:

From: International Community Vol. IV No. 3, June-July 1997

POLITICS

Son of Thatcher Meets His Mayday - "Vile Maxim" Persists
A political obituary for John Major & Co.

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." Adam Smith, in his classic work on the Wealth of Nations, referred thusly to the "great proprietors" of his own time, men who benefited from the "silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures" and "had not the least intention to serve the publick. To gratify the most childish vanity was [their] sole motive..." (Book III, Ch. IV).

Today's "free market" fundamentalists commit posthumous libel when they claim the socially-minded Presbyterian minister Smith - an early advocate of universal public education - as their forefather, for "the vile maxim" is theirs. "Society," Margaret Thatcher once remarked, "does not exist." Only greed is real: to hell with anyone who is in the way.

Thatcher's "dynamic economy" registered one of its great export successes in the disposal of Japanese nuclear waste - Britain's top source of yen in the eighties. The Sellafield "reprocessing plant" accomplished this feat through regular "planned releases" of radioactive material into the Irish Sea. If it's not an accident, it must be safe, and the Toyota and Nissan transplants that then came to England surely prove it. The costs of cancer cases are mostly on the other side of the sea and thus efficiently externalized, according to neoliberal accounting - and in keeping with Britain's imperial tradition of dumping on the Irish.

If, after that and many comparable achievements, the governments of the "Iron Lady" and her aluminum successors actually needed to announce their moral bankruptcy, then they did so with vigor last summer. Continental countries had the temerity to suggest they might not want to accept imports of contaminated British beef. Proud Albion trumpeted tones otherwise reserved for declarations of war, and threatened to blockade all EU business. The pliant commissioners in Brussels soon backed down: the ineffective regulation they resolved was then further gutted by the council of agricultural ministers. It need never be put before the European Parliament. Something to contemplate as BSE, hushed up by the British government for years, crops up among cattle and canines in Switzerland, Germany, and France. [[NOTE: The beef ban was stiffened after this was written.]]

Never lacking for theatricality, the Conservatives appropriately scheduled their own electoral obliteration for May 1st, the international day of labor. "New Labour" under Tony Blair - a smoother son of Thatcher than Major could ever hope to be - is unlikely to change very much, but the symbolism accompanying the demise of the West's original neoliberal regime is appreciated.

The Tories leave behind a legacy of catastrophe. The occasional spurts of "growth" over the last two decades have been the coincidental bounty of North Sea oil. As the business pages wistfully recall this golden age with statistics purporting to show Britain's economic success, allow me to add three figures that aren't normally mentioned:

Forty-three percent: in 1987, the best general-election results polled by the Tories in any of their four "landslide victories" since 1979. Thanks to the "first-past-the-post" electoral system, they were able to impose their "revolution in British society" as a minority dictatorship. When urban voters impudently elected local councils who refused to toe the line of austerity, the Thatcherists responded by abolishing the municipal governments of the country's six largest cities, placing them under Westminster's direct control. Imagine the President of the United States firing the mayors of New York, LA, and Chicago, albeit on a year's notice; the equivalent happened with the Greater London Council in 1986.

Thirty-two: the number of times British governments have legislated changes in the way unemployment is counted since 1979. This resulted in a lower rate on thirty-one occasions - surprise - causing Britain's "jobs miracle." The statistics exclude anyone unemployed for more than six months ("not looking"), anyone receiving health benefits, even if they are looking ("disabled"), and homeless people ("non-existent"). According to a study by Britain's largest bank, Hong Kong and Shanghai (HSBC), if Britain counted unemployment the same way Germany does, its rate would be two percent higher than Germany's (taz, 22 April). Who was it that said you could get away with any lie, as long as it's big enough? The statistically-vanished still know that they exist, however, and they will, as they have in the past, announce it.

Fifty percent, plus or minus a bit due to currency fluctuations: the average individual's wage in Britain, compared to Germany - down from near-parity in the late seventies. After breaking unions, removing fiscal supports, privatizing everything down to the water supply, and witnessing partial deindustrialization, Britain is now the envy of German bankers and executives. "How can we maintain this?" Porsche boss Wendelin Wiedeking asked two months ago, explaining his firm's decision to leave the automotive employer's alliance, thus backing out of the German system of comprehensive wage agreements. "The wages in Britain are half of Germany's, and everyone's known it for years."

Would that the effects of the Thatcherist "experiment" could have been quarantined on an island. In the age of "global markets" they are more contagious than mad cow disease. Beyond the devastation at home, the Thatcherists served as the advance troops for two decades in an international class war from above. Their actions constantly mocked democracy and their own putative "family values." They pioneered the system of yuppie opportunism for the few, and McJobs for the many, that conquered America and is now befalling the continental holdouts.

And they poisoned the meat. Enjoy your burger, Europe.

© 1997 Nicholas Levis

This was published in a Berlin mag of the time called "International Community."

It got some fan mail:

British Embassy Berlin Office
Unter den Linden 32/34
10117 Berlin


Dennis Romeo
(Address)

Dear Mr. Romeo,

The publication of Nicholas Levis' highly offensive article about Britain in the June-July issue of International Community discredits what professes to be a serious international journal.

Please take the British Embassy Berlin Office off the distribution list for your magazine.

Yours Sincerely,

J.F. de Waal
Press Officer

[8bitagent]

So much of the most innovative bands and some of my favorite all time groups came out of a time when England was either in dire straits economically or socially. It's strictly from the Callaghan and Thatcher period when all the bands I like come from(Joy Division/New Order, Wire, The Fall, Public Image Limited, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, The Specials, Fad Gadget/Frank Tovey, Human League, Depeche Mode, etc )

[AhabsOtherLeg]

A lot of my favorite American artists come from a time when Jim Crow was still in force, but I wouldn't want to go back to that. I'm afraid Rebecca Black's "Friday" is just the price we pay for freedom.

I remember Marilyn Manson saying he was happy (as an artist) that George W. Bush had been elected, because few things encourage good protest music more than a conservative philistine in control of the country. But what did we really get from those years? Marilyn Manson and the White Stripes, I suppose. Not really a good deal, all things considered. There were other good bands about, certainly many who were a lot better than Marilyn, but I can't even remember them off the top of my head. The Clinton years were much more productive.

Come to think of it there were loads of crap bands in the Seventies and Eighties as well, and they were far more popular at the time than the innovators. What was the social and economic impetus behind the Bay City Rollers? What was their message?

We'd have no Billy Bragg (or a much reduced one) without Thatcher though, that's for certain.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Unions were out of control in the dreary depressed UK when she took over, the country looked like 1951, and she schooled them in her version of austerity and deregulation.

I don't know, the unions certainly had their problems and bad practices, but it always makes me laugh when people say they were undemocratic or that they were "dinosaurs" - this in a state where Lords, many of whom still live in castles, have an input on legislation by right of blood, and where Bishops of the Church of England are still automatically allowed to sit in the upper chamber of our Parliament.

Thatcher (like Nixon) enjoyed portraying herself as an enemy of the old Established order, and a believer in pure meritocracy, but she was very selective about where that meritocracy was imposed. She did not impose it, for instance, in the Conservative Party. Instead she deliberately surrounded herself with lame ducks by appointing them to high office (just like Gordon Brown, who admitted more than he knew when he claimed to have "inherited her mantle") because they were easier to bully and control.

England prospered by cutting away dead weight.

Some parts of England prospered... mainly the Square Mile. The problem, I suppose, is that England isn't the whole of the UK, and London isn't the whole of England, and The Square Mile isn't the whole of London... but trying to get a Westminster party (whether Labour or Tory) to acknowledge that has always been very hard work. They want to have the power that comes with ruling the whole of the UK, and occasionally the world if they think they can get away with it, but they don't seem to want to take responsibility for governing these places in the interests of anywhere but London and the South East of England. If vast swathes of their domain fall into wreck and ruin they are not too bothered so long as the money keeps rolling in. When it stops rolling in (Poll Tax non-payment starting in Scotland and spreading across the whole of the UK) governments fall. That's what finally got rid of Thatcher.

She continued the crimes in Ireland, and many other unpleasantries, yet was she any different than any other Tory?

Not very different. To quote Martin Amis (which I should stop doing someday):

"Mrs Thatcher is the only interesting thing about British power politics; and the only interesting thing about Mrs Thatcher is that she isn't a man. Tricked out with the same achievements, the same style and 'vision', a Marvyn or a Marmaduke Thatcher would be as dull as rain, as dull as London traffic, as dull as the phosphorescent prosperity, the boutique squalor, of Thatcher's England (or its southeastern quadrant)."

True dat. Compared to somebody like Peter Lilley her rhetoric against socialists and "the enemy within" was
carefully restrained, and she always delivered it with that weird tutored serenity, making the irrational hate sound like good old-fashioned common sense rather than the kind of spit-flecked nonsense you might hear from some pub-bound Daily Mail reader or BNP candidate. Even though they were often saying exactly the same things.

Check out Peter Lilley, briefly a Minister in her Cabinet before she got the boot, for comparison:

Vilifying the frontman in these death schemes is just what the elites put them out there for, making us who engage with these cults of personality in any form, ultimately, dupes.

Yeah, but that's what's instructive about Thatcher in particular. Like you say, there is no lesson to learn from her "philosophy" - she didn't have one. She introduced monetarism and neoliberalism to the UK, but she didn't understand them herself, and didn't have to. The only thing we can really learn from her is that politics is just a performance now. She was such a clear example of what you are talking about. She was an actress (like Ronnie was an actor) but she had to be re-built from the ground up to play the role.

Saatchi & Saatchi invented her style, Gordon Reece decided how she would dress on TV, Daniel Galvin helped construct that monstrous sci-fi coiffure. Even her voice was fake, the result of strenuous elocution lessons that succeeded in lowering the pitch by a full octave. Meryl Streep probably had to do less work to become Mrs. Thatcher than Mrs. Thatcher did.

Gah, I'm going on too long again. Anyway, you make good points.

[MayDay]

Alan Moore once said that he wrote The Watchmen in response to Thatchers England. He wanted to use a future Reagan as the Commander in Chief, running for his fourth term, but decided that it would unnecessarily alienate his American readers, so he went with Nixon instead.

[FourthBase]

A lot of my favorite American artists come from a time when Jim Crow was still in force, but I wouldn't want to go back to that. I'm afraid Rebecca Black's "Friday" is just the price we pay for freedom.

I remember Marilyn Manson saying he was happy (as an artist) that George W. Bush had been elected, because few things encourage good protest music more than a conservative philistine in control of the country. But what did we really get from those years? Marilyn Manson and the White Stripes, I suppose. Not really a good deal, all things considered. There were other good bands about, certainly many who were a lot better than Marilyn, but I can't even remember them off the top of my head. The Clinton years were much more productive.

Come to think of it there were loads of crap bands in the Seventies and Eighties as well, and they were far more popular at the time than the innovators. What was the social and economic impetus behind the Bay City Rollers? What was their message?

We'd have no Billy Bragg (or a much reduced one) without Thatcher though, that's for certain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_the_Moon

The Dark Side of the Moon was an immediate success, topping the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart for one week. It subsequently remained in the charts for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988. With an estimated 50 million copies sold, it is Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album and one of the best-selling albums worldwide.

Not innovate-y enough? Not leftist enough?

How about Stevie Wonder at his mid-late-70's peak? Not original enough, socially conscious enough?

[coffin_dodger]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22093181

Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead headed for the Top 10 music chart

[The Consul]

Much has been made of Maggie and Ronnie. Rumor has it they were both fans of the Sex Pistols. She had some of Sid Vicious' razor blades, the blood which she licked off with her own tongue. Reagan, it is said, had developed a passionate love for the lead vocalist and took to draining grails full of Johnny Rotten's spit.

[seemslikeadream]

[Jeff]

Margaret Thatcher dead: 10 key quotes from Glenda Jackson's speech on the former Prime Minister

1. "Thatcherism wreaked the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country"

2. "It’s a pity she did not start building more and more social houses after she entered into the right to buy, so perhaps there would have been fewer homeless people than there were"

3. "During her era London became a city Hogarth would have recognised"

4. “We were told it was going to be called Care in the Community. What in effect it was was no care at all in the community"

5. "Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue"

6. "If we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from”

7. "People knowing under those (Thatcher) years the price of everything and the value of nothing"

8. "I’m beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis of the spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side"

9. "If we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from”

10. "A woman (Thatcher) not on my terms"

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ma ... ey-1823133

[AhabsOtherLeg]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_the_Moon

Not innovate-y enough? Not leftist enough?

Lacking in ideological rigor.

"Money" in particular strikes us as facile and weak, and neglects a class-based analysis.

How about Stevie Wonder at his mid-late-70's peak? Not original enough, socially conscious enough?

There is no place for Superstition in the materialist dialectic!

Not all popular music is bad though. We here at the Worker's Girder still enjoy Middle of The Road's classic anthem "Where's Your Mamma Gone?", since it celebrates Comrade Stalin's justified purge of fascist elements in a tuneful and catchy manner.

[IanEye]

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if you tell him he's livin' fast
he will say,
"What do you know?
If you had my kind of cash, you'd have more than one place to go."

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