Compassion for the Dead:
Sometimes it’s hard to find.
After a frantic day, a day we’ve contemplated with unabashed relish for the past decade, it’s difficult to marshal my thoughts about the departure of Margaret Thatcher. I seem to recall Martin Luther King once said something along the lines of “Don’t let them drag you down to hatred”. In any case, I’ve never liked the term ‘hate’. It’s a corrosive emotion, yet even for the most compassionate soul, especially in the case of the Grocer’s Daughter, it’s sometimes difficult to avoid.
I opted for no TV tonight. I could not stand another phalanx of ITV and BBC reporters trotting out the same old clichés; “She won three elections; she was the first woman Prime Minister; but she divided the nation…” Yes; even the warped lickspittles of modern British media are forced to concede that final point.
So, I poured myself a stiff Laphroag Single Malt, rolled a cigarette, and decided to watch the film which stirs (for me) most of the poignant emotions which sum up the Thatcher era; Brassed Off. It’s only a movie. The working class are played, albeit convincingly, by well-heeled, famous actors. Yet no film, and that includes The Full Monty, comes close to stirring the anger and resentment engendered by the Thatcher years. She was a woman with part of her soul missing. She liked to talk, as do the Bullingdon Club Boys, about people ‘working hard’ and ‘wanting to get on’. Yet like her political descendants, she possessed no understanding of the people who simply wanted to get through the day, eat three square meals, watch some TV and go to bed. Capitalism’s rule dictates that if you are not part of the mechanism which culminates in profit, then you are, in Himmler’s words, the untermensch. Sadly, there have always been more of this social designation than Maggie and her political offspring could shake a stick at. Isn’t ‘work’ enough? Does it always have to be ‘hard’ work? Can we not exist without the whiplash command of ‘getting on’? Getting on to what?
I was, and remain, a working class creature of ambition. My ego dictates to me that I should write. I dream that people will read my words; I care not if they like them or hate them, but like the hundreds of talented miners who have studied music, learned to read it, and play their brass to international standards, I have a duty to my class to prove that I am more than simply a beast of burden. But for Margaret Thatcher, driven by her anally retentive grocer’s mind set, when it came to providing her puppet masters with profit, I and millions like me would be a write-off. She hated the thing which makes a proletariat great; the sense of community. She told the gullible generation of her term in office that society did not exist. She hated the working class, despised our brilliance and originality, and yes, she despised us because we simply wanted to live under a fair system, earn a fair wage, have a bit of fun and be left to our own devices. We did not provide profit. That is a cardinal sin.
MAGGIE WITH ONE OF HER REGULAR HOUSE GUESTS (well, when General Pinochet wasn't available...)
Yet, as Goebbels amply proved, propaganda works if you repeat the same lies over and over. Thatcher’s successors have taken Goebbels’s diktat, dusted it down, polished it anew, and now repeat, repeat and repeat; ‘benefit culture’ ‘work shy’ ‘’dependency’ etc. etc. etc. For every speck of grime on a worker’s hands, every smidgeon of coal dust on a miner’s brow, Thatcher has spat her venom by the bucketful, and now it is gathered and fermented by the new breed of fiscal fascists to pour over our hopes and dreams in the hope it will melt us into subservience.
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So you won, Maggie. We have no worthwhile industry apart from the arms trade; we are America’s MacDonalds/KFC/Pizza Hut/Burger King service economy poodle. You have given us a new corporate world of phoney ‘customer care’, a money machine run by criminals who would make the Mafia blush. And if, after 1985, we had carried on our final battle against your ideology, then yes, I do believe that your servile love affair with Reagan and the murderous General Pinochet would have driven you to making the UK into one big Guantanamo.
Do I say ‘rest in peace’? No. You’ve had all the peace you were entitled to. Wherever you are, above or below, prepare to meet not only your maker; because the boys from Orgreave are coming, the dead young men you sacrificed for your election in the South Atlantic, the thousands whose dreams you trampled into the dust. And for your successors, ask yourselves this; how long do you think ‘decent, hardworking’people will put up with being driven into penury, robbed, twisted and lectured to by you and your cosseted, privileged well-heeled ilk? A change is coming. Expect us, and prepare for retribution.