The title: I can't bring myself to call myself one of Thatcher's children. I don't want that sort of association.
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On the 3rd May 1979, we had a bereavement in
the family. My pet hamster decided to choose this day to depart from the world.
My father immediately suggested that Humphrey had made a sensible choice. Not
even a hamster should have to endure life under Margaret Thatcher.
At the time, I had just become a teenager and my views on
politics were largely influenced by my parents and the many discussions we had
throughout my childhood that ranged from crises in the Middle East to
mismanagement of local politics from our Conservative local Councillor
neighbour who lived across the street.
We hear about the legacies that people would like to leave
to their children, so often in monetary terms. I will never receive a financial
legacy from my parents because they never had much money, despite my father
being a head teacher, and I hope my mother lives long enough to use all the
equity in her existing house to sustain her into old age. However, one of the
greatest legacies they have left to me started when I was a toddler – that is
the gifts of political thought, empathy and discussion.
Politics was an integral part of our family life. At some
point during the War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel at the end of the
60s, I walked into the kitchen to see my mother bent over the radio listening
to the most recent atrocities in that part of the world. Deep in thought and
restraining herself from crying, she continued to listen to the report of
murder, destruction and annihilation – and I silently joined her. To a four
year old girl, carefully ensconced thousands of miles away, this world of
violence was incomprehensible, and I turned to her and said, “Don’t they
realise that they’re killing each other’s brothers and daddy’s?”
And there was my first political statement – full of
unreasoned hope and ideology with a strong sense of compassion that has essentially
shaped the next forty plus years of my life.
Discord to harmony, error to truth, doubt to faith,
despair to hope – I thought my father would explode. He wasn’t an angry person.
He rarely became over-heated or aggressive and yet here he was on the 4th
of May 1979, getting out of his seat and waving a finger at the television
shouting, “How dare she!” as Thatcher quoted from the Prayer of St. Francis on
the steps of 10 Downing Street.
“She’ll destroy this country!” was his next prophetic
statement, but even he had no comprehension of the extent of such a comment.
So how was Thatcherism for me?
A friend of mine recently said that she was “too young to
appreciate her [Thatcher’s] politics at the time”. Although I understood what
she meant, I recounted her words with astonishment because this friend is
exactly the same age as me, and I was painfully aware of Thatcher’s politics at
the time – from the moment she got out of the car in Downing Street in 1979 to
the time some eleven years later when she stepped tearfully back into the car
to be driven away.
Yet I was one of the lucky ones. My parents were both
employed in public sector jobs that were relatively secure. I wasn’t living in
a mining area, blighted and scarred by the civil and class wars that became an
integral part of my latter teenage years. My brothers didn’t go off to fight in
a seemingly pointless war on the other side of the world. I wasn’t a member of
an ethnic group who would be victimised and abused as some sort of scapegoat
for the state of economic decline in the country and I didn’t have my sexual
choices deemed to be unfit for “promotion” under the Clause 28 agreement.
However, my childhood and my early adulthood was still
drastically affected by the rise to power of this woman, and with careful and
considered thoughtfulness on the part of my parents, I was never allowed to
ignore the impact that Thatcher and her policies were having on people in this
country and globally.
At this point, it’s also worth mentioning the importance
of creativity and the expression of others. On first reflection, Thatcher
herself may not have had a direct
bearing on my life that influenced the choices I made. On second reflection,
her attitude, behaviour and mentality did
have a significant and direct bearing on the choices I made in life. Yet others
who creatively displayed their heart-felt concerns about what she was doing to
the country were the first to impact on my thoughts during Thatcherism.
Alan Bleasdale is one such person. Thirty years on and I
am still deeply affected, even wounded, by the portrayal of hopelessness that
was shown through the characterisation in “Boys from the Blackstuff”. The
despair on the face of Angie Todd, played by Julie Walters, as she saw her
husband – brilliantly portrayed by Michael Angelis, disintegrate in front of
her is an incredibly strong memory, as is the removal of Yosser Hughes’s
children, kicking and screaming, as they were taken away by social services
from a man whose sanity had failed him in the depths of overwhelming
despondency. Whilst these particular characters were fictional, there were real
living and just about breathing people who were far from fictional, attempting
to survive as Thatcher and her policies destroyed their lives, their living and
their communities. That wasn’t fiction.
Peter Fluck and Roger Law, together with the rest of the
Spitting Image masters, managed to satirise with such accuracy that the
caricatures almost became the people that they were mocking. From my student
accommodation, I remember with absolute clarity the stunned silence that befell
the room when the final moments of the 1987 General Election Spitting Image
Show occurred – “Tomorrow Belongs to Me!” In that instance, we knew that we had
another four years of that woman, and it felt like a real kick in the teeth, no
a kick in the heart and the soul. The despondency I’d witnessed a few years
before watching a television drama came flooding back. The nightmare was
continuing, and I just couldn’t understand why people couldn’t see!
In 1982, I started my O-Level course and had the
‘pleasure’ of reading Orwell’s “1984” for my English Literature coursework.
Simultaneously, I was studying Stalin in history. Both of these extreme
dystopias were evident in my life too. Even a pathetically naïve youngster such
as me could see some synergy between what I was learning and what was happening
in my country – and it chilled me to the core.
I can remember distinctly sitting in a mobile classroom
(the 1930s school was falling down and has only just received funding from the
disestablished Building Schools for the Future funds to rebuild on the neighbouring
field – the one that wasn’t sold off for the quick buck of housing) when there
was a scurry of activity coming from the sixth-form block. At the end of the
lesson, we went to find out what was happening, and it transpired that one of
the British ships beginning with ‘A’ had been attacked in the Falklands. Fatal
injuries were reported. Confusion and concern was paramount. Our friend Richard
was on board the “Ardent” or the "Antelope" and his twin brother had just heard about the attack
on the news.
The futility of the Falklands conflict (I won’t grace it
with the Hawkish term war) had already been a subject of intense scrutiny in
our household, and here was that futility personified, living and breathing in
the form of a friend called Richard who could easily have been dead in a
far-off land. The next few days were excruciating as we awaited news. The
outcome was positive. Whilst he had been injured during the explosion, he was
alive but many weren’t.
And many were alive but barely living. You couldn’t
possibly grow up in the West Midlands without seeing with your own eyes what the
unbearable truths of Tory policy were doing to our people. The long and
abandoned factories of Darlaston and Wednesbury could just about be seen from
certain parts of my school. My uncle, who’d spent a lifetime working in the
Rubery Owen – the ironworks, was given a list of people to speak to prior to
its ultimate demise; a year short of its centenary of production. It was his
job to go and tell them that their services to the company were no longer
required. With the job completed, he walked back to the management rooms and
was then told to add his name to the top of the list of redundant workers. He
still talks of that moment today.
By the time I was 18 years old, the Miner’s Strike was in
full flow. For my 18th birthday, my parents hired a minibus and my
family, together with a few friends, travelled to North Wales for a breezy day
by the sea. One of these friends was a history teacher at my school by the name
of Alun Thomas. It was this man from the mining valleys of South Wales that was
driving the minibus when we were stopped by the police as we travelled back to
Walsall. One look at this stocky, dark haired and obviously welsh man was
enough for us to endure a series of questions to ensure that we hadn’t just
driven down from Nottingham or Sheffield – and if we had? Was that suddenly a
crime? Secondary striking was – yet another
infliction on our civil liberties.
The strike continued and again, the visual memories from
that time continue to haunt, particularly this week. I remember travelling to
Wales and seeing the lines of army vans with metal grids over their
windscreens, transporting the scab coal to the steelworks in the North of the
country. Police vans escorted them on their journey as striking miner’s draped
their banners over motorway bridges proclaiming their rightful protestations.
And as for those television images of civil war between miners and police in
Yorkshire, well I wince at the thought. It’s just too painful.
I did my small bit, the only thing I could do. Spending a
year on the dole myself as one of the “One in Ten” that UB40 used to sing
about, I travelled to that groups home town every Monday to study in the
Central Birmingham library. At the bottom of the station slope in New Street,
stood a miner with that infamous bright yellow “Coal not Dole” sticker. From my
‘income’ I donated a pound each week into the donation bucket at his feet. I
wonder where he is now.
Onto college and I became embroiled in student politics
and proudly marched amongst the 120,000+ crowd in November1985 as we took to the
streets to protest about Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and our government’s
refusal to participate in economic sanctions against Apartheid. The
Commonwealth countries took a vote. The outcome was a resounding plea to commit
to sanctions with 49 voting for sanctions and 1 against. Thatcher couldn’t
agree with the consensus. When asked about her unbelievable stance with such a unanimous
conclusion, what was her response when asked how she felt about being the only
person to vote against sanctions? “I feel sorry for the other 49!”
How can a person be so blind to injustice and unfairness
when all about them are united? Her truth was her truth and she was going to
stick to in spite of any argument or debate put to her. When even some of her
political or ideological allies were trying to explain the error of her ways,
she vehemently and steadfastly refused to consider for one minute that she
might just be wrong. Ultimately, of course, she was proved wrong. Sanctions worked.
She was wrong about other things too. London needed a
local government. The power of the Inner London Education Authority and the
Greater London Council intimidated her, so she stamped on them, because she
could. Like a rabid dog who tastes blood for the first time, her thirst for
further political dominance was seemingly unquenchable. Not satisfied with
ruining the lives of so many miners, she paired up with her great pal Murdoch
to smash the unions once more. Of course, new innovations meant that the press
had to change but it was the manner in which it was done that was so
devastating and thoughtless, and let’s not forget that there’s a wealth of
evidence that the mines could have been financially viable, if you had the will
and the nerve to stay in the game and look at the bigger picture.
There are many other memories of Thatcher and what her
policies did, including the delights of training a fascist dachshund to bark at the mere mention of her name, but this piece of writing is too long already. We could all write
books of our personal recollections and why we feel so passionately about the
harm this woman did, and they are all relevant and pertinent even if only to
ourselves. Thatcher wounded and killed people through her policies. Let’s not
shy away from this fact. People died. They lost their lives because of her
policies. As I said, I was one of the lucky ones. But I lost something too.
I lost my political party.
I appreciate this is just my personal opinion and one
that would be staunchly debated amongst my socialist friends and family but
with the Jack mentality and the dismissal of society and communities (only
individuals and families) she took away the normality of togetherness, of
empathy and of equality. No wonder she wasn’t fond of the French with their
national slogan of “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite”.
She pushed party politics to a middle ground that is a
void of nothingness with no reason or conviction. That’s not to say her own
politics was embedded in “middle”-ness. Far from it! But overcoming the philosophy
of Thatcherism meant that an utter dilution of justice and fairness ensued,
under the premise that anything was better than a continued diet of
Thatcherism. Because of this, I have
felt disenfranchised for most of my adult life.
It will take further writing to explain this in detail but her statement
that one of her greatest achievements in life was the emergence of New Labour
is not funny. Let’s remember, she had no sense of humour by her own admission.
As Glenda Jackson so brilliantly said, “everything I had been
taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under
Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker,
sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward.”
And it’s this that not even my insightful father could
see, as he shouted at the television about how this woman was going to destroy
the country, which makes me so despondent. Yes, she was radical. Yes, she shaped
society – and she never said it didn’t exist, she just didn’t believe in it.
And now for a final comment.
At 10.50 on Monday 8th April 2013, I was
sitting in my brother’s house doing some work when I saw him charging through
the garden with his fist victoriously raised in the air. I rushed out to him
and all he had to say was “She’s dead!”
Instantaneously, I knew who he was talking about and
exploded into a fit of multiple “Yes’s” as my bemused children looked on.
Expletives followed, as did a question of confirmation as to whether it was
true because the news still hadn’t materialised on the television. I concluded
with the comment that Madiba had outlived her – which was one of my greatest
hopes and something that had caused me unnecessary concern over the Easter
weekend as Mandela resided in hospital.
For a few hours, with tweet and television viewing, my
elation continued, and I’m not massively proud of this feeling. However, by the
end of the evening, I was calmer and a little sadder. Throughout the day, I’d
been remembering all the reasons why I disagreed so vehemently with Thatcher
and why I despised her policies, and a touch of hopelessness crept in. Laurie
Penny, writer for the New Statesman and the Guardian, had written “Thatcher has
died. Her legacy lives on. Sympathies to her family, and to the families of all
who suffered because of her leadership.”
My legacy from
my parents was my political persuasions that were and still are steeped in a sense
of justice and a belief in humankind. The best way to secure Thatcher’s legacy
is to do nothing and to accept what Glenda Jackson said about vice and virtue
as merely being the way of the world. It isn’t. If all those who feel
passionately enough about this unite, then we collectively ensure that the legacy of
Thatcher dies with her.
United we stand, together we will not fall.
