Margaret Thatcher: More pity than tears

My initial political response to the death of Margaret Thatcher, as a Socialist, should have been one of joy, but it's difficult to be happy about an elderly lady, suffering from dementia, perhaps dying a lonely death in a London hotel.

Although, riding through Brixton late last night, I did bump into the impromptu party celebrating her demise. Like me, some people in this part of town have long memories.

Upon more sober reflection I quickly realised that my overwhelming emotion is one of sadness.

You see, I grew up and lived through her era, witnessing a once thriving working class communities in Manchester and Oldham whose cultures, were vibrant, confident and by and large progressive, get crushed under her premiership.

Large scale, long term unemployment often turned working communities, who worked hard and liked a drink at the weekend, into depressed violent, communities, too many of which would become hooked on heroin and other drugs as a means of escape.

The greatest injustice though, remained the economic violence of Thatcherism, which decimated entire communities, the legacies of which can still be seen today.

It is with some irony that in parts of the country which are blighted by the State dependency culture, much of it started with Thatcherism.

I saw working communities, that could police themselves, immersed into long-term poverty and misery; unable to cope with the dysfunctionality that poverty imposes on families and communities.

As for police racism, to be fair, let's not forget that it was Callaghan's Labour Government which maintained the dreaded SUS laws that saw whole communities unjustly criminalised.

Black people were regularly beaten mercilessly by an almost fascist police force. Officers wore the NF or the Golliwog symbols on the reverse side of the lapels and would proudly show their badge after showering you with racial abusing, battering and then falsely arresting you. There was nothing you could do about it, nothing.

What the miners were to endure, by way of brutal policing during their strike, was perfected, first on Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, then on Black people in inner city Britain, and then on the white working class and wider Labour movement. There is a profound lesson in that history.

Under Thatcher, crime inevitably rose and I saw a deeply racist police force become ever more aggressive, given a green light by Margret Thatcher to treat black communities, as if they were little more than dogs.

We were all pimps, muggers and criminals in those days according to the Tory Party propaganda of the day. We knew, clearly whose side Thatcher was on when she describe Nelson Mandela and the ANC as a ‘terrorist organisation’ and demanded that the BBC stop showing apartheid South African police force savaging Africans with bullets, dogs and bull whips. Those pictures were seared into our brains and we equated that struggle with the oppression we faced here in Britain. At the time the Home Office told Thatcher that the BBC’s coverage was having a radicalising effect on black communities. Reminds me of the modern day killings of innocent Muslims in illegal wars and the effect on Muslim communities today.

Our communities unable to withstand these pressures, erupted in the uprisings of 1981 and 1986 and whilst we fought back this inevitably that led to another wave of mass criminalisation by the police, followed by inner city ‘regeneration” (read reconfiguration.)

Some might suggest that there is a political tradition of racism deep in the genetic code of the Tory Party, discernable today, in David Cameron’s attack on immigrants, we remember her infamous comment in the run up to the 1979 election that;

"People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”

It was the tragic waste of human potential that leaves me now more sad than angry about Thatcher.

I knew the people, both black and white, behind the statistics, and it broke my heart to see the destructive effects of unrestrained free market ideology. It was these issues, that fired me up to enter politics. I could not bear, to see such intelligent, wonderful, beautiful caring and creative people simply thrown on the scrap heap, subjected to police brutality and mass criminalisation

The misery of those times is most aptly portrayed in the 1981 film “Babylon” about the life of a car mechanic and sound man “ Blue” played by Brinsely Forde and the most searing 1982 drama, “Boys From The Black Stuff”.

Both provided a vivid portrayal of the human misery inflicted black and white working class communities.

I was inspired by our riotous resistance, the ANC in South Africa, the Miners strike, Ken Livingstone’s radical leadership of the GLC, individuals such as a campaigning barrister named Paul Boateng, in many ways Thatcher was the grist to my mill.

It was though, the beginning of the end in many ways, heralding as it did the advent of New Labour and the adoption of the free market mantra that has led us to this austerity madness.

I only hope the current generation learns from that history and mounts the fiercest possible resistance to her heirs apparent, Cameron’s Tories and Blue Labour. For what its worth I’m still here and still fighting.

At the time I heard Mrs T had died I was moved to have a beer, problem was after some reflection I ended up crying in it.

Lee Jasper