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Tramp The Dirt Down.


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May she burn in hell!

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!

dmk

Jean-Luc Mélenchon ! Jean-Luc Mélenchon !Compte certifié ‏@JLMelenchon
Margaret Tchatcher va découvrir en enfer ce qu'elle a fait aux mineurs.
7:33 AM - 8 Avr, 13

French far-left politician @JLMelenchon tweets:"Margaret Thatcher is going to find out in hell what she did to those miners."

Margaret Thatcher, the friend of Chile’s fascist dictator General Augusto Pinochet and supporter of the apartheid system of racial discrimination in South Africa, has died of a stroke at the age of 87.

Neither the media’s eulogies to Thatcher as a great stateswoman, nor the staging of a day of national mourning complete with military honours, can conceal the fact that she died arguably the most hated figure in British politics.


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I particularly like this part:

Margaret Hilda Roberts embodied everything that is narrow-minded and philistine in the English middle class. She was preoccupied solely with self-advancement and enrichment, owing much of her success to having secured a rich husband. Her political talents, such as they were, consisted of the nasty cunning and ruthlessness of the social climber.

Lest We Forget - How Thatcher Gave Pol Pot a Hand
By John Pilger


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--- and here's an epigram from Hillaire Belloc which I've always liked:

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The politicians corpse was laid away.
While all of her accquaintance sneered & slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see her hanged.

Pretty much sums up my position!

dmk

PS I've changed the sex - the original was 'his' & 'him'. Not so many female politicians when he wrote this!

Latest news in the ongoing circus show is that a certain right-wing tabloid is agitating to get the BBC to ban"Ding Dong the Witch is dead" and also encouraging people to download"True Blue" by Madonna.

The British Government is a past master of"Divide and Conquer" and these fools all willingly play along with the stupid games. __{{emoticon}}__

Guess who is not coming to Margaret Thatcher's funeral

By Lindsey German

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The importance of Margaret Thatcher's warmongering is reflected in the Falklands theme of her funeral arrangements -- something Tony Blair does not seem to regard as"tasteless".

Tony Blair has denounced as ‘tasteless’ those celebrating the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death.

"Even if you disagree with someone very strongly," he said,"at the moment of their passing you should show some respect."

He may of course be thinking ahead to his own eventual demise and fearing that the scenes of partying will be reproduced on a much wider scale.

Blair's demand that we all show respect for the dead is somewhat hard to take from the man incriminated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

I don't recall a similar call from Blair over the recent lack of respect accorded by the British media to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, when he died at a relatively early age after a long period of suffering cancer.

On the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death, calls for respect are attempts to stifle any criticism about a woman who, it should be remembered, was only able to hold office due to splits in the Labour opposition, rather than any enthusiasm for her or her party from a majority of voters.

And even many of those who voted for her had cause to regret it, as Paul Routledge points out in the Mirror:

She decimated our basic industries of coal and steel. Shipbuilding virtually disappeared, along with much of heavy engineering.

She tried to destroy our free trade unions through repressive legislation; She branded miners fighting for their jobs and communities as"the enemy within"...

She made mass unemployment respectable, and used it as a tool of government. The dole queues were"a price worth paying" under her regime – once described as"an elected dictatorship" by one of her own ministers.

She created a new underclass of jobless men... and forced millions of women back into the workplace so that families could make ends meet.

She sold our basic utilities – gas, water, electricity and telephones – and prices soared.

She flogged off the buses and railways, and fares went through the roof.

She sold off the council houses and built no new ones, so there are now more than two million families on housing waiting lists.

She enthroned the profit motive, and unleashed the spivs and speculators in the City of London.

She surrendered economic policy to the mysterious dark forces of"the market", which led UK plc into one recession after another that led to the mess where we are today.

She imposed the hated poll tax on the nation, first in Scotland where she made the Tories unelectable for more than a generation. She then thrust it down the throats of the English, prompting the worst riots in London since the disturbances of the early eighties.

Mass popular resistance to the poll tax finally marked her downfall, and Thatcher was driven out of office by her own party.

This is all supposed to be forgiven and forgotten as a nation unites in grief for a woman who, in the sickening words of David Cameron, ‘made Britain great again.’

Much has been written about her domestic policies, much less about her international role. Yet she played a crucial part in the escalation of the Cold War and in the reestablishment of a doctrine of intervention which began in the Falklands and continued with her successors in the 1990s and 2000s.

Respect for the dead was certainly not in Margaret Thatcher's mind in 1982, when her popularity ratings were rock bottom and she took Britain into war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, to save an isolated British colony -- and her own political face."Rejoice!" was Thatcher's response at the end of a squalid and unnecessary colonial war that cost over 1000 lives, including those killed on the Argentinian ship the Belgrano -- deaths celebrated by Thatcher's cheerleaders at Rupert Murdoch's Sun with the headline,"Gotcha".

The 323 young Argentinian sailors, mostly conscripts, who died when the Belgrano sank, will not be guests at Margaret Thatcher's funeral.

Nor will the ten Irish hunger strikers who were allowed to die by Thatcher because she refused to countenance their demand to be treated as political prisoners. As Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams commented,"Here in Ireland her espousal of old draconian militaristic policies prolonged the war and caused great suffering... Margaret Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81."

While Margaret Thatcher destroyed many industries, she always protected the arms industry, which she enthusiastically promoted abroad. Most notoriously, was her central role in negotiating the al-Yamamah (Dove of peace!) arms deal with Saudi Arabia in 1983. At the time, this was the biggest arms deal in British history. It was oiled with bribes and backhanders running into hundred of millions of pounds, one of the main beneficiaries being Thatcher's own son Mark, who pocketed £12 million.

It is another example of how Margaret Thatcher was mentor to Tony Blair. When in 2007 a Serious Fraud investigation into the corruption involved in the arms trade got too close to defence company BAE's dealings with Saudi Arabia, Blair ordered it to be shut down.

The establishment of the ‘new imperialism’ which became such a feature of the world from the 1990s, was paved by Margaret Thatcher, alongside US president Ronald Reagan. With him she helped escalate the Cold War in the 1980s, introducing Cruise missiles to Britian despite very widespread opposition.

The ‘special relationship’ cemented with Reagan allowed Tony Blair in particular to follow her in supporting US foreign policy at every turn, with disastrous consequences in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like today, the 'new imperialism' was, proclaimed to be in the interests of spreading democracy. In reality, Thatcher had no problem in supporting dictatorships around the world, whether it be in Saudi Arabia or in Chile, where her good friend General Augusto Pinochet came to power in a blood-soaked coup against the democratically elected President Allende.

Pinochet reigned for two decades through a regime of oppression, torture and mass execution. The response of one Chilean woman to Margaret Thatcher's death sums up the reaction of many in her country:

"The Thatcher government directly supported Pinochet’s murderous regime, financially, via military support, even military training. Members of my family were tortured and murdered under Pinochet, who was one of Thatcher’s closest allies and friend. Those of us celebrating are the ones who suffered deeply.”

When Pinochet found himself under house arrest in Britain in 1998, facing extradition to Spain to face charges of war crimes, Margaret Thatcher visited him to"thank her old friend for bringing democracy to Chile".

Chile's President Allende, assassinated in Pinochet's seizure of power, will not be a guest at Margaret Thatcher's funeral.

Nor will the black South Africans slaughtered by the apartheid regime in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher branded Nelson Mandela a"terrorist" and did all she could to block the sanctions which most of the world imposed in response to the barbarity of the regime."I have found myself to all intents and purposes alone in resisting sanctions,” she wrote in 1985 to PW Botha, the hardline apartheid president of South Africa.

During Thatcher's governments, the UK repeatedly vetoed UN resolutions on apartheid South Africa. Unsurprisingly, the last white South African president, FW de Klerk, is expected to attend her funeral.

And what a gathering it is turning out to be. She said she didn't want a state funeral, but she's getting one in all but name anyway, with the Queen and Prince Philip in attendance. It will be virtually indistinguishable from the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill.

Previous prime ministers received no such accolade, including Harold Wilson who, like Thatcher, had three terms in office, and also led a reforming government, though somewhat different, as it included, for example, liberalisation of laws on censorship, divorce and homosexuality, and the ending of capital punishment.

This state funeral in all but name is a blatant attempt by David Cameron to boost his popularity through a bizarre"feel-good" opportunity, just as millions of people are learning the extent of the suffering his government's austerity policies are causing the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

The importance of Margaret Thatcher's warmongering is reflected in her funeral arrangements which will have a Falklands War theme -- something Tony Blair does not seem to regard as"tasteless". As ex-soldier Joe Glenton says,"Thatcher's march to war in the Falklands won an election - and her funeral will process to the same jingoistic tune."

A funeral march with 700 women and men from the British armed services attending will proceed through the City of London -- where there are plenty of Margaret Thatcher's friends -- to St Paul’s Cathedral. There will be gun salutes and full military honours, and the whole event will be another boost for the militarism which so pervades British society -- one more occasion on top of Remembrance Day or the Queen's Jubilee where the establishment praises the military and by extension drums up support for current and future wars.

The funeral will cost an estimated £10 million. On top of this, is hundreds of thousands more spent on recalling MPs to parliament for a seven hour tribute to Thatcher. The special convening of parliament was forced through against the wishes of the Speaker of the House of Commons, and the Labour MP Glenda Jackson was an almost lone voice in puncturing the endless praise of a prime minister who wreaked, in Jackson's words,"the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country".

Margaret Thatcher was a multi millionaire. She died in the Ritz hotel, where she had lived for months, and had a house in Belgravia. It says everything about her values and of those who continue in her tradition today that this money can be spent at a time when the poorest and most disadvantaged in society are having their benefits cut, when inequality is growing and while most working people see their living standards fall.

Today, the friends of Thatcher and her ideoology of privatisation, economic neoliberalism and warmongering -- from David Cameron to Tony Blair -- justify arms spending, tens of billions wasted on the Trident nuclear missile system, continuing wars, and interventions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

No wonder Tony Blair thinks it’s tasteless to criticise: he learnt everything he knew from her.

and from Socialist Worker (UK)

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Margaret Thatcher: a brutal ruling class warrior is dead
by Alex Callinicos

The official response—including of course that of the establishment media—to Margaret Thatcher’s death has sought to embalm her in “statesmanship”.

Those who remember what Thatcher did to the miners and to many other working class communities will prefer her immortalised as the poet Shelley did another Tory politician, Lord Castlereagh, after the Peterloo massacre in 1819. He wrote, “I met murder on the way—he had a mask like Castlereagh”.

For murder was Thatcher’s business. Sometimes the murder was metaphorical—of industries and communities. It still destroyed people’s lives.

Sometimes the murder was real.

Thatcher oversaw the ongoing dirty war in Ireland. Her callousness was on display when she condemned Irish Republican hunger strikers to death, rather than concede the recognition as political prisoners for which they were campaigning.

The 907 Argentine and British military personnel killed in the 1982 Falklands war would not have died if Thatcher hadn’t decided to take back an absurd colonial anomaly by force. Her legacy was continued British possession of the Malvinas (or Falklands) that still poisons relations with Argentina.

Thatcher gloried in war. When her cabinet finally decided to remove her in November 1990, she pleaded to stay on as prime minister till the forthcoming war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was over.

Morally contemptible though Thatcher was, she could probably claim to be the last British political leader of world-historic importance.

She came to office in May 1979 at a critical historical juncture. The world economy was entering its second great recession that decade—evidence that the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s was truly over.

Underlying the economic crisis was a sharp fall in the rate of profit on capital compared to the last boom years. Restoring profitability required forcing up the rate of exploitation for workers. But, particularly in Britain, the ruling class was caught between hammer and anvil.

It faced a well organised, combative working class that had built up powerful rank and file workplace organisation during the boom.

Led by the miners and the dockers, the British workers’ movement had put paid to Thatcher’s Tory predecessor, Ted Heath, between 1972 and 1974. The great pay revolt of 1978-9,

the “winter of discontent” that destroyed the Social Contract brought in after Heath by Labour, showed the enduring strength of this movement.

Before Thatcher won the 1979 general election, Thatcher had already branded herself as the “Iron Lady”, represented a much harsher and more combative form of ruling-class politics than had become common in the boom years. She disinterred free-market orthodoxies that had been buried with the Great Depression of the 1930s.

More than any other leading capitalist politician Thatcher pioneered what would soon come to be known as neoliberalism. She soon had an immensely powerful ally in the shape of the new right-wing Republican President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

But Reagan faced a less powerful workers’ movement, and by the time he took office in January 1981 he could benefit from the impact of the brutal recession imposed by Paul Volcker, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, in October 1979.

Thatcher and her sycophants liked to praise her courage. In fact, particularly in her early years in Downing Street, she ducked and dived, often avoiding premature confrontations that could provoke too powerful a working-class response.

She enjoyed one huge advantage that she inherited from her predecessors, the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and, after him, Jim Callaghan. While the Social Contract eventually failed, it had succeeded in integrating an increasingly bureaucratised layer of senior shop stewards into collaboration with management and the state.

This meant, for example, the bosses at the British Leyland car giant could move against one of the most powerful of these stewards.

Derek Robinson, the convenor at the Longbridge plant in Birmingham, found himself cut off from the shop floor and was successfully victimised.

It also meant that sectionalism often trumped solidarity.

This made it easier for Thatcher to isolate the epic miners’ strike of 1984-5.

But she was lucky as well. If Argentine armourers had put the right fuses in their bombs, most of the British battle fleet would have ended up on the floor of the South Atlantic and Thatcher would have had to resign in ignominy.

She was also fortunate in her enemies. This was true of her Labour opponents—first Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock concealed increasingly right wing politics beneath a hot-air balloon of rhetoric.

Above all, it was true of the trade union leaders who to their eternal shame allowed the men and women of the mining communities to fight on alone for a year. Militarised police squads occupied pit villages and Thatcher’s cronies organised a scab union, as despair and privation sapped the miners’ will to fight.

But there were moments when she could have been defeated—above all in July 1984, when an organised scabbing operation provoked a national dockers’ strike, and then again the same autumn when the pit deputies (supervisors) threatened to walk out.

On both occasions, trade union officialdom came to her rescue.

In the aftermath of this victory, Thatcher sought to radicalise her efforts to remodel Britain for the possessive individualism of the market.

By the late 1980s she and her chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson had engineered the first of the financial bubble-driven booms of the neoliberal era.

But, in the end, Thatcher overreached herself. Vaingloriously, in 1989-90 she imposed the poll tax, charging everyone from billionaires to paupers the same amount to finance local government.

Out of nowhere came a social explosion—the biggest riot London had seen since the 1930s and a mass movement of 14 million people refusing to pay the tax.

Eventually self-preservation forced the Tories to expel Thatcher from her bunker and to scrap the tax.

This is the most important lesson of Thatcher’s premiership.

By chance she has died as an even greater assault on the welfare state than any she mounted is coming into force.

The best form of class revenge on Thatcher would be to build an even bigger social movement to break the coalition government and bury everything she stood for even deeper than her coffin will lie.

It's been reported that since she arrived in Hell she's shut down a dozen furnaces. __{{emoticon}}__

A load of ex-miners have joined the Trafalgar Square demo and others are burning an effigy of her in Glasgow.

Ongoing updates are here:


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Sing along with Thatcher and her cabinet:


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This is from the Telegraph - a right-wing Tory broadsheet commonly known as the"Torygraph". OK! Its author, Peter Oborne, appears to be a bit of a loose cannon on the political right wing:


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but if even the right wing is prepared to write:

Yesterday the Daily Mirror, not a paper with which I usually sympathise, posed the question: “Why is Britain’s most divisive Prime Minister getting a ceremonial funeral fit for a Queen?” (
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) It was a very fair question to ask.

I am afraid that the decision to turn Lady Thatcher’s funeral into a state occasion was a constitutional innovation and, like almost all such innovations, both foolish and wrong

This is a sensible and measured article from the right explaining why Mrs T should NOT be having a state funeral. I commend it to you all!


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Decay and Ruin in Mrs. Thatcher’s England

This interview with Tariq Ali was conducted by Die Presse in Vienna and appears in German in the paper’s Sunday edition.

What is Mrs Thatcher’s legacy?

Her legacy is clearly visible in the state of Britain today. It is essentially a story of decay and ruin: A small, post-imperial vassal state dependent on nostalgia and, more importantly, the United States to keep itself afloat. On the economy the Thatcherite model (astonishingly, still being praised by blind politicians in denial) was effectively the deindustrialization of the country, the purchase of working-class votes by squandering the monies that accrued from North sea oil and laying the foundations for a financialised economic model that exploded with the Wall Street crash of 2008. We live in a world where it is convenient to personalize politics. Thatcher obviously pushed through the measures required by capitalism with a raw and ruthless energy that was her very own. She was a great believer in appealing to the lowest common denominator, to the animal instincts that remain present in the psychological make-up of individuals regardless of their social origins. Another politician could have done exactly the same things as she did using a less charged rhetoric. A number of old Conservatives were not shy in stating that their party had been taken over by English ‘poujadistes.’ She almost came a cropper. Had the Falklands war gone differently which it might have done if Pinochet’s dictatorship (pushed by Washington) had not backed Britain.

She outmaneuvered the once powerful Mineworker’s Union, forcing it to call a strike on her terms and then destroyed the union and in the process broke the back of a once powerful British labor movement. She had referred to the striking miners as the ‘enemy within’. Even as she neutered the unions, she effectively destroyed the old Labour Party. Thatcher’s favorite Chancellor of the Exchequer and cabinet colleague, Nigel Lawson, while reviewing a book in the Financial Times noted admiringly that the tragedy for the Tories was that Thatcher’s real heir was Leader of the Opposition. Blair’s policies were little more than a continuation of her policies with better PR and an aggressive control of the media. Blair was less lucky with his wars. Iraq finished him off. He was exposed as a simple and straightforward liar. The Scottish writer, Tom Nairn, was accurate in his assessment: “Like other flotsam on the ‘no-alternative’ wave of the nineties, they think that the essence of ‘modernization’ is adjusting society to fit economic and technological advances. Which means serving such changes, via a machinery of collusion between government public relations, a compliant legal system and a servile press.’

With Murdoch dominating the press agenda thanks to Thatcher’s ‘generosity’, she sent her tank commanders to fire a few warning shots at the BBC. A reliable and appropriately named toady, Marmaduke Hussey, was catapulted on to the BBC board as chairman. His first task was to sack director general Alasdair Milne for “leftwing bias” and ‘not being one of us.’ Thatcher was livid that the BBC had permitted her to be grilled on the Falklands war on a live programme by an ordinary woman viewer from Bristol who successfully demolished the prime minister’s arguments. Hussey appointed a pliable Director-General in the shape of John Birt, a dalek without instincts or qualities, who transformed the BBC into the top-heavy managerial monster that it has become. When New Labour won, a New BBC was already in place. Blair and his spin doctors Campbell and Mandelson turned out to be even worse control freaks than Thatcher. Together with their subordinates, they regularly harassed producers complaining about what they perceived to be anti-government bias. Radio 4?s Today programme became a favourite Blairite target. Simultaneously they were crawling to Murdoch at regular intervals, hobnobbing regularly with the editors and staff of the Sun and happily inhaling the stench of the Murdoch stables.

read more

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