Tuesday 9 April 2013

One Minute Manifesto: #Thatcher


This is a #Thatcher One Minute Manifesto

I saw some people, younger than me, asking questions on Twitter about who this woman was, why there is so much anger.  So this is about that and about why Cameron's government works in the interests of corporations, the financial services industry and private wealth.  It's a mash up of different messages posted on facebook, so - creative commons.  If you get to comment below, and want to add to it, please do.

One Minute Manifesto: #Thatcher


To the young person asking online - “Who is Thatcher?”

Search for:

The Miners
The Shipbuilders
The Steelworkers
The Old that Froze to Death
The Old that Couldn't Afford Food
The Thousands Made Homeless
The North
The Disenfranchised Black Youth
The Lost Generation of Young
The Hillsborough families
Soldiers dead in a conflict designed to win her an election
Families traumatised from the Falklands War
Northern Ireland

Ask:
Your mam and dad
Your Grandparents
Your brothers and sisters
Your neighbours
The teachers

Think of:
every LGBT kid who committed suicide due to Section 28 in schools
The victims of gaybashing hatecrime which were never investigated due to pressure from her government
For the gay men stitched up and banged up for being gay

Find out more about:
The women of Greenham Common who were beaten and had their kids forcibly taken into care for no reason
The men and women assaulted in the Battle of the Beanfield
The men and women consigned to the scrapheap
The services that used to belong to all of us and now are badly run in the hands of the rich
The country that used to stand for social justice and created the National Health Service
The mentally ill thrown out on the streets
The children abused in care homes and ignored or worse abused by some in her government
How poverty doubled while she opposed a minimum wage

And while you're at it google:
The poll tax
The Khmer Rouge
Sanctions-busting arms deals with South Africa
Libya
Pinochet
"that grubby little terrorist"

Remember that:
She supported the retention of capital punishment
She destroyed the country's manufacturing industry
She voted against the relaxation of divorce laws
She abolished free milk for schoolchildren
She gained support from the National Front in the 1979 election by pandering to fears of immigration
She destroyed social housing
She privatised state monopolies and created the corporate greed culture that we've been railing against for the last 5 years
She introduced the gradual privatisation/destruction of the NHS
She introduced financial deregulation in a way that turned city institutions into avaricious money pits (see also, Black Wednesday)
She allowed the US to place nuclear missiles on UK soil, under US control

She was
not a feminist
Not a Great Briton
Not loved
and will not be missed
as
this was just some of her work as Prime Minister and
sadly
it is a work-in-progress.

Her legacy is the broken britain you live in now.
A world of inequality.

But there is an alternative
Another World IS Possible..
Fight for the society she said didn't exist.