“Here’s Maggie Thatcher, throw her up and
catch her. Squish her, squash her, squish her, squash her, here’s Maggie
Thatcher” was a ditty which formed part of the soundtrack to my playground
experiences of the mid-eighties. It was accompanied by some creative pen work
and hand movements. The children of the eighties, the playgrounds of the
eighties, were political in a way I am not sure we shall ever see again.
I met someone recently who was also a child
of the eighties – in a completely different area of the country – who also knew
the ditty. It was a shared remembrance
of invention, of ingenuity, but also a sad indictment of the despair in many
Scottish households which imbued children with political hue and awareness
which is unparalleled today. Where the ditty originated, I don’t know and I am
not sure I want to. It is a childhood
memory which needs no clarification of retrospect, but it is a telling one.
The
myth, the legacy, the damning toll of Thatcherism will live on. That the children
of the nineties, who were born with Major, and grew up with Blair, are still
shaped by their attitude to Margaret Thatcher – especially in Scotland - says
much about the attitudes of their parents and their peers, but also indicates that,
love her or loathe her, she created herself a legend. And those who protested
against her lionised her. They gave her
a status which no other prime-minister of the twentieth century – with the
exception of Churchill – could claim. Demonised by some, idolised by others.
I am a child of the eighties. I remember
Thatcher. I distinctly remember
Thatcher. Thatcher helped shape my
childhood and the ideology I have as an adult. Of course, my attitude to
Thatcher was a reflection of my parents’ attitudes at that point in time, but I
have encountered no other considerations since to inform a change of opinion.
My parents were political. They became political as a reaction to
societal and political events. My mum
joined the SNP in 1966 at the age of 14 with her sister Maureen who was a year
older. Their father – my grandfather – was an Irish miner. They grew up in
relative poverty in Fife. My grandfather, John was an Irish immigrant whose
father was a Labour councillor in the south of Ireland. He was a member of the Scottish
wing of the Labour Party and he campaigned for them. He once presented me with
a Parker pen which had been given to him by Gordon Brown. It was a treasured item of his.
My mother and Maureen became aware, through
their voracious appetite for knowledge and books, of the history of Scotland,
of the potential of Scotland, and of the relative imbalance of being governed
by a Westminster which was not Scotland focussed. It was a love affair which
was to last a lifetime for my Aunty Maureen and a vision which my mother still
works toward as an SNP councillor of 27 years standing.
In the sixties, however, becoming members
of the SNP was more than frowned upon.
My grandfather wouldn’t even display a poster for my mother when she
stood against Gordon Brown during the eighties.
Miners’ daughters from Cowdenbeath did not join a nationalist party. They
withstood that familial disapprobation and their legacy is a family of younger
sisters – like my aunt Tricia Marwick - and their brother, and all their many
kids and nieces and nephews, and now grandkids, who share their vision of a
Scotland governed by the people of Scotland with social justice, fairness and
equality at its heart.
My father was less of an emotional
nationalist. He is a pragmatist. From Fairhill in Hamilton, he met and married
my mother in 1974 but remained a Labour voter until 1979. He was a devolutionist and was blindly
confident that the Labour Party would deliver on a devolution settlement in the
referendum in 1979. To watch it drafted
to fail and torpedoed by elected members of the party he had respected and voted for, and which his gradfather had represented as an elected member, hardened his attitude toward a different constitutional
settlement. Clearly, neither the Labour
Party nor the Conservatives could be relied upon to bring democracy closer to
the people of Scotland. When my father embraced independence and the SNP he did
not look back, only forward to the future potential of an independent Scotland.
There is no-one as passionate as a convert.
He was wrong, Labour did deliver devolution
20 years later, but in the meantime Thatcher changed the landscape of Scotland irrevocably
both physically and politically and forever designating large industry and
traditional employment to the scrap heap and she privatised national industries
allowing public wealth to flow freely in to the hands of the few. This entire she
achieved without a mandate from Scotland which confirmed the correctness of his
decision to back independence and the SNP.
Thatcher the anti-devolutionist would have
little idea in 1979 that the actions which she took in office would so harden Scottish
attitudes against the Conservatives so that from a high of 22 MPs when she was
elected in 1979 they led to the complete eradication of all Tories in Scotland
a few months after she was forced from office. She would have no idea that she
set in motion the rise of the SNP. Or that less than a year and a half after
her death there would be a referendum on Scottish independence. She also,
probably, didn’t foresee she would be stabbed in the back by her Tory peers and
humiliatingly be driven from office, but that is by-the-by.
And who would have thought during the
eighties that the SNP would be here, holding a referendum on Scotland’s
political future? The eighties were not a pleasant time to be in the SNP. Still blamed for their actions in helping to
bring down the Callaghan Government and prematurely calling the general election
in which Margaret Thatcher’s Tories swept to victory in the subsequent general
election, they faced much derision and abuse on the doorsteps. That the SNP
were on the right side of the debate in the eighties on the Poll-Tax, in
support of the miners and against the desecration of traditional industry did
not matter a jot, their decision in 1979 was a cross to be borne.
It was inevitable that Callaghan’s
government would fail anyway. It had failed to deliver its own policy on
devolution and it was incompatible to dealing with the many problems of the
seventies – the three day working week and the knock-on effects of that, and
strikes which left the streets filed with rubbish had already hardened
middle-England voters against the Labour Party. They would vote Tory in swathes
at the next election, but in supporting the vote of no confidence which brought down the government the SNP sealed their own fate; losing 9 of their MPs at the
general election and consigning the party to an electoral funk which would last
well over a decade.
I remember during the 1989 Euro elections
Kenny McAskill stood as an SNP candidate. He set off to campaign in Leven with
my mum and Charlie and Craig Reid of the Proclaimers on the “Snappy bus” -which
was a van with no sides and a loud hailer. They returned hours later caked from
head to toe in egg. Leven, it seems, had not forgiven the SNP even then.
Another chant which formed the soundtrack
of my childhood was “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Out, out, out” as my brother,
sister and I accompanied our parents from Bannockburn marches to anti-Poll Tax
rallies. There was no disputing the passion and sentiment of the people who
were involved and marched. Ordinary
people marching in defiance of a discriminatory and unfair system of taxation,
imposed on Scotland a year earlier than the rest of the UK. The despair of
people on those marches was palpable. These were not only marches against the
Poll Tax, but about the annihilation of industry and mining which underpinned
the very fabric of Scottish urban and rural society and way of life. They were
marches against forced unemployment, against visceral attacks on Scottish
society.
Margaret Thatcher traduced the working
classes; the blue collar workers who were the engine power house of Scottish
traditional heavy industry. She maligned the workers, privatised their
industries and went to war on the unions to sate an ego which insisted she was
correct and brooked no argument from those who dissented. She was the ultimate
political narcissist in action.
Margaret Thatcher metaphorically took a
sledge hammer to mining communities, to close knit communities of proud working
men and their families. She criminalised miners and forced food from their families’
tables to impose her arrogant scorched earth political will and policies. That
Arthur Scargill did a disservice to miners does not exculpate Margaret
Thatcher, it just highlights that they were both driven by ego to the exclusion
sense and compassion.
Her premiership is categorised by infringements
and attacks and erosion of civil liberties. She employed draconian and
subversive methods of undermining political opposition. She politicised the police and she used
covert operatives to spy on protesters. That my parent’s phone was tapped
during the miners’ strike is merely an indication of this, not the sum total.
Their particular brand subversive actions? They were feeding the miners who
were on strike.
That Thatcher came to power in a very
difficult period cannot be disputed. Something did need to be done. That something was definitely not to act with
reckless abandonment and callousness creating social divisions and ramping up
class barriers. The rich got richer, and the workers lost their jobs.
Margaret Thatcher’s governance is
categorised by her kowtowing to the City of London. She was much trumpeted for
creating the opportunity for social mobility, but this was built upon the shaky
foundations of credit, and the whole house of cards – banking deregulation,
reckless spending and spiralling borrowing – culminated in the crash of
2008. The crash of 2008 was inevitable, built
as it was on credit. It was one lasting legacy of Thatcher, like finding
someone has dropped a fish behind your chest of drawers and left it to rot.
She is credited by her admirers for giving
working people the “Right to Buy” social housing which allowed people to get on
the property ladder. And loathe Thatcher
as they came to do, many people in Scotland did take the opportunity to do just
that. However, this was another of
Thatcher’s ticking time bombs. So many houses were sold off without much attempt
to replace them that queues for adequate social housing are huge and people are
forced in to private rented accommodation which is more expensive and benefits
neither the welfare system nor the householder.
The only one benefitting in that situation is the landlord. Some of whom
bought their properties from the state at knock down prices in the first place.
Margaret Thatcher probably thinks that is a good thing though. Capitalism, eh?
And so now, when her successor in Cameron
applies his unfair and disgusting bedroom tax, there are hugely insufficient
numbers of size appropriate social housing for those affected to move to, even
if they wanted to.
Privatising public industry, annihilating heavy
industries like shipbuilding and steel-working, and attacking the public sector
does not come without its cost. Four million people in the UK were unemployed,
many of whom did not have the skill sets or education to smoothly transition
from one industry to another. Many of whom in despair as their whole
communities were blighted by worklessness and their pride stripped away as they
were forced on to the scrapheap.
Thatcher robbed these people of their self-worth, forcing them on to benefits
and parking them there, creating new categories of benefits where people were
abandoned, forgotten, but which allowed Thatcher to massage the unemployment figures
to her advantage. What cost to these people as the eighties carried on
regardless of their plight with its shoulder pads, cigars, champagne and
ostentatious behaviours and superficial wealth? They were collateral damage to
Thatcher’s autocratic pursuit of self-interest.
Scotland hasn’t forgiven the Conservatives –
or indeed Thatcher – because Scotland has not recovered from the Conservatives
or Thatcher. The Tories are so synonymous with Thatcher that their vote is in
perpetual decline. Margaret Thatcher has cast them adrift and only some seismic
shift can change their electoral fortunes.
When Thatcher came to power in 1979,
Scotland did lag significantly behind the rest of the UK in terms of
unemployment and other figures, and this is no longer the case. Proponents of
Thatcher point to her economic policies as being responsible for this. Thre may be elements of truth in that, but that is based only on a superficial examination of the employment which people are consigned to., It isn’t as simple as job creation.
The jobs
which were lost during the Thatcher era were jobs for life; skilled jobs, trade
jobs. Replacing these with transient service industries and call centres might
make for good reading of unemployment figures, but they certainly don’t tell
the story about life quality and opportunity. Thatcher’s policies ripped the
heart out of communities, and you cannot patch that rent with part-time jobs in
the service industry.
Worse than destroying industries she
destroyed communities, aspirations and people and that is not a legacy to be proud
of.
So, when Thatcher died yesterday, I confess
– to my shame – that there was a brief moment of satisfaction that we could now
move on to dissecting the legacy of Thatcher; of Blairism and Cameronism. Both
are pale imitations, but shaped by her vision nonetheless. In the case of
Cameron, her legacy of pandering to the wealthy to the exclusion of the most
vulnerable is interpreted, possibly, even more perniciously than she enacted
when in power.
Thatcher created the conditions which
eradicated heavy industry and mining in Scotland. You can’t destroy an industry
twice when it is already obliterated, but Cameron is trying his best to
continue Thatcher’s legacy by destroying the only industries left to him; the
English NHS and the public sector.
However, I will not stand idly by and watch her eulogised out of culpability for the many crimes committed against the social fabric of Scotland.
Margaret Thatcher politicised the
playgrounds. That should serve as due indication of the strength of feeling of
people in Scotland have about her actions in office.