It was twenty years ago today…

That Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister .

This has made me realise that many people reading this were too young to remember Thatcher’s government,t and for others time may have softened their view of her.

But her government was in many ways responsible for the mess we are in now.

• Under her government our manufacturing industry was decimated Which is why Wales today is far to reliant oPublic sector making it far more reliant upon those jobs which are now threatened by her conservative successors.She destroyed our heavy industry, so we now import coal into Wales and her victory in the miners strike destroyed communities which still have not recovered.
• Her sending of the task force to the Falklands  (“Two bald men fighting over a comb”…  Jorge Luis Borges) allowed people to still think Britain was a world power which was reinforced with her aggressive support for the 1^st Iraq war which tied British military policy to that of the U.S. and tied Britain to a Military-Industrial complex who have an interest in Britain being involved in world conflicts.
• Her selling off of our public utilities with the claim that this would “create a share owning  democracy” ended up with a worse transport system than we would have if we still had BR, and resulted in  the majority shares being held, not by ordinary members of the public but by capitalists who were only interested in their dividend.
• She allowed Rupert Murdoch in exchange for his enthusiastic support in his newspapers like the Sun to build up his empire and the UK and have a poisonous influence on UK politics which still effects us.This led to the continuous shift of Labour to the right in order to find favour with Murdoch and the rise of Thatcher’s first  true heir Tony Blair.

But it was not until I studied at Aberystwyth in my 30’s that I saw the real nature of Thatcher’s Tories. Up till then few people I knew claimed to vote for them, let alone support them, but the ones that I met tended to be economic-social conservatives, who genuinely believed Thatcher, was carrying out the right policies for the good of the country.At Aber I found that some of the then Federation of Conservative Students .

• Dressed in Springbok rugby jerseys in order to show their support for the South African apartheid regime.
• Racially abused a member of the Student Union Staff for which they were suspended from the Union.
• Went on a drinking Binge to celebrate the rise of Adolf  Hitler to power. Which was too much for the Conservatives themselves and they were disbanded.

There were some conservative students who were as disgusted by this behaviour as the rest of us but they still put up with it and their leader had in his room a poster which said “Speak English or Die”.

I don’t know where these morons are now but I suspect many are still respectable members of the Conservative Party.

And so we come back today and we have a Conservative party that is intent on  using the current financial crisis to destroy the Welfare State. David Cameron may claim to be “a caring Conservative” but in reality he and his party are fully intent on carrying out what they see as Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy and once again it will be the poor and vulnerable who will suffer.