No such thing as 'Society'

Amy has just put up a post about how much she loved the 1970's, and I left a comment that many of us here in Britain liked them much more in retrospect, when compared to the irreversible destruction wreaked upon British society by Mrs Thatcher in the 1980's.

In the 70's, British social life was punctuated by fights between the much deplored Punks and the even more deplored, Neo-Nazi Skinheads but at least there was some ideology behind these fights, unlike the scraps on Brighton Beach between Mods and Rockers which took place around the same time as the Hippie movement was coming over the Atlantic from San Francisco.

Some of you bloggers have actually chosen Thatcher as a female role-model, when in fact she could hardly be classified as human, let alone female human. If you want to revere her as a maniacal, semi robot in human form then fine, but when you review her legacy from a distance - thousands of miles away in a different country - bear in mind that we in Britain are still sifting through the wreckage of the rampage caused by her, along with a little help from Ronald Regan and his team of financial advisors.

Most people who still revere her here had bought their own council-houses (Project Housing) and made a few thousand pounds by buying up shares in de-nationalised industries such as British Telecom, etc, then immediately selling them on to the 'wealth-creators' (Thatcher's own term). It is these same 'wealth-creators' who have plunged the world into the biggest financial crisis that it has ever known, and they are still paying themselves vast salaries from what were once public resources.

Nobody liked the Unions in Britain when Scargill was in control (he still is, of what there is left), so Thatcher's job of destroying them was made even easier as a result. Bye-bye coal mines. Bye-bye sustainable fuel resources. Bye-bye British industry. Hello British service industry. Hello China. Hello India. At least the unions spent many years trying to gain a level playing field for impoverished India by attempting to secure the production of cotton (once a colonial industry) as an exclusively Indian monopoly for the European market. The USA didn't like that idea much, so neither did we, under the constraints of the 'special relationship'.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union had everyone in Wall Street and the City saying, "You see? We told you communism would never work!" Unconstrained Capitalism doesn't seem to be doing much better these days.

The other thing that both Thatcher and Galtieri realised is that there is nothing better to boost the morale of your flagging country than to start a war - a war which would easily be won in Britain's case, and readily subscribed to in Argentina's, even though it would be inevitably be lost. Right now we are involved in one which can never be won and can never be lost either, and morale is at an all time low.

So remember that when our standard of living was just beginning to revive, 30 years after the 2nd World War and those punks were fighting it out on the street, a humble grocer's daughter was rising rapidly through the ranks of the Conservative party and heading for 10 Downing Street, from where she would decree that, "There is NO such thing as 'Society' in Britain".