Allow me to call myself one of ‘Thatcher’s
children’, though if that had literally been the case I would have disowned
her. If the other way round had been the state of affairs the separation would
have occurred as a matter of course, inevitably. In 1979 when she was elected prime minister I
was 12 years old but it was only when she really got into her stride at the
helm that I myself truly came of age, if I can claim that. I was a teenager
after all.
I remember quite vividly the party election
broadcasts from that campaign in 1979, despite my tender years at the time. Leading
figures in the Labour party, such as Callaghan and Healey, appeared on the tiny
television my family had in a small room to warn of the travails the country
would have to endure if they elected the Tories to power. Mine was a safe
Labour home, parented by Irish immigrants, so even though I had just started
wearing long trousers to school, I agreed with that. Little did I know that
much of what they warned of was 100% correct.
My father, a proud and hard-working employee at one
of Birmingham’s most illustrious plants, was made unemployed soon after
Thatcher took up the reins. The effects on our family are easily imaginable to
anyone with the imagination required.
In 1984, aged 16, I was among a large crowd –
several hundred strong - attending a meeting staged by the Socialist Workers
Party (SWP). Tony Cliff was the main speaker. He said what I had been hoping to
hear on that day about the miners' strike. That the closure of the pits was part of a general attack on
the British working class..I agreed
with him fully. I joined the SWP soon afterwards.
That year was a fascinating one. I went to a
demonstration in Nottingham and saw how passionate the miners were to their
cause. With other ‘comrades’ I sat warming my hands over a boiler on a picket
line in the Cotswolds. You couldn’t be anything but be impressed by the resolve
of those miners. And they were from a pit that were the minority out on strike.
The refrain, however, was “She’ll not get me back”. “She”, meaning Thatcher. We
visited the house of one miner who had been arrested, I believe on more than
one occasion as a result of the strike. He’d also been a soldier in Northern
Ireland. He was more resolute than any of the others. Thatcher has been
described as divisive. She certainly was in his case. He stepped over to the
other side completely.
I went to university, became active again in political
activity, got tired with it and then concentrated on books. Then came a day in
London.
The poll tax riots. I had seen other
Thatcherite-generated violence in London before but never anything like that.
It was mayhem and for a time the people on the demonstration had control of the
streets. Police officers were running away from members of the public shouting
“no poll tax!” repeatedly. Then a police van sped down the street straight at
protestors. Miraculously, no one was killed. But one thing was clear enough.
The people of the UK had had enough of Thatcher. Even the shop workers were
chanting “no poll tax!” on that day. I was just scared of the police. That was
another indicator of life back then. You can speak of the free market all you
want and how it liberated people from the so-called bureaucratic post-war
consensus but Thatcherism also gave policemens’ batons a free hand.
Today, David Cameron said, “We are all Thatcherites
now”. I am not. I am a Socialist. I am an anti-Thatcherite. What I experienced
during my teenage years will not leave me, nor should it ever. Hopefully one
day there will be a proper tribute to the victims of that woman’s legacy,
someone who trod on the lives of countless number of working class people,
including that of my own family
