Wednesday 10 April 2013

Society won't be mourning.

My brother has been quite ill and so I decided to drive over to Wednesbury, my home town in the Black Country and treat him to lunch.  It was great to catch up, particularly as my younger brother also joined us later for a pint.  While we were catching up though a cheer suddenly went up in the pub, which I discovered was a reaction to a newsflash on a nearby TV screen announcing the death of Baroness Thatcher.  A bit later on, an old lady, a bit unsteady on her feet came in and ordered some food at a table opposite; when her fish and chips arrived, she leaned over and said - "Can you get me the salt and vinegar please, young man?"  When I took the condiments to her table she grinned at me and asked, "Have you heard the good news?"  Thatcher was pretty much detested in the Black Country for systematically destroying the steel industry.  Myself, my dad and my brother all at some time worked in the steel mills, and I can still remember the devastating impact it had on the community when following long months of strikes she destroyed the unions and the very livelihood of a town with a long proud history of manual labour in an industry that had defined the whole area.  My dad was a furnace bricklayer at the nearby Patent Shaft Steelworks, and was a broken man when his trade was deemed no longer useful.  He eventually found alternative employment, but the pride he and others like him had in their work was cruelly taken away by a woman whose 'market economy' policies took no account of the traditions of the working class man, and I can affirm that the town has never really recovered from the closures to this day.  Thatcher recklessly announced that there was no such thing as society; but there was and still is in spite of all the damage she did in her time as Prime Minister.  Her policies were indeed radical, and were so far reaching they even inspired a Labour Prime Minister named Tony Blair to continue the assault on the welfare state and the ordinary working man and woman.  Let's not forget it was his labour government for example that introduced tuition fees.  And now we have a truly radical right-wing coalition that is doing all it can to privatise the NHS, as well as denying the poor and dispossessed the right to legal aid and taxing them for having an extra bedroom - all Thatcher's legacy...  Like everyone else in that Black Country pub, I shan't be mourning her passing.