Profundo pesar pela morte de Thatcher. Imagens daqui.
E também em vídeo.
E também a reacção do Socialist Worker Party:
Margaret Thatcher: a brutal ruling-class warrior is dead
"The official response—including of course that of the establishment media—to Margaret Thatcher’s death will seek to embalm her in “statesmanship”.
Those
who remember what Thatcher did to the miners—and to many other working
class communities—will prefer her immortalised as the poet Shelley did
another Tory politician, Lord Castlereagh, after the Peterloo massacre
in 1819: “I met murder on the way— / he had a mask like Castlereagh”.
For
murder was Thatcher’s business. Sometimes the murder was
metaphorical—of industries and communities. It still destroyed people’s
lives.
Sometimes the murder was real. She oversaw the ongoing dirty war in Ireland.
Thatcher’s callousness was on display also when she condemned Irish
Republican hunger strikers to death rather than concede the recognition
as political prisoners for which they were campaigning.The 907 Argentine and British military personnel killed in the 1982 Falklands war would not have died if Thatcher hadn’t decided to take back an absurd colonial anomaly by force. Her legacy was continued British possession of the Malvinas that still poisons relations with Argentina.
Thatcher
gloried in war. When her cabinet finally decided to remove her in
November 1990, she pleaded to stay on as prime minister till the
forthcoming war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was over.
Morally
contemptible though Thatcher was, she could probably claim to be the
last British political leader of world-historic importance. She came to
office in May 1979 at a critical historical juncture.
The
world economy was entering its second great recession that
decade—evidence that the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s was well and
truly over. Underlying the economic crisis was a sharp fall in the rate
of profit on the capital compared to the last boom years.
Restoring profitability required forcing up the rate of exploitation for workers. But, particularly in Britain,
the ruling class was caught between hammer and anvil. It faced a well
organised, combative working class that had built up powerful rank and
file workplace organisation during the boom.
Led
by the miners and the dockers, the British workers’ movement had put
paid to Thatcher’s Tory predecessor, Ted Heath, between 1972 and 1974.
The great pay revolt of 1978-9, the “winter of discontent” that
destroyed the Social Contract brought in after Heath by Labour, showed
the enduring strength of this movement.
Before
Thatcher won the 1979 general election, Thatcher had already branded
herself as the “Iron Lady”, represented a much harsher and more
combative form of ruling-class politics than had become common in the
boom years. She disinterred free-market orthodoxies that had been buried
with the Great Depression of the 1930s.
More
than any other leading capitalist politician Thatcher pioneered what
would soon come to be known as neoliberalism. She soon had an immensely
powerful ally in the shape of the new right-wing Republican President of
the United States, Ronald Reagan.
But
Reagan faced a less powerful workers’ movement, and by the time he took
office in January 1981 he could benefit from the impact of the brutal
recession imposed by Paul Volcker, chairman of the US Federal Reserve
Board, in October 1979.
Thatcher and her sycophants liked to praise her courage. In fact, particularly in her early years in Downing Street, she ducked and dived, often avoiding premature confrontations that could provoke too powerful a working-class response.
She
enjoyed one huge advantage that she inherited from her predecessors,
the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and, after him, Jim Callaghan.
The Social Contract eventually failed, but it succeeded in integrating
an increasingly bureaucratised layer of senior shop stewards into
collaboration with management and the state.
This
meant, for example, the bosses at the British Leyland car giant could
move against one of the most powerful of these stewards. Derek Robinson,
the convenor at the Longbridge plant in Birmingham, found himself cut off from the shop floor and was successfully victimised.
It
also meant that sectionalism often trumped solidarity. This made it
easier for Thatcher to isolate the epic miners’ strike of 1984-5.
But
she was lucky as well. If Argentine armourers had put the right fuses
in their bombs, most of the British battle fleet would have ended up on
the floor of the South Atlantic and Thatcher would have had to resign in ignominy.
She
was also fortunate in her enemies. This was true of her Labour
opponents—first Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock concealed
increasingly right wing politics beneath a hot-air balloon of rhetoric.
Above
all, it was true of the trade union leaders who to their eternal shame
allowed the men and women of the mining communities fight on alone for a
year. Militarised police squads occupied pit villages and Thatcher’s
cronies organised a scab union, as despair and privation sapped the
miners’ will to fight.
But
there were moments when she could have been defeated—above all in July
1984, when an organised scabbing operation provoked a national dockers’
strike, and then again the same autumn, when the pit deputies
(supervisors) threatened to walk out. On both occasions, trade union
officialdom came to her rescue.
In the aftermath of this victory, Thatcher sought to radicalise her efforts to remodel Britain
for the possessive individualism of the market. By the late 1980s she
and her chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson had engineered the
first of the financial bubble-driven booms of the neoliberal era.
But,
in the end, Thatcher overreached herself. Vaingloriously, in 1989-90
she imposed the poll tax, charging everyone from billionaires to paupers
the same amount to finance local government.
Out of nowhere came a social explosion—the biggest riot London
had seen since the 1930s and a mass movement of 14 million people
refusing to pay the tax. Eventually self-preservation forced the Tories
to expel from Thatcher from her bunker and to scrap the tax.
This
is the most important lesson of Thatcher’s premiership. By chance she
has died as an even greater assault on the welfare state than any she
mounted is coming into force.
The
best form of class revenge on Thatcher would be to build an even bigger
social movement to break the coalition government and bury everything
she stood for even deeper than her coffin will lie.""Her tears fall in the darkness as the rain falls in the night,
Silvery tears like silvery rain, hidden out of sight,
The stars fall from her eyes like floating petals from the sky,
Is there no one in all this world who hears this woman cry?
A simple little floating dreamy thought has stired this womans heart,
The golden sleepy dream of yesterdays before they were apart,
What comfort can there be found for a petal so fair and slim
Alone in a forest dark of sorrow she weeps again for him?
Warm silver rolling tears blemish a once complexion fair,
That once shown in the fairest radiance midst a cloak of golden hair.
And the children whimper and cry for a father's care
and love they've never known,
Who sees their little tears of innocent years
as the winds of time are blown?
What sorrow will you know tonight
when all the worlds asleep,
When through the darkness comes the wind
that cuts the heart so deep,
For there is no one there to dry your tears
or your childrens tears who cling around your frock,
When there has been another bloody slaughter
in the dungeons of H Block".
Bobby Sands
