Broken Telephone Boxes in Thatcher’s Ruined Britain
With her dire prophetic warning that there is no such thing as society, Margaret Thatcher ruined Britain.
Winston Churchill, every Tory’s hero, once said that ‘democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others we have tried.’
What is democracy exactly?
According to the Oxford dictionary, democracy is ‘Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them or by officers elected by them.’
The Lady Likes Jewels
Thatcher did not accept that.
She said in an interview for Woman’s Own in 1987 that ‘we were living in a period when too many children and people have been given to understand … ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it. I am homeless, the Government must house me. And so, they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing.’
Thatcher Privatisation
When Thatcher came to power in 1979, she popularised the right-wing concept of privatisation and oversaw the sale of major state-owned businesses including British Airways, British Telecom, British Steel, British Gas, British Rail, the water that fell from the sky and the most profitable chunks of the NHS. Today, 40% of the NHS budget is given straight to private companies.
Assets owned by ‘the people as a whole’ and enriched by the men and women who fought fascism to bring peace to Europe were sold off at bargain prices. They were falsely told that we were entering a house-owning, share-owning age where – thanks to trickle-down economics – everyone would be rich.
The truth is more prosaic. Only a small minority of people had the spare cash to buy those shares and paid more for them than the corporations and foreign banks through a share option system favouring institutions. Many people able to buy their council houses cheap sold them off cheap to a new generation of landlords whose belief in profits at all costs resulted in ruined Britain having the biggest housing crisis in Europe.
Once the council-owned property was sold off, building new social housing ceased. The number of homeless people, as well as those living in unsafe rented accommodation, grew exponentially.
With these policies, Mrs Thatcher with her advisers and followers took a pair of shears and sliced through every thread of the precious fabric of society created after the war by the Labour Government against enormous Tory Opposition.
When there is no such thing as society, you do not provide children in state schools a daily bottle of milk. You save a few quid and snatch it away. Labour Education spokesman, Edward Short, called Thatcher’s policy ‘the meanest and most unworthy thing he’d seen in 20 years.’
Mrs Thatcher relished the epithet the Iron Lady but, as history is beginning to show, Thatcher the Milk Snatcher is far more appropriate.
In 1979 when Thatcher came to power there were no food banks.
In ruined Britain in 2022, there are more than 1,400 Trussell Trust food banks and 1,000 independent food banks. For thousands of families it is now a question of heating or eating,’ Iceland boss Richard walker told the BBC.
Food banks, poverty, hungry kids, zero-hour contracts, broken streets, broken schools and flagrant lies have become so normalised people in ruined Britain still read the rubbish printed in the Express, Telegraph, Sun, Times and Daily Mail as if it’s gospel and vote for the very people destroying what they have been programmed to believe is the best country in the world. On virtually every ranking in health, pensions, infant mortality, education and quality of life, the United Kingdom does not appear in the world’s top twenty.
Making a Call in Ruined Britain
The photograph above shows two telephone boxes in a bleak high street that could be some neglected town far from London. But no, they stand in the Kings Road, Chelsea, once one of the most fashionable shopping streets in the world. The empty 22 bus is on its way to Piccadilly Circus, the beating heart of the metropolis with its soup kitchens, teenage prostitutes and runaways sleeping in shop doorways.
The filthy phone boxes are owned by BT. Who owns BT? A scrabble bag of banks and hedge funds including: IGAAX – International Growth and Income Fund Class A, EFA – iShares MSCI EAFE ETF, DFIEX and International Core Equity.
Why don’t they clean them up? Capitalism doesn’t work like that. Why doesn’t the government make BT clean them up? The government and the corporations have become interchangeable. David Cameron made $10m (£7.2m) lobbying his chums in the Cabinet for Greensill Capital before the financial firm collapsed, according to BBC’s Panorama.
The government has been thrilled to announce that more people are choosing to volunteer at covid booster clinics and at food banks.
Of course the government is pleased. They don’t pay them. Camilla, the Queen Consort, boasted on BBC Radio 4 that her Reading Room programme had encouraged ‘hundreds’ of volunteers to go into schools to help children slow in learning to read.
Why is it necessary?
Schools and colleges in the last ten Tory Years have suffered the worst spending cuts since the depths of the 1970s, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Nine million adults in the UK are functionally illiterate, and one in four British five-year-olds struggles with basic vocabulary. Three-quarters of white working-class boys fail to achieve the government’s benchmark at the age of 16.
That’s three out of every four boys.
When a party wants to retain power at all costs, you make sure you have an uneducated population and maintain close alliance with the press.
The Conservative Party, as a matter of policy, has starved our schools and our children of funds, food, equipment and building repairs. Teachers after years of further education start work with a salary of £25,714 and no chance of ever saving enough for a deposit on their own flat.
In 2010, an MP’s annual salary was £65,738. By April 2021, it had risen to ‘an inflation-busting’ £84,144, as of April 2022.
Liz Truss on her bike.
Margaret Thatcher ruined Britain with her hard-right policies and the five Conservative prime ministers since her party knifed her in the back the Tory way have carelessly kicked over the remains. Each has been worse than the last in descending order – John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May, liar Boris Johnson and finally Liz Truss, a puppet with a wooden heart and personal photographer. She is the perfect ally of the corporations, banks, Russian and Saudi Arabian land and football club owners, the aristocracy and the royal family – yes, King Charles, Camilla, William and Kate Middleton – with their fingers pulling the strings in a ruined Britain where the rich will grow richer and the poor, meek, humble and hungry will this winter be killing themselves from despair.
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Thatcher was an evil tory monster and destroyed the UK and 90% of the UK’s problems from 1990 onwards lie at her feet yet there is a statue of the evil entity in the house of commons🙄 She sold off Nationalised Industries, the countries crown jewels, at cheap prices to bail out her failed economic policies, she stopped free milk in primary schools, she sold off state mental hospitals as they were called at the time, to raise further funds for her failed policies and the huge debt she created, then she introduced Care in the Community, to house the patients who used to reside in State Mental Hospitals, thus depleting Council housing creating massive homelessness and depriving thousands of young people from securing low cost social housing, she also negatively effected, education, the NHS, manufacturing, destroyed, mining, steel and ship building, taxed Live AID fund raising, increased indirect taxes which penalised normal working people but protected rich Tories and their backers, deregulated UK banks which lead to the 2008 banking crisis, started an unnecessary war to win an election, covered up tonnes of Tory sleaze, never got inflation under control, called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, refused to place sanctions on apartheid South Africa, refused to negotiate peace in Northern Ireland prolonging Irish troubles and deaths needlessly, she was a failure of a PM and the destroyer of British industry, UK societies, she created mountains of debt that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would be left to sort out along with all her other travesties, she was a monster and should never be revered.
Spot on Cliff. Hope all well. Must compare notes in 20 22
Well said. We think these things, but are rarely articulate enough to express them adequately and with aplomb. Best wishes.
Ronald Reagan – “Hold my beer.”
For me it started with Thatcher and I remember the point where I noticed it. Amid all the flagwaving after the so-called Falklands War, she said ” After the enemy without it is now time for the enemy within. I looked at my dad and said “What `?”. He said “She means us”. Never forgot it. It was a declaration of class war. And that is why we are here now. Brexit was not an end in itself. It is a means to win that class war.
Chilling words and a warning to us all.
1) Deregulated banks… say no more really.
http://positivemoney.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/M4-Base-Money-Graph.png
The majority of new money (illustrated above) went into a meretricious property price bubble literally sucking purchasing power out of our pockets.
The 2008 crash and resultant Great Recession resulted from this too.
WHY AREN’T WE FIGHTING? We should be throwing stones. We should be on the streets. Screw their attempts to make protests illegal. My wife is disabled. My parents have alzheimers. My son is autistic. Yet, I’d go to prison to defend a better life for us all. Why are we LETTING this happen? They can’t put everyone in prison. Are we going to just roll over and have our bellies rubbed? Our head of state has a jubilee party in the middle of a “living crisis”. Our PM squanders and gives away money to mates and foreign wars rather than help the most vulnerable. Oil companies turn in record profits and tell us our bills are high because the “providers” have overheads. Our NHS is being privatised. But quietly, of course. It is cheaper to fly to Germany than catch a train from London to Newcastle. That’s if there is a train because the operators don’t understand how train stations work. Solidarity to Mick Lynch at RMT and ALL the unions. And while we’re at it, the unions are under threat from the incoming PM. If the unions fall we’ll be in the 80’s again. 1880 with workhouses and Sunday afternoons off to go to Church. All the while the world will burn.
Because we did NOTHING. We should be tearing down the gates at Downing Street. We should be surrounding Westminster, Whitehall and 4 Matthew Parker Street. We should be outside 105 Victoria Street. We should be rattling Johnson and Sunak, Truss and Starmer. Down tools. Throw stones. Make a noise. No other country is coming to help. No EU, NATO or UN. NO ONE. We’re on our own.
On our own and dying.
We face an extremist government hell bent on getting richer so they can watch the end of the world drinking Champagne from the skull of a Dolphin while eating socialists and foreigners.
This is the night of the long knives without the bloodshed.
This is how the German people were duped into accepting fascism.
It hurts me to see how pathetic we have become. I for one think this world is a beautiful place to be. Fascist capitalists like Starmer, Sunak, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Truss or Branson don’t give a f*****g toss about it.
No more words are needed…Thatcher is the most evil woman I have ever had the misfortune to know
2022, We live in a fragmented, incoherent, embittered, unempathic society because of this woman’s policies. The results are irreversible.
To JW. I don’t know about you but IAM fighting , I petitIon, belong to Groups trying to save the NHS, go to demonstrations, join hands around Parliament to save our Freedom of speech. Maybe you should be more active, not everybody is just sitting back and accepting this Tory government
Reagan and Thatcher believed that free trade would solve our problems by making countries wealthier. The problem was it meant that companies could move production to countries with cheaper employees and fewer restrictions on environmental and labour protection. People in those countries had access to work that they may not have had otherwise, but people who had decent jobs in the UK, Europe and the USA found themselves having to take lower paid work as factories and production was moved abroad.
Cheaper production abroad meant that prices of goods dropped and people bought things and felt better with their lives, but the real beneficiaries of all this were the people with spare cash who could invest in shares, the senior management in companies and the shadowy groups buying companies to asset strip and sell on.
This is why people at the bottom who feel abandoned and are financially struggling became poorer and the people at the top grew wealthier. Now things around the world have become difficult with Covid and the Russian invasion this process has accelerated. Politicians on the right still think that more of the Thatcher/Reagan approach will help, but it will only make things worse for those at the bottom.
We need to have the investment like that was put in place after WWII. This includes health, social care, education and local services and infrastructure. We need to see more taxation especially on the most wealthy to fund this, not less. The wealthiest individuals and companies need to be taxed more percentage wise with graduated tax and we need to see a proper minimum wage that people can live on and not welfare payments that just enable companies to pay less.
This will need us to recognise that the Thatcher/Reagan approach has failed for all but the wealthiest and must end.
Very will written Clifford. Also, when John Smith died, Labour decided to fully embrace the Thatcher philosophy, see Simon Jenkins’ excellent book, Thatcher And Sons
Thanks for there recommendation, I have ordered the book and advise others to do so. This is the Amazon UK link.
Hi Clifford
Thankyou for a brilliant, devastating analysis of Thatcherism.
I would add that she also perverted the course of justice at the time of the Great Miners Strike, which is why successive Tory governments refuse to re-open the Orgreave enquiry.
The real reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is because the entire economy is based on usury and commercial bank money. Read “The Problem With Interest” by Tarek El-Diwany, and watch the documentary 97% Owned.