“Kindness is Better than Greed”: Photos, and a Response to Margaret Thatcher on the Day of Her Funeral

“Kindness is Better than Greed”: A Response to Margaret Thatcher on the Day of Her Funeral, a set on Flickr.

To paraphrase William Shakespeare, I came to bury Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. However, due to a hospital appointment, I missed the procession and only arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral after the funeral service, when the guests were leaving, although I was in time to take a few photos as reminders of the day when the woman was laid to rest who, during my lifetime, did more than any other individual to wreck the country that is my home.

My most fervent hope is that I will live to see Margaret Thatcher’s legacy overturned, and for a caring, inclusive society to replace the one based on greed, selfishness and cruelty that was her malignant gift to the people of Britain.

Since her death last week, I have largely avoided the sickening attempts by the Tories to use it for political gain, although I was absolutely delighted that their insistence on providing a lavish funeral at taxpayers’ expense backfired, because only 25 percent of the public thought that a state funeral was appropriate, and 60 percent opposed it.

I have no time for anyone praising Margaret Thatcher for anything, and I have been thinking about this on and off for the last nine days, avoiding the praise from the rich and powerful people who benefited enormously from her leadership, and the craven supplication of the many establishment liberals who should know better, but who, it turns out, also bought into the agenda of selfishness and greed that, of course, was enthusiastically embraced by New Labour in 1997.

For 34 years, since Thatcher came to power, selfishness has replaced the common good, and greed has become the only reference point for the value of existence. Much of this — most of it, in fact — was facilitated by Margaret Thatcher, even though it has been enthusiastically continued by all her successors — John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and David Cameron and George Osborne.

I remember a time when there was more to life than greed, and much of that was in the world that Margaret Thatcher devoted her energies to destroying. This world contained industries that had helped to shape Britain as a world power — coal mining, steel and shipbuilding — and communities across the country that depended on these industries. Supporters of Thatcher claim that the destruction (which started with the miners in 1984) was necessary because the unions were engaged in a war with the state, and while there is some truth to this, the damage caused by killing off Britain’s industries rather than finding a way of negotiating with the unions was destructive on a totally unjustifiable scale, a bonfire of our assets, and a death sentence for communities around the country — and millions of people — that have never recovered.

That is unforgivable, but it was just one small part of her crimes. I chronicled her war on the travellers, festival-goers and green activists in my book The Battle of the Beanfield (also see here), and I also mentioned her war on the women of Greenham Common, who were opposed to Britain becoming an outpost for American nuclear weapons in my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion.

In addition, of course, Thatcher sold off council houses, a move that some people regard as empowering, although there was never any need for people given an affordable home to rent, for life, to get into the property-owning world. The sell-off not only ended up fuelling a rise in house prices (with ex-council houses as the new entry level for first-time buyers), but was also part of an attempt to discredit social housing as a valid form of housing, which Thatcher reinforced, to devastating effect, by banning councils from building any new homes — a policy that her successors also continued, including New Labour, whose love of the housing market disgracefully engineered an epidemic of almost uncontrolled greed that defined Casino Britain from 1997 to 2008.

Moreover, Thatcher was also responsible for selling off Britain’s privatised utilities, transferring power to the rich and powerful, while fooling people into thinking that a quick profit as shareholders was a fair exchange for being fleeced for the rest of their lives by private companies and corporations — many of whom, of course, were foreign and took their profits abroad, as did the companies that started an orgy of outsourcing, in search of easy profit, during the Thatcher years. In addition, she attempted to introduce a tax on existence, regardless of the individual’s income, via the Poll Tax (the “Community Charge”), which backfired horribly, and, through widespread non-payment, the jailing of little old ladies and the infamous Poll Tax Riot of March 31, 1990, led partly to her political demise later that year after eleven and a half grindingly long years in power.

Furthermore, Thatcher’s deregulation of Britain’s financial markets, in 1986, opened the doors on a feeding frenzy of greed that led directly to the global economic crash of 2008 — with help from the deregulation of the banks by Blair and Brown and President Clinton between 1997 and 1999 — and this baleful legacy is one that is particularly crippling right now for the ordinary people of Britain, as the true villains go unpunished, and our current malignant politicians — Thatcher’s heirs — seek suicidally to destroy the state to protect the true criminals — the ones initially liberated by Thatcher — from being held accountable.

The ordinary people of Britain — and particularly those who are poor, ill, unemployed or disabled — are being savaged by cuts imposed for malignant ideological reasons by Thatcher’s brutal successors David Cameron, George Osborne and the rest of their heartless colleagues, and in London, moreover, these problems are exacerbated by the capital’s continued existence as a swollen housing bubble, driven by speculators and foreign investors.

There is more, much more to despise about Margaret Thatcher — her war in the Falklands, her monstrous support for the mass-murdering scumbag Pinochet, her love of the racist South African regime, her hatred of gay people, but this was only meant to be a send-off for the wretched woman, and not a full-blown treatise.

Goodbye, Margaret. I always took it personally, and you always absolutely epitomised everything I loathe about Little England and the hardhearted, greedy bigots who love to inflict misery on their fellow citizens. You will not be missed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.