legacy of pain BY AMANDA CAMPBELL
Greed was good; and if manufacturing was in decline no worries – the financial sector was were where it was happening, especially when the ‘big bang’ swept away financial sector regulation.
Hunger strikers died, bombs exploded, public utilities were sold off in a gold- rush frenzy of self-interest – the division of the have and have nots had never been so blatant. The pigs stuffed themselves at the trough, the poor got on their bikes.
But what did we learn? – not nearly enough it would seem. Margaret’s heirs are now running the country, intent on continuing the devastation she couldn’t finish. We cannot yet write these bitter years off as so much history. How can it be history when what we are all
living with now is the direct consequences of her careless and cruel actions?
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey described Margaret Thatcher’s legacy as “an evil creed.” The Tories’ politics of division are as alive today as they were then. George Osborne’s ‘scrounger’ rhetoric means thousands of working people on housing benefit have to pay for a ‘spare’ bedroom. Maria Miller has destroyed the hope of thousands of former Remploy workers. Jeremy Hunt is cutting services and privatising the NHS. Elsewhere, bank fat cats are out of control as those unable to find affordable housing hunker down with friends and family, in cramped conditions.
Benefits are capped,
unemployment is up, attacks on workers’ rights continue. The agricultural wages board has been scrapped, you can be unfairly
dismissed in the first
two years of your
job and have no legal
recourse, and you
could well
have to work till you’re 68.
Unite is not prepared to let the heirs of Thatcher return us to a state of despair. We must fight back – and we are. Unite is not only
defending you at work, but is engaging community activists and
“”
There is no such thing as society
Margaret Thatcher 1987
working with groups like the People’s Assembly – fighting to consign
Thatcherism to the history
books – where it so rightly and urgently belongs.
17 uniteWORKS May/June 2013
From top – Croydon riots, 2011 Mega-rich ex-banker Rich Ricci , 2013 Tuition fee protest, London, 2011
...NOW
PA Photos
PA Photos
PA Photos
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