The Old Hack

“And the Morgan Stanley lifetime achievement award goes to… Margaret Thatcher!”

Please excuse the Old Hack’s failure to applaud. I was around when this pathetic excuse for a politician was elected to lead my country. And lead it she did - into a state of arrogant disdain for the poor and disadvantaged. Into a selfish, introverted uncaring and uncharitable society where respect belonged only to the wealthy. Into a duped society believing that salvation was at hand as soon as it had pawned it’s family silver to buy its council house, and which was rudely awakened when the bailiffs came knocking at the door just a few short years later. A society whose disabled and sick were labelled ‘spongers’ without recourse to evidence of any kind. A society where working man was set against working man in the orchestrated destruction of the Trade Unions. A ‘loadsamoney’ society which began to truly believe that money could buy anything, and knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. A society which has forever since retained festering, septic, remnants of this distasteful, vulgar period of politics under a distasteful and vulgar leader.

“Today”, said David Cameron in the Daily Torygraph, “We know exactly what Thatcherism meant for our country; victory in the Cold War, victory against unbridled trade union power, the sale of council houses, the liberation of the British economy…”

To the best of my knowledge (and I have no wish to be sued here, so I am careful to make that qualification) David Cameron has never belonged to a trade union. Nor has he owned or even lived in a council house. I doubt he is old enough to remember much detail of the so-called Cold War and as for the liberation of the British economy I do not believe that Cameron’s wealth or background suggest he has ever enjoyed anything other than a wealthy and privileged life.

I do not think we need concern ourselves that Cameron may replace Thatcher. Tony Blair did a good enough job of that, failing to reverse or even compensate for much of the damage the former inflicted on Britain. Rather we should remember the lifetime achievement of one of his predecessors. The achievement of a British Prime Minister who succeeded where the Third Reich had failed in destroying the spirit of a nation and reducing it to an infighting, self-important, uncaring shadow of its former self.

A lifetime achievement indeed, and one which I fear cannot be reversed within mine.

Picture courtesy of www.recessmonkey.com