Four years ago we discovered a leader who embodied all the hopes and aspirations we held in our hearts but had long become absent and distant in the politics of our country. I voted for Margaret Thatcher to be Prime Minister in 1979, probably for much the same reason as many voted for Boris Johnson to retain that same office this year.
It soon became clear, even to me, that we had taken a wrong turn. The posters they’d put up saying “Labour is not Working” with queues of jobseekers, were compelling, but unemployment then was only around 1 million. Under the Tories it would soon become 3 million and the monetarist policies that promised a trickle down of wealth already looked threadbare.
To be fair Labour was all at sea but was having to deal with the oil crisis. The parliamentary party had lost its way but was seeing a resurgence of the left. However, very much like now the voices of progress were suppressed not only by a vicious Tory government who waged war on the unions but also by the Parliamentary Labour Party that was determined it would not be dominated by the socialist advocates who better reflected Labour’s roots than the leadership.
Though Thatcher should have been condemned for selling off Britain’s assets while being propped up by the Falklands War and North Sea Oil, her downfall was the Poll Tax and while she was damn near a…
