With England fans chanting that Keir Starmer is “a cunt” during their teams dour 1-0 victory against Andorra in Barcelona on Friday night, one was reminded of the mess this country was in when Labour returned to power 11 months ago. It’s hardly Starmer’s fault that it is taking time to repair a country that has been well and truly broken by 14 disastrous years of Conservative misrule and I’m sure we would be happier if there were instant fixes to our many ills. Of course, we can rightly blame David Cameron, along with the useful idiots of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and finally Rishi Sunak for trashing the UK, but in truth things go back much further than that.
The former DJ and presenter Danny Baker is, due to his own ego and his subsequent volatility, one of the great lost figures in our culture. On his day, a brilliant cutting edge broadcaster, the man has no filter and is like, as Graham Nash put it, King Midas in reverse. Personally, I find the implosion of his media career very sad because in a perfect world he would still be a BBC DJ, enriching the lives of music fans with his rich and diverse knowledge. I don’t really know what he does these days but what I do know is that he still has the knack of being able to tell a story, in this case the real and enduring reason why Britain remains broken: Margaret Thatcher.
But hang on, you say. Thatcher became Tory leader from 1975 and was prime minister from 1979 to 1990. She’s not been in office for 35 years and she’s literally dead. Given that Labour came to power for 13 years from 1997 to form the best government of my lifetime, how come I am still blame that woman? Have a look what Danny Baker says:
‘Everything rotten in Britain stems from this period. Everything.
Landlord rents. Shit in the rivers. Zero work hours. No British industry. Gas, electric bills through the roof.
No affordable housing.
All of it.’
Every word demonstrably true. Thatcher presided over the disastrous privatisation of all the things we, the taxpayer owned, including water, gas, electric, as well as destroying British industry along the way and all but wiping out manufacturing. She flogged off council properties – affordable housing – on the cheap, in exchange for votes; literally gerrymandering. She decimated the rights of working people by castrating their representatives’ power within the trade union movement. When she left office in 1990, and later when the Tories left office seven years later, the country was on its knees. Schools were literally falling apart, the NHS was on its knees, unemployment was soaring, interest rates reached 15%, homelessness and poverty rose dramatically but one thing she was wholly responsible for was the ‘me first’ society.
Like a British female Gordon Gekko, Thatcher told everyone that greed was good. you could have it all. There was no such thing as society. It was perfectly fine to trample over the sick, the old, the weak, the vulnerable to get what you wanted. If you had no legs, you would have to find another way to stand on your own two non-existent feet because the state surely wasn’t going to help you do it. You had to be self-reliant in Thatcher’s world because otherwise you didn’t matter.
The Cambridge Dictionary describes the word evil as “morally bad, cruel or very unpleasant“. Thatcher was all of these things and more. She was not so much an elected leader as an elected dictator. When she was first elected in 1979, she even had the brass neck to quote Saint Francis of Assisi, a Catholic friar who gave up a life of wealth to live a life of poverty, by saying this: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. Where there is despair, may we bring hope.” No one in their right mind could not conclude that in her deeds she did the exact opposite. No one did more to divide Britain than Thatcher. And, as Danny Baker rightly points out, her terrible legacy remains.
Thatcher governed from the right of British politics, crushing her opponents who more often than not were working class people and stifling dissent by politicising the civil service and, particularly, the police. Under Thatcher, we did what we were told.
When she died in 2013, I drank Champagne. I felt no joy because, despite my loathing of her, I knew she had family who loved her, as families do, regardless of their actions. Prisons of full of terrible criminals who are still loved by their families and friends. I was glad she was no more, but in truth nothing had changed. Her terrible reset of Britain endured, and still endures, to the extent that her period in office still exercises huge influence of how we live today, none of it good nor positive.
I don’t happen to agree with the England football fans who call Keir Starmer “a cunt” and indeed I find it instructive that they do not reserve any of their anger for the Fagash Fuhrer Nigel Farage, the Oswald Mosley of modern times, maybe also the William Joyce, too, but maybe that’s why some people are attracted to him, as people were to Mosley in the 1930s when the Daily Mail supported Hitler and Mosley’s fascist ‘brownshirts’ marched on London? The truth for many working class people, many born long after her pernicious reign, is that Thatcher stole their future, as well as clearing the way for the broken Britain Starmer inherited from the Tories.
Incredible that it took a diminished former DJ and media presenter to point out the reality of today’s world, explaining how the actions of someone seen by many as an historical figure who has been dead for 12 years has shaped the country in which we live today. The Tory years from 2010 to 2024 unquestionably made things far, far worse but the rot started when Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader and our prime minister. We should never forget and I for one am grateful for Danny Baker’s timely reminder.
