Back in the bad old days, following the Thatcherites’ sell-off of so many council
houses, and their decision to let market forces and the private sector re-house
the poor, it was only a matter of time before young people without jobs became
refugees in their own country, and many of the enterprising and adventurous
went off to live on the margins of society in old vans and buses. perhaps they thought they were buying into a culture of freedom of choice. They became what were commonly known as the
New-Age Travellers.
But freedom of choice probably didn’t have a lot to do with it. For most it was a rational decision taken in
the face of a new certainty … that in practical terms, they were no longer
welcome in their own communities. In
time, faced with enduring poverty and squalor, many who were trapped in that
lifestyle found themselves in cultural isolation, and in a perpetually
relocating mobile ghetto. Their children, and their children's children still suffer. Thanks for
that, Margaret.
I’ve often wondered why Mrs Thatcher allowed the Argentines to
invade the Falklands in the first place.
Was it a failure of military and diplomatic intelligence gathering
? To me this seems unlikely because anyone who was reading a serious daily newspaper at
that time knew all about the Argentines’ belligerent rhetoric ... so why on Earth
didn’t Mrs Thatcher just pick up the phone and tell them not to even think
about it ? To me it seemed then like a massive dereliction of the Churchillian precept of protecting freedom
with eternal vigilance, and her inaction amounted to a truly criminal neglect of her duty of
care for distant friends.
So, having got herself into such very hot water she was then forced
to re-invent herself as the glorious leader of a military nation, and in doing
so she committed us all to paying for an unnecessary war that should never have happened, and then to
reinforcing a newly self-important and self-serving military-industrial complex
that still holds the UK’s bankrupt economy in a less than fully creative form of
abeyance. Later, the scoundrel Blair was
to follow her example. Thanks for that,
Margaret.
'Nuff said.