A Future That Works

A Future That Works
NO2aTory/Liberal coalition - Vote with your feet for an alternative to a neo-liberal economy and neo-conservative state Yes2aLeftFront and a Red/Green Left Alliance

Sunday 1 September 2013

If Grantham needs to remember its glory days


As Ian Selby says Thatcher was such a controversial politician, surly there should be a referendum of the people of Grantham. Ray Wootten thinks that Grantham should capitalise from her notoriety and Helen Goral agrees with him. OK that two out of three put it to the people and let them choose between capitalising on her notoriety as a controversial politician or preferring to be remembered as the town that educated Isaac Newton and maybe its engineering history which is less controversial. If Grantham needs to remember its glory days, then I'd say Hornsby's, Aveling-Barford's, Neal's which became Coles Cranes, Kontak's and BMARC etc engineering along with its railway history would be better than a person who despised her home town, spat on other children from her window above her father's shop and as prime minister of Britain destroyed the lives of millions of its citizens believing ''there is no such thing as society, just the individual''. Is that really what the people of Grantham want it to be remembered for, is it a price worth paying.

9 comments:

  1. A statue to Maggie Thatcher is a waste of money, to a person who privatized gas, electricity, water which are all owned by multinational corporations now. Before that they were assets owned by the people of this country, back in the days when we were a manufacturing nation, who remembers Grantham's engineering history again back in the day before that woman came to power. Isaac Newton was a great mathematician and scientist, he gave us the technical knowledge upon which the engineers designed and built the products that are no longer made in Grantham, and people want a statue of Maggie Thatcher put near to his, what can I say, it beggars belief.

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  2. Thatcher's legacy, is the return of that world of privilege and lack of opportunity, those of us fortunate to have benefited from the post-war boom, NHS and welfare-state enabling us to buy our own homes and send our children to university should remember we owe this to Nye Bevan, not Maggie Thatcher.

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  3. The current Tory-Liberal coalition government is now advancing Thatcher's ideology of hate for the sick, disabled, unemployed etc. so that the wealthy can have a 5% cut in taxes is also a government without a popular mandate for the draconian attacks it is making on the weakest and poorest in society so that the most powerful and wealthy benefit.

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  4. Thatcher's legacy, the return to class politics 1930's fashion and an attack on the material benefits won by the labour movement in the social-democratic phase of welfare-capitalism (often referred to as the thirty golden years) between 1945 and 1975. Between 1975 and 1980 the political and economic elite abandoned the Keynesian model of capitalism and adopted the Hayek-Friedman model which allows the market to dictate who can have and at what price, and the role of the state is purely to enforce market discipline via the law and police/military as required like in the case of the miners' strike between 1984–1985.

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  5. What we have witnessed post-2008 is that we are back where we were in the late 1970's, capitalism is still in a realization crises, growth is at 0.3% (a tenth of that required by the capitalist economic elite) and hence the need to cut the real-wages of workers and dismantle the welfare-state. All that Thatcherism and Reaganomics stand for is appropriation of a greater portion of real-wealth from the working class to make up for the shortfall in real-growth. Basically robbing from the weakest and poorest in society so that the strongest and wealthiest don't pay the cost of the general crises of capitalism.

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  6. Whilst Nye Bevan was a working class hero, Maggie Thatcher was a hero to greed and self-interest and it's a sad indictment to peoples knowledge of our history that many working class people see the petite-bourgeois dogmatist as a hero.

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  7. Grantham Matters (Grantham Past)

    http://granthammatters.co.uk/

    https://www.facebook.com/GranthamPast

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  8. The statue is being paid for by donations, but once its erected it will cost Grantham council tax payers money. As a socialist a statue of Maggie Thatcher glorifies Thatcherism and is a symbolizes its triumphalism over the post-war consensus which we call social-democracy and welfare capitalism. As a Marxist I could argue that the post-war concessions were made due to the threat of social revolution post-1930's and post-world war in 1914-18 and 1939-45. And that Marxist theory always argued that such compromises would at some point be withdrawn by the capitalist political and economic elite.


    Having said that, it still symbolizes the triumphant assault on the real material gains made by trade-unionists, social-democrats, socialists and communists from the likes of William Gallacher and Nye Bevan through to Hugh Scanlon and Harold Wilson. It's a monument to class hatred and contempt by the bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie for the proletariat and precariat which manifests itself in privatization of health care, education and dismantling of the welfare-state. For those reasons as a socialist, I find it obscene and hope that trade-unionists, and the broad left demonstrate outside of Grantham museum against this triumphalist celebration of Maggie Thatcher and Thatcherism.

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  9. Have they triumphed over the labour movement in Britain, will they achieve their goal of dismantling the post-war compromise between capital and labour known as welfare-capitalism?

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