Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I was talking about MK, of which (Wikipedia at least claims =) Mandela was a founding member.
Yeah, he was -- and he backed sabotage and even countenanced terrorism as an extreme option. MK was initially a separate group but came to be regarded as the ANC's militant wing.
But I was just trying to sort out the claims. I don't think that Thatcher's claim about the ANC being "a typical terrorist organisation" was accurate, given that by 1987 everyone knew it was the government in waiting.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called some of the actions of the para-military organisation he founded, and would not denounce, a "gross violation of human rights". Of the 200 civilians who died in its terror, 140 were black.
Perhaps we should get this right. The exact quote, given at a press conference at the 1987 Commonwealth Summit in Vancouver, is this:
Just before you, I just remembered I did not answer the second part of the previous question put to me about the ANC, when the ANC says that they will target British companies. This shows what a typical terrorist organisation it is. I fought terrorism all my life and if more people fought it, and we were all more successful, we should not have it and I hope that everyone in this hall will think it is right to go on fighting terrorism. They will if they believe in democracy.
The ANC's militant wing, MK, certainly committed multiple acts of terrorism, but whether the ANC was a "typical" terrorist organisation is debatable, given that it enjoyed mass membership and was already widely seen as a government in waiting. (Mandela does not appear to have planned or participated in any acts of terror, largely on account of having been in prison since 1964, although when he was at large he did countenance that resort to terrorism might be necessary in future.)
More significant was her long and trenchant opposition to economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa, which I think does put her on the wrong side of history, and certainly made Britain an outlier in the Commonwealth. She saw the regime as a bulwark against communism.
She changed her mind about the ANC and Mandela at the eleventh hour. In December 1989, she wrote this in the Sunday Express:
In southern Africa, which I visited earlier this year, freedom and democracy are on the march. After the successful election in Namibia the release of Nelson Mandela, which I hope to see in 1990, would surely speed the end of the decaying system of apartheid in South Africa. And we are working hard for peace and reform in Angola and Mozambique, too.
Margaret Thatcher -- terrorist-lover!
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Wow. The Thatcher’s Dead street-party videos are starting to hit the wires. The one in Brixton seems to have gone on for hours (and ended up in some looting -- the people in the latest clips just need to go the fuck home, or to the pub). Here they are, dancing to The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’:
In some of the clips, it seems there’s no one who could even remember her, which is fascinating in itself. A generational hatred. See Ian McEwan’s observation about how people loved to hate her.
I presume these are not the type of people who minister Chris Finlayson – who tweeted today that she had been “the greatest woman of the 20th century” – would have a lot of time for.
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Hard News: Illegal Tender, in reply to tonyH,
[ [2116-22-7-04_REJOICE.jpeg] ] sorry not up to speed with posting images
It's not you, probably. There's an issue with image uploads at the moment.
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Ian McEwan’s assessment is good and thoughtful.
But I like Polly Toynbee's better. Although it's not her usual turf, I think I think she nails it with some of the economic stuff towards the end.
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Final word before I go and make TV ...
Blame must also accrue to the British Labour movement, whose disappearance down the Militant Tendency rabbit-hole played a great part in Thatcher winning successive elections.
They fell prey to the very divisions Thatcher looked to foster. You really had to despair of them at the time.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
That is ,for someone from the left, a fair summing up of the Lady
Some people seem to have forgotten what a basket case the UK was then
I am sure it could have been do better but it had to be donePerhaps that's a 20th Century lesson: don't allow your economy to degrade so terribly that it appears that extremists are the only people who can fix it.
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Okay … five minute break.
If you can judge a person by the company they keep … Thatcher’s most important mentor, Keith Joseph.
A vile man who gave speeches about the working-class birth rate threatening “our human stock”. Who, in the wake of riots in Liverpool, proposed a “managed rundown” of Merseyside, on the basis that there was no point in trying to help such people. Who told West Indian immigrants to go back and grow bananas".
There’s a fascinating BBC doco called Tory Tory! Tory! about the development of Thatcherism. Some of those people were basically fascists.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Danielle,
A corrupt, evil bitch
Ahem.
Yeah, I actually meant to include a "avoid gendered insults please" rider. So, that.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Stephen Judd,
In other countries, New Zealand included, the move to a new era of production was achieved pragmatically
What.
In newspapers, it absolutely was. When I started at the Christchurch Star in 1981, they’d just gone through the change, retiring the old compositional technology in favour of a computer-based system. In consultation with the trade unions involved, workers were retrained and the large majority kept their jobs. It took years for the changes to fully play out, but there was a general recognition that this was the sensible way forward.
That didn’t happen in Britain. When I went to work there in 1986, I couldn’t believe how primitive things were. As The Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger has noted, his newspaper owes a debt to Murdoch for breaking the union lock on the way newspapers could be produced.