Maggie Maggie Maggie, DEAD DEAD DEAD (revised)

I'm not sure where my vitriol for Margaret comes from and actually given that I was so young during the Thatcher years it's hard to imagine that I formed very much information about the ongoing debate around me. My most vivid memory of Maggie was the day she left Downing Street, my whole primary school class got rounded up and taken into the audio visual room to watch this historic moment. Born in 1980 we had never known another Prime Minister. When I look back on that I can only think that the teachers that surrounded us were watching with some level of relief and jubilation. Though we were to young to know it.

I grew up in a small village on the west coast of Scotland. My family were poor. My Dad spent years on and off the dole. Mum went back to work, luckily she was a qualified Occupation Therapist, I dread to think what would have happened to us had she not been previously qualified in something. To be honest I remember being poor. I remember eating Beanfeast for what seemed like weeks on end. My Dad scrabbling around on the floor pulling up the carpet at the edges searching for pennies in the hope that he might be able to go to the pub for a pint and standing with him in very very long queues at the dole office with what seemed like hundreds of other men. I also remember looking at those boards with the jobs cards popped into position with a subtle bend. There was a never more than a few jobs on display and they were mainly for things that my Dad couldn't do. But they were tens of guys crowded round half a dozen measly jobs. Now looking back at that and having the context and knowing how the job centre works it is possible that hundreds of men viewed those jobs day after day and further more hundreds probably applied for them. I don't remember seeing any other kids there, that's probably because they were at home with a mother who too wasn't working. The price those families paid was high my aunt and uncle had their house repossessed and were maid homeless with two young children.

My mother is one of six, three boys three girls and at one point not one of the brothers or the brother-in-laws were in work. For this reason I've actually always had an issue with Feminism because in the world I grew up in the women went to work and raised the children, not the men. Women were the dominant sex, through all of my childhood lenses. The men were invisible and in the end the brothers all immigrated to Canada in search of a better life, along with thousands of others. The women stayed.

My family were the lucky ones no doubt about it and still scrabbling around on the floor for pennies. With each season depending on our monetary situation we would shop accordingly. We went to Tesco if we were rich. It was Farmfoods and Kwick Save for us if we were poor. You could tell Mum tried to save money every way that she could going from shop to shop in her lunch hour, to try and get the best deal. Which probably goes to prove that nobody shops in these places unless they absolutely have to.

The Poll Tax was the final straw. The Poll Tax was introduced in Scotland 18 months before it was introduced in England and Wales. It was per head of population rather than per household whether those members of the household were financially contributing or not. Children and the elderly were all taxed. When it was introduced I was surrounded by a lot of live debate, a lot of people refused to pay it, including members of my family. Mum had no choice if she didn't pay it it would be deducted from her salary regardless as she was employed by the state. I remember watching her write the checks with a look of pure contempt and making some statement about what we couldn't afford or the food would have to go on the credit card. The legacy of that credit card lived on for years never mind Thatcher.

And then there was the fear the fear that if you stepped out of line you would be publicly humiliated with brut force if necessary; for expressing an opinion, like the miners, travellers and ravers. That's what I remember being scared, scared of the milk man coming cause we couldn't pay the bill. Scared of Dad loosing his job, scared of having no money, scared of stepping out of line. For a lot of years I think that fear curtailed everyone. My parents weren't the kind to go out on public protest they were kind that venomously complained in front of the T.V., which is no good for anybody.

I don't think it was what Thatcher did to the children that grew up under her rule that was so terrible. We didn't know any better, if you were poor you were poor. I don't remember crying because they took my milk away I remember being annoyed we couldn't afford the flavoured stuff, they brought in to expand choice. You didn't expect holidays abroad as we were continually bombarded with the expectation of being disappointed.

I think the adults faired far worst, they had known something better. They had known employment, holidays and ice-cream at the weekends. Now it was all gone washed down the drain with any hope they had for their future and the guilt of their own kids childhoods being worse than there own. I think that is what destroyed people most. Not only that these were people doing there bit they weren't idle or unskilled they were made redundant. My Grandparents hadn't sat on the dole their whole life, they had fought in a war that defeated fascism and had voted to create a new state that would off set the damage of that war via the NHS and free tertiary eduction. The world was getting better.

Then from nowhere half of Britain was derelict. Any adult that lived through the eighties tells me that and Glenda certainly touched on it, in her speech to the commons. That's what I grew up with and high school was certainly an endurance test with indoor water features, smashed windows and desks that gave you splinters. Now just about every High School in Inverclyde of that era has been knocked down and rebuilt with New Labour money.

One day driving past the docks in Greenock (There are about six miles of docks in Greenock). Dad told when the shipyards finished up for the night you could watch twenty-five thousand men pour out of the shipyard gates and across the road. Up until that point it never occurred to me that these buildings had been alive bustling places that employed thousands of people and supported families. Being a child that didn't understand such things I asked where did they all go? “They're still here they just don't have jobs”. That's what a dead town is a town with no jobs. This was a town that had protected the atlantic convoys during the war suffered the blitz and had managed to build the QE2 in the 50's with some of the finest trades men in the world. However there it was miles and miles of derelict shipyards.

Then there was IBM, National Semi-conductors and Mimtec (better known as Grimtec), that demonstrated exactly what the beginnings of Neo-Liberalism was about unsecured contracts and waves and waves of temporary jobs. Everyone laid off after three months and rehired a fortnight later, in order for the corporates to avoid the consequences of employment law. That's what kept Greenock going for nearly ten years until the arrival of the call centre. You wouldn't be surprised to hear of it's qualification as a Tesco town either, I'm sure.

I have no over arching memory of that lady other than that of being marched in the audio visual room to watch her demise and a varying array of images of her in blue suits and that highly unnatural blonde hair. I don't think I've ever met anybody with hair like it. She does not inspire me as a woman she has none of the attribute that I would attribute to being a woman. Not even a good stylist. I have not read a history of her life but I don't credit her with much intelligence at all, because surely for any woman the human cost of her policies should have been to much to bear. Not for Maggie. And surely for the simple reason she wasn't curious enough to find out about 'her peoples' suffering. So the dogma she had been fed by the Tory party was used to 'nurture' the nation much like nestle milk formula promoted in Africa with out the considerations of a posinous water supply. In my mind she didn't do much better than sleep her way to the top, she just happened to marry the person who would get her there.

Another thought was the Falklands if nothing else how frequently this tiny little dot in the middle of the south Atlantic pops up on the BBC. Never mind that poor guy that got his face melted off there and seemed to be banded about daytime television for years.

From as early as I can remember I have defined myself as a socialist. Mainly because I've always believed in the benefits of the dole and as I get older the NHS. In my teenage years signing on the dole was delivered to me as a god given right and the first step to independence as well as putting your name down on the housing list. For years I believed that claiming benefits was a way of counterbalancing all that avariciousness or maybe for many it became a way of retaining their dignity “I'll take the money thank you very much” rather than admit defeat. I say this because if you haven't figured out by your early twenties that you are working to make somebody else rich you are a fool.

Now having been exposed to more radical ideas. I probably consider myself more of an anarchist because I realise that state funded handouts or broad blanket social prescription aren't necessarily the answer. However I believe more services and support systems are needed especially for the disabled, mentally ill and those who care for them. I say this as someone who has claimed benefits for years.

Nobody wants to spend their life on the dole. Though who wants to spend there life stacking shelfs in ASDA under green glowing light that makes most people feel nauseas in less than half and hour? That's what I believe is the problem that people aren't encouraged to aspire to there own values of what they want. Instead it is prescribed, I mean seriously who wants to spend their days working a 45 hour week in order whizz round the supermarket to be home in time for some awful television and watch their kids being raised by someone else. It's not much of a life and yet it is the one prescribed to us intermitted by travel programmes to offer some escape. Yet at the same time what is it that the Tories want us to aspire too, a bigger house? More money, it's not much in the scheme of things? When we could be watching the sun rise and set over the homes and families we were born into without much need for work, with modern technologies it's certainly possible and yet the world at large would prefer us to be wage slaves.

And that's it most people would rather move than contribute to society they are trying to buy themselves a better school for their children or buy a house in a better area, when they could actually do the hard graft and contribute to their community by demanding better schools, public parks and housing or actually building them themselves through mutual co-operation.

People of my parents generation say “You're to young to remember Thatcher”. I'll say it again “I grew up under Thatcher”. I stood in the same dole queues as my Dad because of Thatcher.

I was once pally with a Welsh guy who'd been a Trade Unionist and was a steel worker and would regularly say “I lived in the valleys when all there was for sale was a piece of rope and you were lucky if you could afford it”. He moved to a small village in Cornwall and had a disagreement with a Thatcherite in the village pub. He didn't go back in that pub for ten years. It was the only pub in the village and this guy didn't drive. There is a strange look that people who suffered under Thatcher get when they talk about it, they summon up all the inner strength available to them to remain human while the withheld tears remain visible. A big deep collective darkness strung together by individual stories.

I take great relish in these comrades who I meet along the way, who share exactly the same sentiments I do. Yes you can work your way out of poverty but at what cost? I think the one thing that has stayed with me if not from Margaret Thatcher but from my parents 'You should never have to step on someone else to get ahead in life' (I think that applies to crushing peoples and movements too). Maggie did not care for society she battered it with the loyalty of better paid policemen.

Her greatest legacy to me will be my friends who are mostly united in hating her, hating her for taking away all hope. How can we celebrate someone's death? That's the only thing we had left to celebrate; that the certainty of her death was the only thing that might end the living nightmare. We were wrong her rule was just the first flickerings of how bad we thought it could be. So at the end of the evening we all empty our pockets of the money that we have on us, put it together and split it equally and buy each other a half pint to keep the exchange of free ideas flowing.

I'm cheered by the prospect of Scottish independence. The idea that a nation of disenfranchised voters, can find a voice of their own.