Thatcher funeral: dying UK establishment military propaganda

[cem]

Thatcher's funeral: Britain's new opportunity for propaganda


http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/04/11/18735063.php


Thatcher's funeral: Britain's new opportunity for war propaganda and domestic repression


Propaganda alert

compiled by Cem Ertür

11 April 2013





True to form, Britain's political establishment is preparing to use former British Prime Minister (1979-1990) Margaret Thatcher's funeral in London as a stage for imperialist war propaganda and domestic repression.







London Evening Standard, 10 April 2013


______________________________________________________________________ _______________________




excerpts from: Falklands guard of honour will carry Margaret Thatcher on final journey to St Paul's

by Joe Murphy, London Evening Standard, 10 April 2013

[TonyGosling]

Thatcher "created profit hungry cartels that gleefully sodomised their customers"

Thatcher’s true legacy: Her Majesty’s national socialist state

By Richard Cottrell

Contributing writer for End the Lie
http://endthelie.com/2013/04/09/thatchers-true-legacy-her-majestys-nat ional-socialist-state/#axzz2QCirKjAI

The death at a great age of Margaret Hilda Thatcher should provide the British people with a perfect opportunity to draw a line in the sand between the Iron’s Lady’s ruthless neo-fascism and the enlightened forms of government which, by some grace of God, might succeed the interregnum represented by the clueless and weak caretaker David Cameron. I am not optimistic.

Editor’s note: read Richard’s latest articles “The empire strikes back: Luftwaffe bombs Cyprus” and “Gagged! UK government brings in full press censorship, pledges death to the internet”

Thatcher’s greatest crime was to transfer to the public consciousness her own entrenched hatred for the mores of decent society, for individualism, for respect of the privacy of individuals and all the ancient rites long stored in the British state such as the Runnymede Charter and the Statutes of Westminster.

Thatcher let rip the mania of destructive consumerism and debased capitalism which has led directly to the police state that is now steadily displacing the paternal welfare state.

Indeed ‘welfarism’ is now equated – particularly in bottom trawling (literally) rags such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Express – as the natural replacement for communism.

‘Welfare dependency’ is the new plague stalking the nation, while the crooked banksters and city trading types steal millions every day and park it in sunny South Seas islands.

That’s called prudent independency, and it was Thatcher who created that culture of greed and unbridled dishonesty with the famous Big Bang that transformed the City of London into one gigantic roulette wheel.

When Thatcher told a popular woman’s journal that there was no such thing as society, only individuals ‘striving’ for a better life she was thinking of her own warped, dystopian upbringing in a small and dull Lincolnshire town.

She never possessed sound political principals or instincts, except the endless ‘striving’ in which her glorious alderman-grocer father indulged behind his shop counter in Grantham, unremarkable capital of the Lincolnshire potato growing country.

His virtues of thrift and hard work were doubtless real enough, but revealingly throughout her life and career in politics she failed to indicate the same degree of devotion to her mother and sister. Her family life mirrored what had gone on in Grantham.

She idolized her largely witless son Mark, precisely because he was a son, while his clever and witty sister, Mark’s twin Carol, found herself, like her grandmother and aunt, consigned very much to the sidelines. Margaret Hilda Thatcher did not like women, to the extent that she considered she had been born in the wrong form.

Very early in her prime ministerial career, the word ‘conservative’ as applied to the party that she led (bullied and harangued) was replaced by ‘Thatcherism.’ This was a doggerel creed she picked up from her chief guru, Milton Friedman, and neocon backwoodsmen like the remote and icy John Boyd-Carpenter.

For all her idolizing of the old scoundrel Winston Churchill and the Monarch of the Grouse Moor, Harold Macmillan, she had nothing in common with either their thoughts or principles. In fact she was not really a conservative at all in any meaningful sense.

She was, in fact, a socialist of the nationalist and corporatist hue which placed her very much in the line of pre-war national socialism and of course, Soviet corporatism. Truly, a creature of Hegel.

The Britain that she built shifted the scale of power away from individuals and their personal relationships to the state in favor of the power of big corporations who were allowed to grab the ‘family silver’ – as Macmillan, who despised her, called the nationalized industries – at knock down prizes.

Her great programme of flogging off the state enterprises – gas, water, electricity, airlines, telephones – was trumpeted as the ultimate freedom, whereas in fact the millions who came into the market for the first time were out again in two shakes of a dog’s tail.

On the back of this mass illusion she created profit hungry cartels that gleefully sodomised their customers, maximizing shareholder profits and gigantic boardroom rewards before investments, exactly as the Austrian-born thinker Peter Drucker prescribed as the new course of modern capitalism.

Of course behind the scenes, her millionaire oil baron husband Denis, a daguerreotype racist and all-round reactionary, egged her on to ever more extremes of daylight robbery.

Bewitched by this apparently mad woman, the perfect fountain of duplicity, the British public reacted like slaves who come to love their chains. The ‘prosperity’ she created was false and shallow, since inequality in British society widened to unprecedented levels. The Brits partied on and begged for more.

Like the ersatz shareholder democracy, the prosperity of the UK was constructed on the false foundations of soaring house prices and runaway IPOs in the City of London.

After the Bing Bang blew up the old medieval ways of open call, the City abandoned all pretence at acting as a store of investor value. Caution was thrown to the wind as one tin pot worthless outfit after another took a bucket to the magic well in search of flyaway fortunes.

It was bound to end badly and it did. Thatcher was the true grandmother of the great financial collapse which began in 2008.

Perpetually frustrated by her skirts, Thatcher loved any scrap she could wade into. In one of her famous demonstrations of respect for democracy, she entirely demolished the Greater London Authority because Londoners persistently voted for socialists to run it.

Greater London, home to eight million people, was thus Balkanized into a cabal of squabbling parish councils. She called denying Londoners the right to choose their governors a victory.

She itched for a good war and duly got one when the Argentineans invaded the Falklands, home to just about enough people to fill the average morning London commuter train and a lot of sheep.

In fact, her own Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington had quietly put the Argies up to it, by withdrawing the only naval patrolling vessel cruising the local waters.

No one in their maddest dreams thought the old bat would launch a counter-invasion, but she did and duly earned her Empire Strikes Back moment of fame. Yet the lasting scar of that affair was the lost lives of scores of British military personnel, taken from their families for the hubris of a woman who soaked the entire affair with her overbearing, outlandish pride.

She loved bashing garlicky foreigners. It was always difficult to get her to go on holiday, and on the rare occasions that she did venture across the great silvery ditch known as the English Channel (la Manche to the French) she chose Switzerland, because of the tinkle of the Alpine cow bells among the whizzing of the money markets.

Thatcher was the culmination of the steady transformation of the British political personality into a national socialist state. Thatcher’s corporatism would have been recognizable to Mussolini. Her flattery and encouragement of great state champions shamelessly aped the Third Reich.

The Nazi programme was designed with tricks of mirrors and light to convince Middle Class Germans that they had at last discovered true salvation and security. This was the same elementary message of Thatcherism which – and this cannot be said too often – was intended as a permanent force. The rival Opposition was never intended to govern again and in reality, it never has.

Thatcher tore the unions to shreds, again exactly like Mussolini and Hitler. Organizations or combinations of any kind which stood up to the rolling juggernaut were ruthlessly crushed, the coal miners being a classic example. At the end of the crisis in the mines, an entire industry was wiped out in the twinkling of an eye, purely to satisfy Big Oil – perfectly represented by her tipsy consort, Denis Thatcher.

The British people were mesmerized by Thatcher because she was – in every meaning of the phrase – a class act.

She appeared to have arisen from a humble background, unlike the usual snobby Tory grouse moor toffocracy. She indeed went about describing this, that or the other person as ‘one of us’ – pure national socialist stereotyping.

She was a dictatress, who did not brook rebellions in cabinet and castrated the shrinking ‘wet’ faction in the party.

She was unique in Downing Street annals for her complete tone deafness to humor. She was literally witless.

She never failed to resort to screaming rants at those who disagreed with her, or simply annoyed her. We small band of brothers in the European Parliament were marked out for especial displays of scornful rebukes – and worse.

We were invited for drinks at an annual ritual cursing, but otherwise treated as lepers. She was eternally petty minded and could never shake off the absurdities and fancies which danced beneath her everlasting permanent waves.

She drank excessively and never stopped drawing attention to herself. Reagan said of her after one close encounter in Camp David: ‘Well I don’t know about anything else but she sure can talk.’ She was incapable of relaxing except with a large whisky.

Of course the ‘legacy’ word is now in full play. She certainly bequeathed one very impressive legacy. She has succeeded in eliminating the essential differences and normal spirit of political combat.

There is no longer any real divide or difference between MPs who call themselves conservatives, socialists or liberals. The United Kingdom is – pretty much like the United States – a one-party state.

The natural flowering of British national socialism is none other than Tony Blair. It was he who created the fiction of ‘New Labor’ out of the ruins of the old.

Peter Mandelson, his closest ally in this task, deserves the credit for noticing that Thatcherism could survive and indeed flourish without the Iron Maiden herself. Even more significantly, a party minus politics was exactly the right brand for the market.

Thatcher’s legacies are many: the grasping criminality of the financial markets, penalizing the poor at the expense of the rich and famous, the debased concept of prosperity expressed by the Plimsoll Line of house prices, the destruction of education, the extermination of the middle classes, and the appearance of an embedded culture of crime on the streets of the cities, which has percolated inevitably to the formerly peaceable rural pastures.

Thatcher’s national socialism appeared to collectively derange an entire nation formerly renowned for its sober pleasures of caution.

Of course the hangover of the Sixties, drugs, celebrity fetish, entertainments that insult the intellect and the general dumbing down of the media, are all part and parcel of remorseless change in the British Tescoland.

The sheer cleverness of Thatcher was to attune herself and her aims to the new feckless society. She judged correctly, as did Blair when he succeeded her, that shallow hollowed out intellects and minds made perfect gardening soil.

The manner of her exit from the political scene was instructive. She was ambushed by the Wets who at last raised the courage to stage an insurrection. But John Major’s strange orphaned government was the last afterglow of genuine conservatives. Then came Blair.

It no longer matters who comes next. The piper knows the tune. Fascism is resurgent wherever one looks in the contemporary political landscape. The phrase in the unofficial jingoist British national anthem Rule Britannia famously declares ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves.’

Well, now they are: slaves to secret courts and inquests, media censorship, the largest system of mass surveillance in Europe and possibly the world, police drones and the militarized police in general, and all the rest of it.

Old precautions such as habeas corpus are gone, probably forever. The Iron Maiden departs to her vault, secure in the fruits of victory.

[Wakeymedia]

She's only been in hell a few days and she's already trying to shut the furnaces down.




And finally . . .


Link

[TonyGosling]

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/margaret-thatcher-timeline-life- and-career-milestones-89743.html

Margaret Thatcher timeline: Life and career milestones

By ASSOCIATED PRESS | 4/8/13 10:31 AM EDT

LONDON (AP) — Milestones in the life and career of Britain's former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:

Oct. 13, 1925: Born at Grantham, central England.

June 1947: Graduates from Oxford with a chemistry degree.

Dec. 13, 1951: Marries Denis Thatcher, a wealthy oil executive.

Aug. 15, 1953: Gives birth to twins, Mark and Carol.

June 1, 1954: Qualifies as a lawyer.

Oct. 8, 1959: Elected to Parliament.

June 20, 1970: Becomes education secretary.

Feb. 11, 1975: Elected leader of the Conservative Party.

May 3, 1979: Wins national elections, becomes prime minister.

June 9, 1983: Wins second term.

June 11, 1987: Wins third term.

Jan. 3, 1988: Becomes Britain's longest continuously serving prime minister of 20th century.

Nov. 22, 1990: Announces resignation after party revolt.

Nov. 28, 1990: John Major succeeds her as prime minister.

June 26, 1992: Becomes Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, a member of the unelected House of Lords with a lifetime title.

March 22, 2002: Ends public speaking after suffering a series of small strokes.

June 26, 2003: Her husband, Sir Denis Thatcher, dies.

April 8, 2013: Dies of stroke.

[TonyGosling]

Margaret Thatcher, and the man in the shadows
http://rt.com/op-edge/margaret-thatcher-man-shadows-929/

Eyebrows have been raised around the world to see Brits in their thousands dancing through the night in spontaneous street parties following the death of 1980s Prime Minister 'Iron Lady' Margaret Thatcher.

As the nickname suggests, she had a fearsome reputation round the world for hitting hard for Britain, but at home it was a different story. In the industrial North most knew several families who lost their livelihood on her watch. Londoners saw ominous shifting sands, homeless youngsters begging on the streets whom her regime had turned it's back on.

The taboo not a single commentator has broached though is the shadowy 'advisory' role played throughout her premiership by European banking fraternity's Labour peer Lord Victor Rothschild. He was revealed in the book the Thatcher government tried to suppress, Peter Wright's Spycatcher, to be behind London's top secret service appointments. In 1986 Rothschild penned 'Paying for Local Government' the policy paper that led to the notorious Poll Tax that fell hardest on the poorest, and which brought Britons onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands in 1990, riots echoing London's Poll Tax revolt of 1381.

And according to the then BBC Chairman Marmaduke Hussey, Lord Victor also initiated the sacking in 1987 of the last independent-minded Director General of the BBC, a castration from which the corporation never quite recovered.

One word captures the essence of the Thatcher legacy; 'privatisation'. As an exasperated former Tory Prime Minster Harold Macmillan put it "she's selling off the family silver!". And so tens of mind-boggling billions of pounds of silver were auctioned off to the highest bidders, mostly to Rothschild's kith and kin. From shipyards and public housing to telephones, steel, oil, gas and water, anyone in the world was free to own the infrastructure and manufacturing heart of Britain that was once collectively 'ours'.

Was this to pay the USA Lend-Lease second world war debts? To repay Britain's humiliating 1976 IMF loan? Or simply to fill the hole left in the national accounts after Thatcher dropped income tax on Britain's richest by more than half from 83% to 40%? Or was it just daylight robbery?

When she refused to join the EMU, the forerunner to the vice-like Euro, she was promptly knifed in the back by those who sing her praises today.

Since Thatcher, City institutions have bought up much of our politics and mass media, leaving a post-industrial wasteland 'museum' of a nation where the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently estimated six-and-a-half million British adults are being cruelly blamed, punished and made destitute for 'not wanting' full-time jobs, that don't exist.

Today the cracks that Margaret and Victor's turbo-charged crowbar opened up have become a chasm which is reawakening this nation's anger at injustice. The £10 million of taxpayers money being spent on Lady Thatcher's state funeral, by the millionaires for the millionaires, is rubbing salt in the wounds. Hundreds of thousands of Britons who know right from wrong will turn away and raise a solemn glass to the damnation of Margaret Thatcher and her 'rehabilitation of greed' this week, demanding better. The sleeping giant of the British public is rousing from its slumber.

People demonstrate in the streets of London, on July 06, 1984 against National Coal Board plans to shut 20 pits and lay off 20.000 miners (AFP Photo)

As millionaire Prime Minister David Cameron reads the Christian eulogy at Lady Thatcher's lavish funeral, those of Britain's ruling class who still have something resembling a conscience will do well to heed them.

Britain's first woman Prime Minister - the Margaret Thatcher timeline
1925 October 13 - Margaret Thatcher is born in the market town of Grantham, Lincolnshire
1947 - Thatcher graduates from Oxford with a Chemistry degree
1954 June 1 - Qualifies as a lawyer
1970 - Enters the Cabinet as Education Secretary
1975 February 11 - Elected Conservative Party leader, beating Edward Heath.
1975-9 - Leader of the Opposition
1979 May 4 - The Conservative Party wins the general election, Thatcher succeeds James Callaghan as PM
1979 December 13 - Abolition of Exchange Controls
1980 - Buses deregulated and bus routes privatised
1980 - British Aerospace partly privatised
1980 April - Local Government stopped from building council homes and tenants given the right to buy
1981 March - Prisoners at Northern Ireland's Maze Prison go on hunger strike to regain status as political prisoners
1981 April-July - Urban rioting in Brixton in London, Toxteth in Liverpool and St. Pauls in Bristol.
1982 January - Unemployment tops 3 million
1982 April-June - Falklands War
1983 - Associated British Ports (ABP) privatised
1983 - British Shipbuilding privatised
1983 June 9 - Second term as PM begins; the Conservatives secure a landslide election victory
1984-5 - Miners strike, amid the closure and privatisation of coal mines
1984 - British Leyland car manufacturers privatised
1984 October 12 - Narrowly escapes death after the IRA bombs the Conservative party conference in Brighton, killing 5
1984 November - British Telecom (BT) the old Post Office Telecommunications is privatised
1985 - Attempted suppression of former MI5 officer Peter Wright's autobiography 'Spycatcher' which is then published in Australia & Scotland.
1985 June 1 - Battle Of The Beanfield, Britain's traveller peace convoy destroyed near Stonehenge, Wiltshire by violent police action as recorded in the 'Operation Solstice' documentary
1986 January - Wapping dispute as Rupert Murdoch embraces electronic publishing and breaks the power of print unions, depicted in the documentary 'Despite The Sun'
1986 - British Airports Authority (BAA) privatised
1986 March - Abolition of Ken Livingstone's opposition Labour controlled Greater London Council or GLC
1986 October 27 - Big Bang deregulation of the City of London financial sector which many believe contributed to the 2008 financial crisis
1986 December - British Gas privatised
1987 January - After several TV and radio programmes critical of the Thatcher government Victor Rothschild & Marmaduke Hussey sack BBC Director General Alasdair Milne
1987 February - British Airways privatised
1987 - Majority share in British Petroleum (BP) privatised
1987 - Rolls Royce aero engines privatised
1987 June 11 - Wins third term as Prime Minister
1988 - British Steel privatised
1989 - British Aerospace fully privatised
1989 - Water Boards privatised
1990 - The Electricity Act began the complex privatisation of electricity (except nuclear)
1990 March 31 - Poll tax riots culminate in a 200,000 strong march on central London, as portrayed in The Battle Of Trafalgar documentary
1990 October 30 - Thatcher No!, No!, No! speech in Commons makes it clear she is set against European Monetary and Political Union
1990 November 13 - Geoffrey Howe resigns in protest at Thatcher's refusal to agree a timetable for European Monetary Union
1990 November 14 - Former cabinet minister Michael Heseltine challenges Margaret Thatcher for the party leadership
1990 November 28 - Thatcher resigns, despite having won the first ballot. She is succeeded by John Major
1992 - Thatcher leaves the House of Commons, joins the Lords as Baroness Thatcher
1994 - Praises Tony Blair and New Labour as her proudest achievement
2013 April 8 - Lady Thatcher dies in The Ritz hotel owned by Daily Telegraph proprietors the Barclay twins.

[Wakeymedia]

This is not a Masonic Temple (apparently).

[TonyGosling]

Thatcher and Pinochet - shouldn't it be obvious?

[Frazzel]

the metropolitan police in 2006, set up what is called a fixated threat assessment centre FTAC, staffed by a mixture of police and mental health professionals, the myth being that those who do not support thatcher or the expensive funeral at tax payers expense are somehow suffering from a mental health disorder, that they are 'fixated' personalities. This is absolute clap trap psycho babble straight out of 1984 or brave New World. Just take a pill, people and you will soon forget about all the damage thatcher did to this country.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

How British Jews built Thatcherism
Many of U.K. Jews deserted the left and voted for Margaret Thatcher. But it was largely thanks to a handful who built her election campaign that she became prime minister, changing the face of British politics in the process.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/how-british-jews-built-thatcherism.prem ium-1.516009
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/how-british-jews-built-thatcherism.prem ium-1.516009?v=67F4433B89C4867B4B1EC89D17A2C486
Jonathan Cummings 17.04.2013 | 16:56 4 comments
A nagging thought, as Thatcher Week reaches its peak with Wednesday's funeral: Never a supporter, and now observing from afar both the pomp of British ceremony and the swelling chorus of disapproval outside St Paul’s Cathedral, I am bothered by the role that Britain’s Jews might have played in Margaret Thatcher’s political successes.

Certainly Thatcher succeeded in attracting far more Jewish voters for the Conservative Party than ever before, having won them over from their traditional support for the Labour and Liberal parties. She elevated so many Jews to the higher reaches of British political life that a predecessor sniffily commented – with a tang of residual post-war golf-club anti-Semitism – that one was more likely to find an Old Estonian than an Old Etonian in government nowadays.

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But although the shift towards Jewish support for Mrs. Thatcher in micro-political, communal terms was revolutionary, by itself it did not have nationwide resonance; the substantial crossing of party lines was not an important macro-political shift equivalent to, say, American Jews deserting the Democratic Party for the Republicans within half a generation, as one colleague put it to me. True, many Jews were now part of the upwardly-mobile tide of Middle England that carried her to power, but they voted as individuals, not as a group.

To understand this distinction, it is necessary to put the U.K. Jewish community and their ballot box influence in perspective, especially in comparison with the Jewish community of the U.S. Firstly, there is no discernible 'Jewish vote' in the U.K.: The community is neither large nor concentrated enough to make a difference in more than a small handful of voting districts. More significantly, there is no one issue on which Anglo-Jews determine their vote, and no easy choice between the major parties on the question of Israel, perhaps the most likely issue on which Jews might do so. Both mainstream Labour and Conservatives have been consistent both in their broad support for Israel, and in their approbation of Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories.

There have been occasions when Jewish voters as a collective have been significant, as Anglo-Jewish historian Geoffrey Alderman reminds us in his book, The Jewish Vote in Great Britain since 1945. The election of Lionel de Rothschild, the first practicing Jew to take his seat in the House of Commons, followed a concerted Jewish campaign in the 1850s against the then-exclusively Christian oath of office. More recently, Jewish votes played a role in preventing Ken Livingstone’s re-election as Mayor of London in 2008.

But these are exceptions. Indeed, as Alderman notes, the community’s influential ‘cousinhood’ leadership, drawn from families who arrived in England long before the mass immigration from Eastern Europe of the 1880s, strongly rejected any suggestion of corporate or political identity. Historically, to be "Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion", and in that order, was quite sufficient. To act as a communal voting bloc was too public and invited too much attention, focusing on Jewish citizens’ difference and not their quiet assimilation into British society.

Thatcher grew up with an almost complete lack of contact with Jewish people. There had few opportunities to encounter Jews in market-town Lincolnshire in the 1930s, although her sister’s Jewish pen-friend Edith Muhlbauer, a refugee from Austria, stayed with the family for several weeks in 1938 on her way to safety, leaving a profound impact on the young Thatcher. A working-class scholarship girl, she was largely free of the prejudices of Britain’s traditional elites who formed the backbone of the Conservative party.

When in 1959 she was selected to represent the constituency of Finchley in parliament, with its sizeable Jewish population, it was her father’s Methodist values of hard work, education and community she most easily identified amongst her Jewish constituents. "Not the faintest trace of anti-Semitism," her Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, himself Jewish, later approvingly noted.

Even if the idea of U.K. Jews voting as a bloc on specific issues never took root, it was a small number of individual British Jews that had a decisive effect on Margaret Thatcher’s political fortunes. As Thatcher positioned herself to challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party in the mid-1970s, her ally Sir Keith Joseph (himself of Jewish origin) played the role of "John the Baptist to the Madonna of Finchley", as described by Professor Dennis Kavanagh in his obituary of Joseph, who died in 1994. It was Joseph, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and the founder of the Center for Policy Studies, who converted her to the liberalist political philosophy of F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman’s monetarist economics.

These two schools of thought became the twin bedrocks of what was to become Thatcherism, the forging of a radical alternative to the failing consensus politics of post-war Britain. Other Jews took their seats around her cabinet table - Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson, Malcolm Rifkind, Michael Howard and David Young – although none matched Joseph in intellectual and ideological influence. In her memoirs, Thatcher said, "There have always been Jewish members of my staff and indeed my Cabinet. In fact, I just wanted a Cabinet of clever, energetic people - and frequently that turned out to be the same thing."

Decisive, too, was the appointment of the virtually unknown Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency, founded by the brothers Charles and Maurice, Baghdad-born Jews, in the run-up to the 1979 election campaign. Thatcher had already dabbled in image management, changing her voice, her clothes and her hair to appear more authoritative. "Every politician has to decide how much he or she is prepared to change manner and appearance for the sake of the media," she wrote in her memoirs. "It may sound grittily honorable to refuse to make any concessions, but such an attitude in a public figure is most likely to betray a lack of seriousness about winning power."

Evidently, she suffered no such lack of seriousness, and the Saatchis vindicated her decision, capturing Britain’s frustration with the Callaghan government in a ruthless attack ad of three simple words: "Britain Isn’t Working," above a long line snaking out of the unemployment office. It became the defining image of the election – and she won.

Margaret Thatcher restricted her inner circle to those she defined as "one of us." Whether mourning inside the Cathedral or protesting outside it today, British Jews will know today that a few of them were in that category.

[outsider]

Steve Bell on Margaret Thatcher's death – cartoon:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2013/apr/08/margaret- thatcher-death-steve-bell-cartoon

I missed this at the time.
Perhaps someone will copy the picture onto the Forum? I still cant do it.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

A Faceache post by Ellie Baker
just a reminder about the selling off of UK public assets. Often to foreign governments. So our railways that we subsidise for instance now subsidise cheap fares on the railways in France and Germany. Our power generation profits now subsidise power production in China, France and Germany. Many of our once public asserts have moved abroad. there is £55 billion more earmarked for selling off.

The selling of the 'Family Silver'

1970s
British Petroleum (1977, 1979, 1981, 1987)
International Computers Limited (1979)
Lunn Poly (1971)
Rolls-Royce Motors (1973)
State Management Scheme (1973)
Thomas Cook (1972)
1980s
Amersham International (1982)
Associated British Ports (1983, 1984)
British Aerospace (1981, 1985)
British Airports Authority (1987)
British Airways (1987)
British Airways Helicopters (1986)
British Gas (1986)
British Leyland
Alvis (1981)
Coventry Climax (1982)
Danish Automobile Building (1987)
ISTEL (1987)
Jaguar (1984)
Leyland Bus (1987)
Leyland Tractors (1982)
Leyland Trucks (1987)
Rover Group (1988)
Unipart (1987)
British Rail Engineering Limited (1989)
British Shipbuilders (1985-1989, shipbuilder companies sold individually)
British Steel plc (1988)
British Sugar (1981)
British Telecom (1984, 1991, 1993)
British Transport Hotels (1983)
Britoil (1982, 1985)
Cable and Wireless (1981, 1983, 1985)
Council houses (1980–present, over two million sold to their tenants)
Enterprise Oil (1984)
Fairey (1980)
Ferranti (1982)
Harland and Wolff (1989)
Inmos (1984)
Municipal bus companies (1988–present, bus companies sold individually)
National Bus Company (1986 - 1988, bus companies sold individually)
National Express (1988)
National Freight Corporation (1982)
Passenger transport executive bus companies (1988 - 1994, bus companies sold individually)
Rolls-Royce (1987)
Royal Ordnance (1987)
Sealink (1984)
Travellers Fare (1988)
Trustee Savings Bank (1985)
Vale of Rheidol Railway (1989)
Water companies
Anglian Water (1989)
North West Water (1989)
Northumbrian Water (1989)
Severn Trent (1989)
South West Water (1989)
Southern Water (1989)
Thames Water (1989)
Welsh Water (1989)
Wessex Water (1989)
Yorkshire Water (1989)
1990s
AEA Technology (1996)
Agricultural Development and Advisory Service (1997)
Belfast International Airport (1994)
Birmingham Airport (1993 - 51%)
Bournemouth Airport (1995)
Bristol Airport (1997, 2001)
British Coal (1994)
British Energy (1996)
British Rail
3 rolling stock companies:
Angel Trains (1996)
Eversholt Leasing (1996)
Porterbrook (1996)
6 design office units (1995-1997, sold individually)
6 freight operating companies
Freightliner (1995)
Loadhaul (1996)
Mainline Freight (1996)
Rail Express Systems (1996)
Railfreight Distribution (1997)
Transrail Freight (1996)
6 track renewal units (1995 - 1997, sold individually)
7 infrastructure maintenance units (1995 - 1997, sold individually)
25 train operating companies (1996, operations contracted out as franchises)
British Rail Research (1996)
British Rail Telecommunications (1995)
European Passenger Services (1996)
Railtrack (1996)
Red Star Parcels (1995)
Union Railways (1996)
British Technology Group (1992)
Building Research Establishment (1997)
Cardiff Airport (1995)
Central Electricity Generating Board
National Grid (1990)
National Power (1991, 1995)
Powergen (1991, 1995)
Chessington Computer Centre (1996)
Department for National Savings (1999, back office functions contracted out)
East Midlands Airport (1993)
Girobank (1990)
Humberside Airport (1999 - 82%)
Kingston Communications (1999, 2007)
Laboratory of the Government Chemist (1996)
Liverpool Airport (1990, 2001)
London Buses (1994, bus companies sold individually)
London Luton Airport (1997)
London Southend Airport (1993)
National Engineering Laboratory (1995)
National Transcommunications Limited (1990)
Natural Resources Institute (1996)
Northern Ireland Electricity (1993)
Property Services Agency (1994)
Regional electricity companies
East Midlands Electricity (1990)
Eastern Electricity (1990)
London Electricity (1990)
MANWEB (1990)
Midlands Electricity (1990)
Northern Electric (1990)
NORWEB (1990)
SEEBOARD (1990)
Southern Electric (1990)
SWALEC (1990)
SWEB Energy (1990)
Yorkshire Electricity (1990)
Scottish Bus Group (1991, bus companies sold individually)
Scottish Hydro-Electric (1991)
Scottish Power (1991)
Severn Bridge (1992)
The Stationery Office (1996)
Student loans portfolios (1998, 1999, 2013)
Transport Research Laboratory (1996)
Trust Ports (1992–1997, ports sold individually)
2000s
Actis (2004, 2012)
BBC Books (2006 - 85%)
BBC Broadcast (2005)
BBC Costumes and Wigs (2008)
BBC Outside Broadcasts (2008)
BBC Technology (2004)
British Nuclear Fuels Limited
AWE Management Limited (2008)
BNG America (2007)
BNG Project Services (2008)
Reactor Sites Management Company (2007)
Westinghouse Electric Company (2006)
East Thames Buses (2009)
Leeds Bradford International Airport (2007)
National Air Traffic Services (2001 - 51%)
Newcastle Airport (2001 - 49%)
Partnerships UK (2000, 2011)
Qinetiq (2002, 2006, 2008)
South Eastern Trains (2006)
Teesside International Airport (2003 - 75%)
UKAEA Limited (2009)
2010s
BBC Audiobooks (2010 - 85%)
BBC Magazines (2011)
Behavioural Insights Team (2014 - 67%)
Bio Products Laboratory (2013 - 80%)
Constructionline (2015)
Defence Support Group (2015)
Dr Foster Intelligence (2015)
East Coast Trains (2015)
Eurostar International Limited (2015 - 40%)
Fire Service College (2013)
Food and Environment Research Agency (2015 - 75%)
Government Pipelines and Storage System (2015)
High Speed 1 (2010)
Lloyds Banking Group (2013, 2014, 2015)
Manchester Airports Group (2013 - 35%)
NEC Group (2015)
Northern Rock (2012)
Remploy (2012, 2013, 2015, factory businesses sold individually)
Royal Bank of Scotland Group (2015)
Royal Mail (2013, 2015)
The Tote (2011)

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Rothschild and Letwin named as secret poll tax campaigners

http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2014/12/rothschild-and-letwin-named-as- secret-poll-tax-campaigners/

Monday 6th August 2018 Written By: Andrew Rosthorn Published: December 30, 2014 Last modified: October 25, 2016

Cabinet files have revealed the names of advisers who persuaded Margaret Thatcher to try out her poll tax in Scotland.

The tax that ended her political career and revived Scottish nationalism was conceived by Lord Victor Rothschild and championed by Oliver Letwin, a 29 year old adviser in her policy unit who is now Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in David Cameron’s government.

Nigel Lawson, Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer, described the proposed tax as ‘completely unworkable and politically catastrophic’. When Thatcher asked William Waldegrave to find an alternative to taxing homeowners under the long-established rating system, Lawson said it was a ‘fatal invitation’:

Rothschild prided himself on having no political judgement. He was above that sort of thing. William Waldegrave seemed to regard this as an advantage

In a secret memo now released into the National Archive, the young Oliver Letwin suggested in November 1985:

If you are not willing to move to a pure residence charge in England and Wales immediately, you should not introduce a mixture of taxes but should rather use the Scots as a trail-blazer for the real thing.

If the Scottish experiment worked, it could make a pure residence charge look sensible rather than extreme, and thereby pave the way for its introduction in England and Wales.

The memo proves the long-held suspicion that the Conservative Party were prepared to use Scotland as a test-bed for risky social experiments.

A memo from Nigel Lawson, also released this week, warned that seven million people would be worse-off in the poll tax were to be introduced nationwide:

A pensioner couple in inner London could find themselves paying 22% of their net income in poll tax, whereas a better off couple in the suburbs pay only 1%. We should be forced to give so many exceptions and concessions (inevitably to the benefit of high spending authorities in inner London) that the flat-rate poll tax would rapidly become a surrogate income tax.

When the ‘Community Charge’ was eventually introduced nationwide, the percentage of former ratepayers defaulting on poll tax reached 30% in some areas. After poll tax riots and the gathering of 200,000 protestors in Trafalgar Square on March 31, 1990, followed by the fall of Thatcher in November 1990, the tax was replaced by council tax under the Major Government.

victorrothschild
Victor Rothschild, son of a banker, worked on booby trap disposal, disinformation and espionage for MI5 during the Second World War and won the George Medal for ‘dangerous work in hazardous circumstances’. Despite sitting as a Labour peer in the House of Lords he headed the original British government think tank, Edward Heath’s Central Policy Review Staff. He was wrongly accused by Peter Wright, author of Spycatcher of being a Soviet double agent.

Historian Niall Ferguson commented after his death:

His role at the Think Tank turned out to be “to rub ministers’ noses in the future”; Heath came bitterly to regret his appointment. Margaret Thatcher too must have rued the day she ever met the man who acted as William Waldegrave’s adviser during the design of the calamitous poll tax.

Oliver_Letwin

Oliver Letwin is the son of the late Shirley Letwin, a Chicago-born right wing philosopher, pupil and friend of the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek. According to Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Hayek once urged Thatcher to copy the economic policies of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Shirley Letwin worked for for Margaret Thatcher and was a director of Sir Keith Joseph’s free market think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies.

Oliver Letwin joined the merchant bank N.M. Rothschild & Sons in 1986, headed the firm’s International Privatisation Unit and served as a director of N.M. Rothschild & Sons from 1991 to 2003 and a non-executive director from 2005 to 2009.

In 1988 he published a book called Privatising the World and in the 2001 general election disastrously claimed that he expected an incoming Conservative government to impose £20 billion a year in cuts rather than the £8 billion they had promised in their manifesto.

Jonathan Ashworth MP, Labour’s shadow cabinet office minister, said yesterday:

Oliver Letwin was a key architect of the poll tax, so enthusiastic about it he pressed Margaret Thatcher to push ahead with its introduction. Over the years he has called for further privatisation of the NHS and for public expenditure at 35 per cent of GDP. Today he is David Cameron’s policy chief at the heart of his Government. It seems that the Tory Party never changes.