Vote to save us from a merciless Maggie II
I REMEMBER the night of June 9, 1983 like a slo-mo flashback from a slasher film.
I was in a Henley-on-Thames nightclub with a girlfriend who had a set of mates, some of whom probably now own small islands on the back of what happened that night.
In the early hours of Friday, I rang home to ask how the General Election was going and heard my mum close to tears as she said it was such a disaster that even Tony Benn had lost his seat.
When I returned, stunned, to my girlfriend, news of the Tory landslide had reached her mates who were mwah-mwahing each other’s cheeks, popping Champagne and toasting “Good old Maggie” for delivering them and their families to the Promised Land.
I felt sick to the pit of my stomach knowing that undiluted Thatcherism would now be unleashed. That with a 144-seat majority she would go after her enemies with a merciless vengeance and the country would be brutally divided between Us (her disciples) and Them (the rest). It was.
She declared war on the unions, ripping apart whole communities. She privatised key publicly-owned industries, handing the profits to rich pals in the City. She sucked up so hard to a right-wing US President that Britain became a virtual 51st state. She dismantled Labour-led local authorities, replacing them with unelected quangoes run by hand-picked Tory stooges.
Taxes for the richest were slashed while at the bottom, unemployment rose to 3.4 million. Inner cities were ravaged as crime soared, drugs were rife, kids’ lives written off and pensioners left to rot in fear. Our booming North Sea oil revenues were wasted on a welfare bill which spawned a culture of dependence as many families’ only hope of a payslip was a dole cheque.
As Theresa May tries to sell herself as Maggie II (replacing Argentine dictator Galtieri with the EU’s Juncker in her woeful 80s Iron Lady tribute act) and as her colleagues and lackeys paint Jeremy Corbyn as a shambolic, unelectable Michael
Foot II, they arrogantly believe another landslide is
theirs for the taking. The Tories have called this election for one reason: they sense domination again. They want to party like it’s 1983 and crush their enemies.
Why else do you think City backers gave them £3.7million in one week in May, ten times more than Labour received, and the billionaire owners of our overwhelmingly right-wing Press are rabid in their demonisation of Corbyn?
Before that 1983 election, Neil Kinnock correctly predicted the consquences of a decisive Tory victory: “I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”
If you let another one happen on Thursday because you can’t be bothered to vote, you think Corbyn is unelectable or you believe May’s lies that she cares about anyone outside of a rich elite, then I warn you not to be young, or fall ill, or be old, especially if you get dementia.
I warn you to expect in five years’ time the NHS to have effectively gone, state school classes of 50-plus, a poverty-pay economy as the UK becomes an off-shore haven for low-taxed businesses, the gap between the rich and poor to have become an obscene chasm and the rest of Europe looking at us with a mixture of pity and contempt.
So unless you want the Tories to have another 1983 wet dream, get out there on Thursday and vote Labour.
Tories want to party like it’s 1983 and crush their enemy