| by Pearl Thevanayagam
(April 14, 2013, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) “Me dad lost his job. Mum said she had to apply for council housing since they could not afford the rising mortgage payments. Bloody Maggie Thatcher ruined my family,” Jane Boothroyd wailed. Jane was at college with me in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
This was 1977 when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister- incidentally JRJ also became president in sunny Sri lanka ousting Sirimavo Bandaranaike who squeezed out all the land-owners of their lands and put a ceiling on 50 acres per head and changed the currencies with the time limit of just 48hrs to exchange them for new currencies- thereby incurring the wrath of many Tamils being the type of tight-fisted Jews they were and who did not rely on banks.
JRJ did no better; he continued with executive presidency thereby pilfering all powers and buying out the judiciary, police and any other portfolios which mattered.
Maggie, the grocer’s daughter who should have sympathised with the working class, closed the coal-mines where my new-found friends’ fathers toiled days in and days out. She chose capitalism over nanny state where the poor and those out of work who could seek redress in way of redundancy benefits were left high and dry thanks to her privatising of governmental institutions.
I was a bit put out that my college friends’ fathers worked in the coal-mines but saved enough to put their children to college so they should not suffer their hardships in working down coal-mines contracting lung-diseases.
Maggie Thatcher is dead but the government is mourning her with a state funeral to boot with a service at St Paul’s Cathedral. NHS (National Health Service) which was once admired the world over is now a dead parrot thanks to Maggie’s privatisation policy. She invaded Falklands and sacrificed the lives of England’s innocent youth blinded by empty rhetoric of preserving its lost empire.
Her legacy is mourned by only the BBC and the current government which continues to live in the past in that they still believe that old blighty is still the ruling empire of the world.
The Jarrow marchers who comprised coalminers and brass band of Yorkshire whose only recreation from the coal-mines full of mud and lung diseases were the playing of trombones and other instruments which for a fleeting weekend make them forget their toiling deep down in the mines so that the British could stoke the fires in their hearths and provide electricity and heating for their homes.
Maggie killed their souls along with their sustenance for a living which could hardly be described as luxuries.
The introduction of poll tax put an end to her reign in 1990. From one borough to the other, in all parts of England, motorists had to pay poll tax. She was the iron lady who listened to no-one and who taxed the poor so much so that owning houses became a pipe-dream since the coal-miners- the nerve centre of Britain’s energy resources –were made redundant overnight.
Closer home, the myopic populace are bent on electing leaders who are bent on their own self-aggrandisement time and time again. Gone are the days when politicians sold their own lands and property to serve their people. Rajapakses are selling the country’s wealth to line their pockets and creating a nouveau dynasty; not unlike Maggie whose son Mark is an international arms dealer and now ensconced in apartheid South Africa and daughter Carol Thatcher a druggie turned invalid due to drug abuse.
Does Mark Thatcher hold a resemblance to Gotabhaya Rajapakse? It is so uncanny.
(The writer has been a journalist for 23 years and worked at Weekend, The Daily News, Sunday Leader and Weekend Express in Sri Lanka as sub-editor, news reporter and news editor. She was Colombo Correspondent for Times of India and has contributed to Wall Street Journal; Washington Bureau, where she was on work experience from The Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, California. Currently residing in UK she is also co-founder of EJN (Exiled Journalists Network) UK in 2005 the membership of which is 200 from 40 countries. She can be reached at pearltheva@hotmail.com)
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