April 9, 2013–As I wrote in my October 2012 article on the state of politics in Britain [1], one of the most striking features of life in Britain today is the degree to which the policies of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher failed to improve the lives of working class people and degraded the social/environmental condition of the country.

By all evidence, her policies are coming apart at the seams. Next year, the people of Scotland will vote, in part, on that legacy in a referendum to exit the United Kingdom altogether.

Enclosed below are four articles from the British press on the Thatcher legacy. She died yesterday.

I had a connection with the Thatcher years in Britain because I visited the country in 1984 and during that time I joined several of the picket lines of striking coal miners who were under heavy assault by Thatcher’s government, the police and courts. Several of the articles below report on the surprising and welcome undoing of some of that legacy, too.

One issue that my 2012 article did not address is the worsening crisis of housing in Britain. That has its roots in the years of privatization of public housing under Thatcher, continued under Labour Party administrations that followed. You can read on that below. (From Simon Jenkins’ column in today’s Guardian: “No one noticed it, but she was [newly elected Prime Minister] Blair’s first guest at 10 Downing in 1997.”)

Thatcher leaves behind a record of cruelty and ruthlessness not only in Britain but also in such far-flung places as El Salvador, Grenada, Argentina, South Africa and Northern Ireland. In these places and more she unleashed British military power against peoples fighting for justice and dignity, or she backed the violence of the U.S. government in doing the same. Thatcher forged a close political and military alliance with the U.S. under presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.

Roger Annis

Read also: Margaret Thatcher is dead, but the struggle against Thatcherism continues, by Alex Snowdon, published on Counterfire, April 8, 2013 [2].

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 For Margaret Thatcher, few tears shed in South Africa

The late British prime minister once labeled Nelson Mandela’s political group a terrorist organization. Three years after Thatcher left office, Mandela became South Africa’s first black president.

By Erin Conway-Smith, Global Post, April 8, 2013 [3]

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — To Margaret Thatcher, the African National Congress under jailed leader Nelson Mandela was a “typical terrorist organization.” When much of the world enforced sanctions on apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, Thatcher refused, instead pursuing a policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government.

Now, after her death at age 87, the three-term British prime minister’s legacy is as polarizing in South Africa as it is in Britain, where the Manchester United soccer team decided not to hold a minute of silence before a Monday night game fearing the crowd response.

Thatcher’s rule began in 1979 and encompassed critical years before the release of Mandela and the collapse of the racist apartheid regime. While she always said she opposed apartheid, Thatcher has been dogged by criticism that her government’s efforts to counter it weren’t enough.

David Cameron, the current British prime minister, apologized for Thatcher’s policies on apartheid when he visited South Africa in 2006. Cameron said his Conservative party had made “mistakes” by failing to introduce sanctions against South Africa, and that Thatcher was wrong to have called the ANC “terrorists.”

Following news of her death, some South Africans on Twitter branded Thatcher an apartheid supporter, and took delight in the fact that Mandela, who is 94 and in poor health, has outlived her. Mandela was released from prison during Thatcher’s last year in office, and four years later became South Africa’s first black president.

“Mandela outlived Thatcher. 1-0 to FREEDOM! History is the ULTIMATE judge!” one tweet said.

Official reaction to her death has been far more muted. President Jacob Zuma, in a short statement that refrained from commenting directly on Thatcher, “expressed his heartfelt condolences” and sent prayers to her family and to the British people.

The ANC, which has governed South Africa since the first free elections in 1994, said it had been “on the receiving end of her policy in terms of refusing to recognize the ANC as the representatives of South Africans and her failure to isolate apartheid after it had been described as a crime against humanity.”

“Long after her passing on, her impact will still be felt and her views a subject of discussion,” ANC spokesman Keith Khoza said.

During the 1980s, Thatcher stuck to a policy of engagement with the apartheid government to try and effect change, while refusing the sanctions espoused by Western nations, arguing that they would hurt black South Africans the most.

When at a meeting of Commonwealth countries in 1987 a reporter suggested the ANC could come to power, Thatcher’s spokesperson said: “It is cloud cuckoo land for anyone to believe that could be done.”

The former British ambassador to South Africa, appointed by Thatcher, writes in a new book that “there was never any doubt about her opposition to apartheid,” but the question was how best to achieve change.

“It seemed to her that the worst approach was to further isolate South Africa with sanctions, as isolation contributed to a siege mentality on the part of Afrikaners. She reacted with genuine indignation to any suggestion of racism,” Robin Renwick writes in “A Journey with Margaret Thatcher,” to be published this month in the UK.

“She regarded any racially based legislation as incompatible with her meritocratic vision of society. She saw the apartheid laws as inhuman and absurd, understanding that the people they alienated most were the black elite on which the future of the country would depend.

“She did, however, feel a good deal of sympathy for the white population of South Africa, whom she credited for the country’s economic development,” says an excerpt of the book.

Former South African President FW de Klerk, the country’s last white leader and a joint Nobel peace prize winner with Mandela, has praised Thatcher’s role in supporting South Africa’s constitutional transformation from white rule.

“Although she was always a steadfast critic of apartheid, she had a much better grasp of the complexities and geo-strategic realities of South Africa than many of her contemporaries,” de Klerk said in a statement, responding to news of Thatcher’s death.

“She consistently, and correctly, believed that much more could be achieved through constructive engagement with the South African government than through draconian sanctions and isolation.”

Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, a rival of the ANC, also posthumously praised his “dear friend” Thatcher.

“She was a voice of reason during apartheid and listened attentively to my plea against sanctions and economic disinvestment, which we both recognized would hurt the poorest of our people the most,” Buthelezi said.

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 Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with little sympathy by Orgreave veterans

‘I’m not a hypocrite. I spoke ill of her when she was alive and I’ll speak ill of her now she’s dead’

By Helen Pidd and David Conn, The Guardian, Monday 8 April 2013 [4]

“I’ll tell you what really annoyed us miners,” said Pete Mansell, sipping a pint of John Smith’s on Monday. “She said we were the enemy within. We weren’t. We were just looking after our lives, our families, our kids and our properties, everything that we ever had. We were fighting for that big style.”

Along with most of the other men drinking in the Black Bull pub in Aughton, Rotherham, the 55-year-old former pit worker had borne witness to the fiercest confrontation in the miners strike at the nearby Orgreave coking plant on 18 June 1984.

Almost 30 years have gone by since Margaret Thatcher characterised those who took part in the “battle of Orgreave” as thugs. But in a village that one drinker said had been “decimated by Thatcher”, the words still cut deep. It is perhaps no surprise that those gathered in the pub were having what they described as a party after hearing about her death.

“I’m not a hypocrite,” said Mansell, who is from the nearby pit village of Swallownest and worked underground for 22 years. “I spoke ill of her when she was alive and I’ll speak ill of her now she’s dead. She doesn’t mean two iotas to me.”

Chris Whitley, 56, who sold tobacco on the picket line, said he was in the pub to “celebrate – course we are. She killed these villages.” He said families had been torn apart by the strike – brothers still refusing to speak to each other, unable to forgive the sibling who crossed the picket line while the other struggled by on strike wages for a year or more.

“Scabby bastards,” said one drinker, declining to give his name for fear of reopening old family wounds.

Whitley said he was thinking of getting t-shirts printed saying “Thatcher’s in hell – she’s only been there a few hours and she’s already closed down the furnaces”. Propping up the bar, the men compared text messages they’d received throughout the day. A typical example: “I enjoy a good swim. But if someone asked me what my favourite stroke was I’d say Maggie Thatcher’s.” Another proudly brandished a text message he’d received just after 1pm saying simply: “Parteeeeee time.”

All were convinced that the truth about the brutal Orgreave Operation has yet to emerge. Much bitterness remains about the demonisation of those present on the day. The subsequent legal proceedings received barely a fraction of the attention devoted to the events on the day, which were widely characterised as an attack on South Yorkshire police by the miners.

There were 95 miners arrested at Orgreave and prosecuted for riot, a charge that carried the potential for a long prison sentence up to a maximum of life. But a year later, on 17 July 1985, all 95 were acquitted. The prosecution withdrew, from the first trial of 15, after police gave unconvincing accounts in the witness box: it became clear that the miners had themselves been attacked by police on horses or with truncheons, and there was evidence that a police officer’s signature on a statement had been forged.

Michael Mansfield QC, who represented three of the accused Orgreave miners in that trial, said afterwards it was “The biggest frame up ever.”

He and the miners argued that they had been set up at Orgreave, ushered deliberately to a field where the confrontation would take place on the police’s terms. They have always said they were behaving largely peacefully, when riot squad officers and police on horseback charged them. They argue that any stone throwing or violence after that were futile attempts to protect themselves.

Mansell remembered the battle vividly. He recalled a crucial turning point in the day when ambulances approached the picket line. “We opened up to let them through – course we did, we were respectful people,” he said. “But when the ambulances got to the other side, police got out from the ambulances, they attacked us with truncheons from one side and the horses from the other side. We got absolutely hammered.”

These days the Orgreave plant has disappeared. The vast site is currently being developed in a £100m regeneration project. Rising from the somewhat bleak wasteland is the half-finished Waverley housing estate. Opposite it, just up from a huge Morrisons supermarket, is an ambitious development called the Advanced Manufacturing Park, which houses high-tech local businesses.

Civic life is not in abundance. When the Guardian stopped to ask a local man if this was Orgreave, he said simply: “It’s supposed to be.” It’s not just the pits which have gone, said Mansell, who worked underground at the Treeton colliery for 22 years. But with it the “camaraderie, the community spirit – the sense that we were all looking out for each other.” He believes Thatcher didn’t just destroy his village and many others like it, but also paved the way for the political climate of today.

“It was class war,” he said. “The people above didn’t want us to win. The people with money didn’t want us to win. If we had won, they wouldn’t be able to get away with what they are doing now, cutting benefits for disabled people and things like that. The unions would have stopped them. But we lost.”

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Other articles:

Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow 08 Apr 2013 [5]

Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared 08 Apr 2013 [6]

Little sympathy for Margaret Thatcher among former opponents 08 Apr 2013 [7]

Margaret Thatcher’s death celebrated in Brixton – video, 9 Apr 2013–Several hundred people hold an impromptu street party in Brixton, south London on Monday evening to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher. [8]

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 Miners’ strike: how the bloodiest battle became the ‘biggest frame-up’

Many miners suspect the South Yorkshire police operation at Orgreave in June 1984 was a trap, pre-planned for confrontation, co-ordinated for the courts. Now the IPCC is to probe claims of assault, perjury, perverting the course of justice and misconduct

David Conn, The Guardian, November 22, 2012 [9]

For almost 30 years the South Yorkshire police and the then Conservative government’s version of the brutal, pivotal confrontation at the Orgreave coking plant has never been officially revised.

In Margaret Thatcher’s description, the coal miners picketing the plant were “the enemy within”. The police claimed the miners rioted on 18 June 1984 and that officers who were filmed beating miners with truncheons and charging on horses were only defending themselves. Despite the subsequent collapse in the prosecutions for riot against 95 miners, and South Yorkshire police’s £425,000 payout to miners who consequently sued, neither the police nor the then Tory government has admitted any fault.

Now, following last month’s BBC documentary and the Guardian’s exposé in April of links between Orgreave and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster – both were policed by the same South Yorkshire force under the same chief constable, Peter Wright– the events at the coking plant are to be investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The present-day South Yorkshire police force has referred itself to the IPCC, with the commission explaining that allegations include assault, perjury, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public office.

The National Union of Mineworkers, and Michael Mansfield QC, who defended three of the Orgreave miners accused of riot and now acts for the Hillsborough Family Support group, are calling for the director of public prosecutions (DPP) to investigate in tandem with the IPCC, as is happening with inquiries into South Yorkshire police’s alleged misconduct at, and after, Hillsborough.

‘Crush the strike’

“The miners were defending their livelihoods and communities against the closures of the pits and we believe this was a planned operation to crush the strike,” said Chris Kitchen, the NUM’s general secretary. “Assault, perjury, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public office are all very serious criminal offences so we believe the DPP should stand behind the IPCC investigation.”

Before the Orgreave confrontation, Wright planned to charge miners with riot, a charge which carried a potential life sentence, if police deemed that the circumstances justified it. In a report to his South Yorkshire county council police committee on 25 September 1985, Wright explained the decision was made, and a team of detectives appointed to collate evidence, following police officers’ reports throughout May 1984 that miners were picketing violently at Orgreave.

“Discussions took place involving the chief constable, his senior staff and the county prosecuting solicitor,” Wright wrote. “The chief constable decided that the usual charge of disorderly conduct … was inadequate and that where appropriate charges of unlawful assembly and riot should be preferred.”

On 18 June 1984, around 8,000 miners assembled for a mass picket called by the NUM and its then president, Arthur Scargill. South Yorkshire police now claim that 4,500 officers from different forces nationwide were there to police the coking plant.

Miners have always described their surprise they were not turned away by police that day, as was common during the year-long strike, but allowed to assemble close to the plant, before being ushered into a large field, where police were massed at the bottom. Kitchen, who was present as a 19-year-old striking miner, said it was a trap.

Bob Bird, a West Midlands officer who served at Orgreave in a short shield police support unit (PSU), told the Guardian he believed the plan was to inflict a significant defeat on the miners: “It would have been easy to turn people away, but the decision was taken to let them in. If you were to choose an area to defend, you would choose that site, and the police were decided: if there was to be a confrontation, we were not going to lose.”

‘Continuous barrage’

The police account, both in the media on the day and during the trial the following year, was that the miners, unprovoked, had attacked police lines with sustained violence, throwing a continuous barrage of stones, and bottles, lengths of wood, metal objects and bricks.

Mansfield challenged the assertion in court, referring to the police film of the day, which showed miners, many with their shirts off, initially relaxing in the June sunshine. Generally, miners accept that some stones were thrown from the back – there are many accounts that senior miners told those throwing stones to stop. When the lorries carrying coke to British Steel at Scunthorpe left the plant the miners pushed at police lines, as was routine on picket lines. However, the police lines suddenly split, horses charged through, and the PSUs released.

One miner, Russell Broomhead, was filmed on television being beaten by a policeman just in front of the police lines.

“I was knocked over by a horse,” recalls Broomhead, now 55, who worked at Houghton Main colliery near Barnsley. “Then a short shield policeman hit me, and as I was getting up, the next one attacked me. The police were out of control, and nobody has ever been held to account for what they did.”

Suffering physical injuries and psychological trauma, Broomhead was arrested and charged with riot; he was to be tried in the second batch of the 95 prosecuted miners, until he was acquitted when the first trial of 15 collapsed.

One of those 15, Stefan Wysocki, now 62, was arrested for allegedly throwing a stone, which he always denied. He says he was punched and kicked as he was led through the ranks of police officers after his arrest. Another, Arthur Critchlow, said he was hit over the head with a truncheon while attending to an elderly man on the ground. The officers who arrested Critchlow claimed he had been running backwards, tripped on the kerb and hit his head. Another charged miner, David Bell, sustained a broken leg. Bill Greenaway had his wrist fractured after, he claimed, it was hit with a truncheon.

Wysocki, held in a Rotherham police cell, was told late that night he was to be charged with riot.

“I still cannot explain how that felt,” he said. “It was unbelievable, that it was happening in this country. It was extremely stressful. But we believed we were going to prison, because they wanted to make an example of us.”

At the trial, the miners were alleged in very similar terms to have been clearly identified as throwing stones at the police. In each case two police officers had made a statement, and testified in court, that they had witnessed the incident and made the arrest.

Police statements

Copies of police statements obtained by the BBC for last month’s Inside Out documentary [10] reveal that dozens contained identical descriptions of a riot. And the statements of the two officers relating to each individual miner are almost word for word the same.

Wright told his police committee that several officers had parts of their statements dictated by South Yorkshire detectives at the scene. However, he said the detectives only “assisted” with “local knowledge and detail” and that “there was nothing sinister in this procedure. Evidence had to be collated.”

Bob Bird,a West Midlands officer, and Norman Taylor, a Northumbria officer also on duty that day, have confirmed that they do not recall large parts of their statements being dictated. Bird said the two arresting officers handwrote their statements quickly, about the individual arrest, with little preamble. At that time, he and other officers told the Guardian, it was common practice to compare notes and make statements together.

South Yorkshire police then typed the handwritten statements up centrally. It was at that stage, Bird concluded, that they must have incorporated the very similar general introduction, describing the violence by miners. Bird’s statement, identical to that of his fellow arresting officer, included the phrases: “A continuous stream of missiles came from the pickets”; “there were broken bottles, bits of masonry and telegraph wire strewn across the road.”

Bird said he never saw or signed his typed statement – the miner that he arrested was not in the first batch of 15 prosecutions. He said he did not believe it was improper for such a general description to be written into the officers’ statements centrally by South Yorkshire police, if the description was accurate. Although he questioned the wider political conflict between the miners and the government into which he believed the police were drawn, Bird said that miners were throwing stones that day, that “it was an unlawful assembly,” and that he stood by the arrest that he made. It was, however, the decision of South Yorkshire police to decide on charges of riot.

The prosecution fell apart after 48 days of police evidence, challenged by Mansfield and other defence barristers. Some officers’ oral evidence differed from their written statements. The defence had collated photographs from many sources, and used it to argue that officers’ evidence was inaccurate, and that several who claimed to have arrested men had not even been at the scene.

One officer who had apparently signed the statement of his fellow officer was challenged by barrister Vera Baird (later a QC and Labour minister) that it was not his handwriting. Baird requested a handwriting expert to analyse the statement – over lunch, it went missing. A copy was analysed by a Home Office expert who concluded the signature had not been written by the same officer.

Acquitted

All 15 miners were acquitted on 17 July 1985, when the prosecution offered no further evidence. Mansfield called it “the biggest frame-up ever”. The South Yorkshire police committee were concerned that, at the very least, the allegations of a forged signature and dictated statements “amounted to inaccurate perjured evidence”. However, Chief Constable Wright insisted the police action was justified.

The miners sued for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution, and in June 1991, South Yorkshire police paid £425,000 in damages. The settlement was reached before the discovery stage, at which internal police documents would have been disclosed. South Yorkshire police has never admitted liability, no investigation was ever announced with not one officer disciplined for any offence.

Ian Lavery, Labour MP for Wansbeck and a former NUM president, argues the IPCC investigation should consider the policing of the miners’ strike more widely. “The general perception all these years has been that miners attacked the police. In fact, terrible wrongs were done for which nobody has been held to account. There is still huge resentment within former mining communities. We need the truth about what happened, not just at Orgreave.”

In a statement, South Yorkshire police said it had “demonstrated openness and transparency” in referring the Orgreave events for investigation, almost 30 years after the bloodiest day in the miners’ strike.

The IPCC said it “must now assess the information … to determine how the matter should be dealt with”.

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 Housing policy is a mess – and the budget’s ‘mortgage guarantee’ will not change that

The OBR believes that until more houses are built such plans as the mortgage guarantee will make things worse

By Toby Helm, The Observer, March 31, 2013 [11]

There have been two periods in postwar Britain when housing policy was clear, ambitious and executed pretty much entirely according to plan. They stand in stark contrast to the present, when only confusion seems to reign.

The first was after the second world war when Clement Attlee’s Labour government built more than a million homes – 80% of them council dwellings – as the country rallied to recreate communities destroyed by Nazi bombs.

For decades afterwards, Britain built more and more as successive governments pumped money into capital investment in housing stock and private building also took off. In the 1960s, 360,000 houses were being built a year.

For those on the political left, social housing was a powerful example of how to promote equality through the intervention of the state in people’s lives. But by the 1970s the downsides of urban renewal – the soullessness of the high-rise blocks and estates and their association with inner-city crime, social problems and the corruption of local councils – were helping to spawn new visions for the future of housing from the right and Labour moderates alike.

The idea of the “right to buy”, under which people could purchase their council homes, began to catch hold as politicians sought ways to promote aspiration through home ownership. It was Margaret Thatcher, in the Housing Act of 1980, who made the policy a hallmark of her time in office – the second period of clarity. The act allowed people to buy their council homes at the market price, but with a hefty discount based on the length of occupancy and the rent already paid. The incentive worked: in 1982 alone 200,000 council houses were sold to tenants. By 1987, 1m publicly owned council dwellings had switched into private hands.

But what looked to the Tories (and to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) like an unqualified success has turned out to have a sting in the tail. The staggering changes in the way we fund our housing provision for the least well-off since the right-to-buy revolution is neatly encapsulated by statistics in a report, Together at Home, from the IPPR thinktank.

In 1975 more than 80% of public expenditure on housing went on supply-side capital funding (building homes and their upkeep), with rent support and rebates low. By 2000, things had gone into reverse with, as the report states, “85% of spending being routed through demand-side revenue funding in the form of housing benefit”.

Today 40% to 50% of the annual £23bn cost of housing benefit goes to private landlords, many of whom have taken advantage of buy-to-let schemes and used the shortage of social housing to drive up rents. This is the mess the government finds itself in during a downturn and when the need for low-cost housing is at its highest.

Millions cannot hope to buy because prices are too high, supply is limited as builders see little demand, and banks are reluctant to lend. So people are forced into an overheated rented sector. The bill for housing benefit is soaring, not only because more people are applying for it, but because the private sector is increasingly able to ask its price when the stock of properties is so limited.

With money bleeding away from government, politicians are desperate to find ways to stimulate house building to reduce the imbalance of supply and demand, boost economic activity and cut the benefits bill. Ed Miliband invokes the spirit of Attlee with his repeated pledges to “rebuild Britain with bricks and mortar”, though we have heard little about how this will be done.

In a recent article in the New Statesman, business secretary Vince Cable also suggested that [12], if Britain could only find a way to build more houses, the economic benefits could spark a recovery reminiscent of the 1930s.

But little was offered on housebuilding in George Osborne’s budget. Instead he said people buying new homes up to a value of £600,000 would be able to borrow 20% of the value of their property interest-free for five years, in return for the government taking a stake in the equity. The government also introduced a new “mortgage guarantee” to help more people get a home loan without the need for a prohibitively large deposit. But these moves met with scepticism, including from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which believes that, until more homes are built, such plans will make things worse by pushing up prices and putting home ownership further out of reach for most people.

Roughly 100,000 homes are being built each year in Britain, a feeble rate in the context of a housing crisis. Why can’t we build more?

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Other articles:

Bedroom tax is worthy of Stalin, says government’s poverty tsar, 29 Mar 2013. [13]
Frank Field condemns change to housing benefit as ‘flawed’ and says scheme will eventually prove to be more expensive

Benefit cuts: Monday will be the day that defines this government, March 28, 2013 [14]

Liverpool’s rotting, shocking ‘housing renewal’: how did it come to this?, March 27, 2013 [15]

Bedroom tax: why you should march against this heartless, pointless ‘reform’, 15 Mar 2013 [16]

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