Thread by @AlisonCybe

So just to be clear to my American readers, this may seem spiteful or even malicious. You might think Thatcher was just a politician and didn't deserve to die in unspeakable agony.
Well, let me give you some context here.

I'm Scottish, born and raised. Thatcher trialled a new system of national tax in the UK; specifically in Scotland. It was a flat-rate tax, called the Poll Tax. Flat-rate here means that everybody pays the same percentage of tax from their income. Everybody.

That may sound good in theory. But in practice, it impacts on the poorest in society. The wealthy tend to be expected usually to pay a higher percentage because, well, they can afford to do so - but for the poorest, they lost about a third of their wage packets.

Thatcher decided to implement poll tax in Scotland first, before England. She knew that she could do this, because Tories tend to regard Scots as second-class citizens
(if anyone ever wants to hire me for sensitivity reading in relation to Scotland, I'm totally available ;))

Families were made destitute. People couldn't afford heat in the winter or basic food.
People fucking died.
When I was a kid, the old lady in the tenement flat above me had to buy a portable gas heater because she couldn't afford her heating bill.

She could only afford a cheap knock-off model, because she had no money left.
It leaked poisonous gas into her bedroom.
My family checked in on her every few days because it was winter and she was old. So it was my grandmother that found her body.

Thatcher knew about the suffering that her policies caused. She just didn't care.
And let me give you some more context here. How about Brexit? You know those photos you see of UK supermarkets right now with shelves empty? Yeah, that's because of her.
How? Isn't she dead?

How could she cause that?
Well, the thing with Brexit is that the UK left the Euro trade with no deal in place. So we're not getting the trade imports that we need.
The reason we couldn't make a deal, let's be fucking honest here, is because our country has VERY LITTLE to trade.

That wasn't always the case. We once had a thriving manufacturing industry. We made anything from textiles to machines. You could get damn good (well, at least, affordable) quality British-made white goods. We had factories that made things across the nation.

If the country still had that, we could, potentially, have brought those goods to the international market.
But we don't. Why?
If you ask any working class person what Thatcher did, the answer will be "closed the mines, closed the factories".

Y'see, she had the idea that manufacturing was outdated. We were competing with foreign-made goods and, rather than compete, she wanted the UK to shift from a manufacturing model to a service model.

My first job was in a call centre. In fact, just about every job I've ever had has been in a call centre. The same is true for the vast majority of young people in the UK. Rather than going into factory work, we go into them. That's the model Thatcher wanted.

Now, I firmly believe that she wanted to create this economic shift in order to pull power away from trade unions. Her conflict with the unions was legendary. Unions tend to have more strength when their workers can levy control over the means of production.

Without anything being actively produced, there's fewer and weaker trade unions now. We (I'm a trade unionist, big surprise there) don't have the political sway any more.
That's why, in a long-way around, our KFCs are running fucking low on chicken.

So like, yeah, it may seem bitter and mean-spirited to say that it's a fucking lovely thing that she died in unspeakable agony. But I don't care. If it were up to me, I'd jam a stake through her heart to make sure she never comes back.