Thread by @SouthsideTrekk1

Margaret Thatcher: a thread 🧵

So when she died, a girl I was at uni with told me off for posting on Facebook that I was glad she was gone. Usually, I would not celebrate the demise of a fellow human being, but we are still seeing the legacy of her cruelty and worship of greed today.

When Thatcher said "There is no such thing as society" she paved the way for the destruction of the social contract. The idea that, fundamentally, we are all responsible for making our society a good place where people are cared for and nurtured.

When you wonder why we have Foodbanks, why people accept the deaths of the poor and disabled at the hands of the DWP and why little children go to bed hungry and cold, you can thank Thatcher's legacy of the destruction of the idea we should all care.

When she closed the mines, she destroyed entire towns and ways of life. In some places the vast majority of families depended on mining for their income. There was no plan to retrain workers, no mitigation of the impact, just destruction and poverty left in her wake.

When she cosied up to General Pinochet she condoned the torture of Chilean people. If you want to learn more about this, watch the film "Nae Pasaran" about the aviation engineers who refused to repair Chilean planes.

When she sold off our utilities and telecomms she paved the way for private profiteering to be embedded in public services. Your energy bill is high? Thatcher is at least partly culpable. This also led to continued privatisation, to what we have now with our #NHS in danger.

Thatcher created the blueprint for privatising public assets: run it into the ground, defund it, make the service so shit everyone no longer sees the value in it, sell it off, reap the profits, laugh as the poor no longer have access to basic services we all need.

She also had a questionable relationship with #JimmySavile I am not saying she for sure knew what he was doing, but others did. The British elite are responsible for enabling his abuse of young and vulnerable people.

Section 28 was one of the cruelest pieces of legislation ever to come out of the British government. We are still seeing the effects of it today. I went to school in the 90s/00s and many teachers *still* refused to talk about LGBTQ+ issues as a result of S28.

The traumatisation of thousands of LGBTQ+ people, the hate, the violence and the tropes we still see used against us were crystallised into a malign machine of hate by Thatcher. The continued abuse of Transgender folks is the legacy of this- it uses the same shitty justifications

She also cosied up to Ronald Reagan, the man who framed the AIDS epidemic as a natural punishment for being gay. Millions of people have died because of this. Plus she imported a lot of his cruel neoliberal ideology to the UK too!

The way she taught us to frame the unemployed as "lazy" instead of questioning why we allow people to suffer and be punished for circumstances. If you've ever been treated cruelly because you are unemployed you can blame Thatcher.

When she removed nutritional programs for kids we called her "Milk Snatcher" but now we wonder why we allow young people to starve or suffer malnutrition. We were being primed to accept that some kids can't afford to eat decent meals.

When she crushed the unions you all cheered. Now you wonder why we have zero hours, fire and rehire and why wage growth for average people falls far behind the rate of inflation. If the cost of living is too damned high, blame Maggie.

She sold off the council houses and convinced us that this would make everyone rich. In practise, this enriched a few wealthy folks and encouraged the predatory landlordism we see today. This is the biggest con ever to have been perpetrated on working class people.

They were told if they bought their house then they would be richer, able to leave it to their kids. We saw house prices artificially inflated to the point where your kids can't afford to buy. Now you are being told to sell your home to pay for your care. You were duped.

We continue to see house prices rising as a "good" thing because it benefits those same wealthy rentiers. Old people pray their home will increase in value so they do not become destitute, everybody loses except the super rich.

Young folks fight for fairer housing, for measures to curb these rises. Older folks fear for their ability to afford to eat because their pension is shit. Who made pensions shit? Surely you can guess by now right.

Right to Buy and the sell off of our public property was the biggest asset strip ever perpetrated on a country, and we accepted it because we were being told it would make us richer and our services better. Now we are poor, and it costs you thousands to heat your home.

In a nutshell, her legacy is to make our country poor, cruel, nasty, harsh and devoid of any love for each other. She pitted the poor against the poor and allowed the conditions for the wealthy to further enrich themselves off the backs of the destitute.

She was a tyrant who enabled the destruction of all of the things that make our communities nice places to be, and replaced them with get rich quick schemes for the supposed elite.

So now here we are. Poorer, sicker, sadder and with a government that took the schemes Thatcher set up and ran with them to their logical conclusion. We have starving kids, freezing pensioners and dreadful quality of life for many of us.

When #COVID19 hit, our government was more concerned with enriching their pals and throwing office parties than with the fact your mum died alone in hospital because you were unable to be there. This is the logical end point of "No such thing as society".

We can still turn this around, but we have to work together. The first thing that was destroyed was the notion that all of us are collectively responsible for more than just the people we can hold in our arms.

https://twitter.com/danielmgmoylan/status/1512337026670022659?s=20&t=-j2HSGWoHDhgTmGhk5ZqGg

this is exactly what I mean.

If you're fed up of this, and you want to live in a country where everyone is safe, everyone is fed, everyone is warm and everyone can thrive then we need to rediscover the idea of solidarity, and that means fighting alongside people who are not 100% like you.

It means that you stop blaming the immigrant family next door for your problems, and that you stop seeing the disabled family member you have who receives PIP as a faker and a scrounger. Quit fighting the people who have next to nothing.

Turn your attention to the people who hoard everything, who have more money that they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. Get mad, get together, get off your couch and off Twitter and out into the streets. This is the only way we win.

I guess I also wanted to add, the terrible people might die in the end, but they will be replaced by someone else. We should never stop fighting for each other and we should never stop caring.