The Maggie Deadheads Aren't So Curious

Ed Morrissey over at HotAir finds the Maggie Deadheads to be curious.  He writes:

Don’t get me wrong — I can appreciate taking any excuse to party, get drunk, and pretend that the world has been set aright in one fell swoop. (I’ve been waiting 25 years for the Dodgers to win another World Series for that very reason, and 20 for Notre Dame to win a football championship.) But this is truly, truly strange — and very revealing, in a number of ways:

Hundreds took to the streets as macabre ‘Thatcher death parties’ were held late into the night across the country, organised by critics of the ‘Iron Lady.’

Smashed shop windows, paint bombs and police being attacked were all consequences of the Left’s sick ‘celebration’ of Baroness Thatcher’s death from a stroke yesterday morning.

In Brixton, south London, riot police were deployed as the crowds, which had been drinking since 5pm, started to become more aggressive smashing shop fronts and throwing paint bomb.

In Liverpool, flares and fireworks were set off outside Lime Street Station by revellers, while in Bristol, seven police officers were injured – one seriously – as violence erupted at a street party of 200 people and police were pelted with bottles, cans and rubbish.

What exactly were they celebrating? Thatcher hadn’t been in power in over 22 years.  An entire generation has gone by since Thatcher left office, and the Tories have held power only briefly since.  If these people are so miserable and put her in the center of that misery, perhaps they should ask why their lot in life hasn’t improved since she left office.

Normally, this kind of celebration takes place when brutal dictators die while still clinging to power, not when elected leaders pass away 22 years after they honored the will of the electorate. That’s a key point, too — Thatcher didn’t seize power and rig elections to keep it, like the mullahs of Iran or (arguably) Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.  The voters of the UK made her Prime Minister, and kept her in place as she rolled out the policies that returned the British to economic, military, and diplomatic strength.  If these ghouls want to protest, they should probably protest their own people instead of a long-retired popular leader whose place in history won’t be threatened at all by people who struggle to spell correctly.

   

There’s nothing ‘curious’ about it. Most of the people attending the ‘death parties’ are younger than I am, which is to say they were born during her tenure as PM or not yet born at all. They have been marinating in the extreme Marxist cesspools called educational institutions. Their profs are of the same vein of George Galloway, who has never met a dictator or terrorist that he didn’t like – regardless of how brutal and atrocious – as long as they were against the West. They have been taught that everything bad in their lives is the result of capitalism and Mrs Thatcher.

Also, while the death parties have received a lot of coverage, they are not some massive show of hatred by a country. Even The Guardian puts the figure at ‘hundreds’ attending Maggie death parties across the country. Most have been limited to a few dozen and several ended with looting, beatings, and even trashing charity shops (go figure). What do you expect from self-identified Communists, Marxists, Trotskyites, Marxist-Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists, and other assorted nuts?

Brixton, in South London, has been the site of one, but we are talking about Lambeth here. The whole area is one that has seen settlement by immigrants, the majority of which come from Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. It is a Lab stronghold. Their dislike of Mrs Thatcher shouldn’t surprise anyone. Most weren’t in the country when she was PM and have no knowledge of what it was like. To them, she represented the West, capitalism, Judeo-Christianity, and colonialism.  This area was the scene of some of the rioting in 2011.

On the other hand, the immigrants from formerly Soviet Eastern Bloc countries, there is profound respect for Mrs Thatcher. You will see them line the streets for her funeral.

Scotland, especially Glasgow, has seen the most celebrations and, again, who’s surprised? The Scots keep threatening to declare their independence. Well, let them. They will be forced to do without considering the fact that in FY2011/12 only 12% of Scottish households paid more tax than they received in services … almost entirely financed by Southeast England. Scotland can pay its share of the current debt and go join the euro since it will not be allowed to keep the sterling. Bully for it! It can sign up for bailing out ClubMed, which the UK doesn’t have to, in large part because Mrs Thatcher realised that a common currency was doomed before it was too late. So, go! Hopefully, you can clean up your act, reduce the knifings and other violence, and increase the life expectancy of your people in many areas. As it is now, in some areas of Glasgow, a boy born there has a 28 year shorter life expectancy than a boy born in a village in the Philippines.

So, Maggie Deadheads, celebrate your slavery, the soul-deadening that has resulted from a welfare state that the majority of Brits, including those on benefits, believe is broken, discourages work, and encourages bad behaviour. Just don’t forget to blame others for your miserable lives. You have to keep yourselves predictable.

“I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” 

- Harriet Tubman

Yet, in spite of the celebrations on the Left over her death, one thing is undeniable: 

She won and she changed Britain. 

Even after Labour won in 1997 (and until they lost 13 years later), no serious politician ever argued for a return of the UK that Mrs Thatcher ‘inherited’ when she became PM. NO ONE.

Of course, none of the Maggie Deadheads has noticed that NO POLITICIAN save the pure Marxist has ever called for a return of the pre-Thatcherite days…even during the 13 years of Tony Blair, a Fabian Socialist, and Gordon Brown, a Socialist. NONE. 

None has argued for a return to state ownership of whole industries. NONE.

Anyone, who is familiar with the Great Britain of the 60s and 70s, doesn’t pause a second to ask ‘Why?’

And, today, only the far left believes that the welfare state is fine, noble, and should be expanded.

Recent polls show that 64% of Brits think the benefits system “doesn’t work”; 78% think that if an unemployed person turns down a job, his benefits should be cut; and 84% believe there should be tougher work-capability tests for disabled people.

According to a British Social Attitudes survey in 2003, 82% of people on benefits agreed that “the government should be the main provider of support to the unemployed”, but by 2011, three years into the downturn, only 62% did. The proportion of working-class people who agreed with that statement fell from 81% in 2003 to 67% in 2011.

Agreement that “unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work” has risen steadily among the less well-off. Only 40% of benefits recipients agreed with it in 2003, while in 2011 59% did. 38% of working-class respondents agreed in 2003 that welfarism discouraged work; 58% agreed in 2011.

When a journalist, who has worked for both Labour and unions and describes himself as a ‘Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest’ writes this:

‘Those who support it need to understand the welfare system that has existed since the war is finished. Dead. Kaput. Fighting to save it is like fighting to save a sandcastle from the incoming tide.’

The Left hated Margaret Thatcher not only because she was extraordinarily successful in destroying their little fiefdoms and saving a country that had to be bailed out by the IMF in the 1970s (£2.3 billion rescue package – the largest-ever call on IMF resources up to that point – and conditions for which included deep cuts in public expenditure and IMF-oversight of domestic policy), saw sky-high inflation, and was plagued by chronic, nationwide strikes that shutdown the country and the economy leaving people freezing, rubbish piling up, rotting dead bodies unburied, trains and buses parked, and hospitals reduced to admitting only emergency cases, but because she mocked them. 

Anyone, who is familiar with the Great Britain of the 60s and 70s, doesn’t pause a second to ask ‘Why don't even Labour politicians argue for a return to the pre-Thatcher days?'

In the mid-70s, the Labour Government under Sunny Jim Callahan introduced The Social Contract. The idea was that Britain would be run the way Germany was run at the time: union leaders and government ministers would meet and discuss policy, and decide the best way forwards. In practice, of course, the union leaders decided that they were the government, and that their job was to get the best possible deal for their members, at the expense of anyone else.  And, when they didn't get what they wanted, the unions broke The Social Contract with the Transport and General Workers' Union being the first, but hardly the last.

The Brits didn't want nor do they want to return to the troubles of the 'Winter of Discontent,' when union bosses controlled the country and could bring a stop to entire industries if they were 'offended.'  If asked 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?' the answer was 'yes,' which is why and how she became the longest-serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 20th century.

It’s obvious that the pre-Thatcherite days are never coming back and all of the hate in Brixton and Scotland is not going to change that.