“A generation of trade unionists will dance on Thatcher’s grave”

'you spit on your own, you can’t do anything. But if you all spit together, you can drown the bastards.’

                                                                                RMT leader Bob Crow

AT THIS YEARS TUC conference, the brothers and sisters have gathered to unleash the venom they have stored up within them for the last year. Rant after rant, bigotry and spite, is the formula at the lectern; as the ancient class war, like a May Day Morris dance, is engaged in by the remnants of a once powerful and destructive Union movement, that was given its rightful place in the pecking order by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

            This lady took it upon herself to abate the union tide that threatened this country’s ruination. In doing so she allowed our economy to breath and grow once more. For I swear that if she had not acted in the way she did, we as a country, would have suffered modern Greece’s  Fall, but a decade earlier.

            But what do we see today at the TUC conference? T-shirts with an inscription promising that their wearers will dance on Thatcher’s grave. £10 each is the asking price, but they have not had, according to Christopher Hope of the Daily Telegraph, no more than half a dozen buyers. However many sympathised, but were not prepared to be seen wearing one.

            Unlike many who are attending this bash in Brighton, I am old enough to have comprehended the Thatcher years and to have become imbued with the kind of hatred  toward her that many feel today. I had been, since my 16^th birthday (as far as I can recall), a Marxist, brought up in a Labour family. In 1971 or was it 1972…it does not matter. I can remember marching against the Industrial Relations Act introduced by Ted Heath. There were some 200,000 people marching through London on that day to do what the TUC hopes to do today – to bring down a Tory government elected by the people; for then, just as now, democracy only had any kind of  relevance for the Left whenever a Labour government was in power.

            The country was in the grip of the trade unions and I was loving it; the revolutionary ether  was infiltrating the nostrils of a generation. There followed during that awful decade, the four-day week; the miners’ strike, the refuge collectors strike, the power workers strike which left the country facing power cuts. While in the private sector Red Robbo, the Bob Crow look-a-like, ruled the roost at British Leyland at their Longbridge plant in Birmingham. British Leyland had gone bankrupt in 1975 and was stupidly nationalised by the government.

            I was in my early twenties and the oil crises that set inflation spiralling gave me even greater hope that capitalism was on its last legs. At a time when I should have been concentrating on my own future, I was enjoying my revolutionary status as a member of the British Communist Party.

           

THE BRITISH NATION was, economically speaking, facing the abyss; and it was the trade union movement that managed to frighten the weak ‘One Nation’ Tory governments; and wrestled endlessly with impotent Labour ones, forcing them on many occasions to bow before their will.

            The TUC conference then, unlike today, was covered by the BBC as thoroughly as the party conferences were. Today the TUC merits only a news item and no live coverage. Then trade union bosses would be frequent visitors to Downing Street under Labour governments, threatening them with all sorts of embarrassment unless they were allowed their bridle.

            In 1969, pre-dating Heath’s Industrial Relations act, Barbara Castle, the Labour Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, introduced a similar document, In Place of Strife, which met with the same fate as Ted Heath’s later attempt at union reform.

            So what was left? The country was left beached and without rescue. The two main parties had fallen, each in their own way, to the power of the trade union movement . The Conservative Party had evolved into what became  known as a One Nation Party; which sought to accommodate all classes after its centuries of Toff-like image; or, as we have come to know it today via a quote from a Tory politician,  the Nasty Party.

THE RISE OF Margaret Thatcher, at a significant time in our nation’s history, sought to rehabilitate our economy. She did so, first of all by loosening the grip of union power over our legal processes regarding industrial law. She introduced  opposing laws given the unions  by previous Labour and One Nation Tory governments. No longer would closed shops or shop steward’s rule the roost on the factory floor. The trade unions were rightly brought to book and faced fines if they carried on with their nefarious practices.

            Heavy union fines soon confined the antics of the union bosses. This and only this, is why Margaret Thatcher is so hated among those gathered in Brighton today.

            Today, as in the past, it is the public sector unions who are set to revolt and cause mayhem this winter. Teachers, NHS workers, refuge collectors, town hall bureaucrats; are all being cajoled by their union leaders to bring about another winter of discontent.

            The public sector, who are paid from the taxes garnered from the private sector, are better paid and receive superior pensions to those working in the private sector.

            The public sector union bosses are hell bent on a political strike, which they hope will turn back time - but with a different outcome. These overpaid, bigoted, foul mouthed (see quote above), and bone headed commissars will lead their ‘members’ to certain defeat, before retiring on a pension of such opulence that may a CEO inn the privates sector would envy.

            In the world of palaeontology , speculation is rife that Neanderthal man may have interbred with homo-sapiens. If evidence was needed of such an occurrence, then the  leaders of the various public sector unions should provide conclusive proof.

            Margaret Thatcher, who is now too ill to defend herself, will be remembered long after Bob Crow’s Neander-sapien bones have become fossilised and awaiting the services of some future palaeontologist's trowel to confirm the relationship.

            Meanwhile the Thatcher legacy, like that of Churchill will have served this nation and allowed it to continue holding its head up in the world.