10 years since Margaret Thatcher's death: Her deadly neoliberal legacy lives on

This week marks 10 years since the UK’s notorious first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, died in London’s five-star Ritz Hotel. Passing away in the same way she lived and ensured the 1% would continue to live; at the expense of the British working class, in unfathomable luxury.

Growing up in the North of England to a working class family of Irish and Palestinian descent, made up of miners, mill workers, and migrants, I knew from an early age not to believe the fabricated Tory school curriculums glorifying Thatcher's time in office.

Whilst my school teachers would eulogise Thatcher for her supposed heroism, and tell me I should look up to her, I was raised to know her differently. I recognised Thatcher by her utter contempt for ordinary workers, being an avid supporter of apartheid in South Africa and her callous role during the Irish hunger strikes. As I got older, I also knew her to be the leading perpetrator behind the oppression today’s British working classes face.

''The undeniable legacy that looms over us a decade after her death, and still subjugates us today, is her militant onslaught on working class communities, to whom she referred to ‘the enemy within’.''

Thatcher spent nearly 12 years in power and passed some of the most oppressive pieces of legislation in Britain, yet history will only remember her as Britain's first female Prime Minister, mere accolade for her gender alone. This of course is part and parcel of years of shallow Tory representation politics, which involves the bolstering of ‘diverse’ individuals into higher positions in a bid to cushion the blow to their ever expanding abhorrent and regressive policies.

Modern-day Tory representation politics sees the likes of Suella Braverman, a woman of colour, pushing one of the most hardline Tory campaigns on immigration to date, to deport and imprison refugees and asylum seekers in Rwanda.

Indeed, Thatcher’s legacy is part of a continued Purplewashing by the Conservatives. Thatcher is today praised for her “empowering” role in ‘leading’ the Falklands War (Malvinas) to self-acclaimed victory, as though it was some great feminist contribution. In reality, it was all a calculated political move fuelled by British imperialism to protect a relic of the British empire over 8,000 miles away and resurrect war-time patriotism in order to distract from the unpopular austerity measures she was simultaneously passing at home. There was nothing liberating about it.

Furthermore, Thatcher's foreign policy record was nothing short of nefarious. Her refusal to support calls to boycott apartheid South Africa was said to have actually delayed the regime’s fall. She believed South Africa should be a “whites-only state”, and publicly proclaimed Nelson Mandela to be a “terrorist”.

The late PM’s actions in Ireland were also known to be particularly callous, notably her treatment of Irish-Republican hunger strikers. In 1981 mass hunger strikes began by Irish-Republican prisoners who had been arrested for political offences around resisting British military occupation. Thatcher condemned 10 hunger strikers to death, rather than conceding to their demand to be recognised and treated as political prisoners. In fact, her stance on Irish resistance was so brutal, she was described as being one of the best recruiters to the IRA.

The undeniable legacy that looms over us a decade after her death, and still subjugates us today, is her militant onslaught on working class communities, to whom she referred to ‘the enemy within’.

Thatcher wanted to crush the power of the trade unions that humiliated her Tory predecessor Edward Heath. 1972-1974 saw a series of triumphant miner’s strikes that left Heath’s government grovelling with concessions to trade unions and strikers, with him eventually having to resign as a result. Since Thatcher saw the power of trade unions to be her biggest threat, she stopped at nothing to paralyse their collective power. She passed legislation to make trade unions illegal, rolled back the welfare state, made it official policy to encourage ‘borrowing’ as economic freedom - instead of encouraging workers to pursue fairer wages – and privatised everything she could.

When thousands of striking miners were picketing in Orgreave, South Yorkshire in 1984, within minutes they were met with 5,000 heavily armed police officers who launched a violent assault on them. This was how Thatcher cemented her authoritarian anti-trade union laws.Many of her anti-trade union laws from the 80s still criminalise and make strike action difficult to this day.

Thatcher additionally presided over some of the worst unemployment rates in British history.

A decade after her time in office Thatcher was asked about her proudest achievement, she answered: “New Labour”. She was referring to her lasting intensive targeting of the party that was representing trade unions. Since Thatcher, not only has the Conservative Party swayed further right, but so has the Labour Party. It's almost unfathomable to conceive today’s Labour Leader, Keir Starmer is banning his own MP’s for daring to join a picket, when there once was radical Labour politicians like Dennis Skinner who stood on every picket in his constituency and gave his salary to striking miners.

Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson cut the top rate of Income Tax from 83% to 40%. This created 10% inflation and 3 million unemployed.

It also the created the current system where the rich grow ever richer while the poor remain the same or get poorer

Greedy tax dodging thieves

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) April 3, 2023

What appears to be the only exception to her decimation of anything that serves the poor, was the National Health Service (NHS), as she feared the outcome of selling it off instantaneously. Instead, she sowed the seeds of privatisation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she faced some of the staunchest levels of dissent of any public policy in office, particularly over her controversial ‘Poll Tax’, for which over 14 million people refused to pay and vast areas of the UK protested in record breaking numbers.

Today, we can thank her for the continued decline of the welfare state, and privatisation of numerous vital public services which have resulted in one in five people living in absolute poverty, including 3.9 million children living on the poverty line. The shocking levels of homelessness (there are 271,000 homeless people in England alone) despite there being over 676,452 homes which remain empty, are also a continuation of her legacy.

She inspired and helped ensure a modern Britain that has more food banks than ever before, yet that is also filled with the most billionaires in the country’s history.

Yes, Thatcher certainly made a mark; her neoliberal policies are still working perfectly for the for 1% they were intended to benefit.

As the Conservative Party will undoubtedly misrepresent Thatcher’s premiership as some sort of win for feminism on the 10th anniversary of her death, it must be emphasised that a woman in a position of power means nothing if they peddle a misogynist, racist, classist, and neoliberal line. Thatcher was no win for women, she was an oppressor of South African women, Irish women, striking women, and still is the oppressor of working class women everywhere.

Thatcherites will likely boast about how she ‘defeated’ trade unions and strikers, so this anniversary should be used as a time to remind them of the contrary. In the past year alone we’ve seen trade union membership soar, with record-breaking numbers of striking teachers, nurses, transport workers, cleaners, and the movement is only growing. Let Thatcher’s lasting legacy be that her policies and her policies alone fuelled the largest, grassroots, collective of trade unions and workers who finally rid society of the chains of classism, capitalism and neoliberalism, once and for all, and achieved despite the Labour Party.

Farrah Koutteineh is head of Public & Legal Relations at the London-based Palestinian Return Centre, and is also the founder of KEY48 - a voluntary collective calling for the immediate right of return of over 7.2 million Palestinian refugees. Koutteineh is also a political activist focusing on intersectional activism including, the Decolonise Palestine movement, indigenous peoples rights, anti-establishment movement, women’s rights and climate justice.

Follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @key48return

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.