John McDonnell On Margaret Thatcher

Those of you having fits of the vapours, you do realise, don't you, that he is not standing for Leader of the Conservative Party? Mind you, with these views on Thatcher, he might as well have been at any point in the last 20 years. Come the next contest for that position, she will be a distant memory, and the winner might well be someone who could not vote when she left office. The one after that might very well not have been born in 1990.

What do you defend about her? Her Single European Act? Her Anglo-Irish Agreement? Her Exchange Rate Mechanism? Her Police and Criminal Evidence Act? Her replacement of O-levels with GSCEs? Her introduction of abortion up to birth, and the moral chaos of the 1980s generally? Her privatisation of British Airways, British Petroleum, and what are now our largely foreign-owned water and power supplies, something unconscionable in any other country?

Do you mean her destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority, initially in working-class families and communities, though it spread like wildfire, exactly as it was intended to do? Her two recessions? Her invention of mass benefit dependency? Her compelling of the State to make gifts of significant capital assets to people who were thus enabled to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits, and her accompanying creation of the Housing Benefit racket, which is vastly more expensive than would be the maintenance of a stock of council housing?

Or do you mean her refusal to recognise the Muzorewa Government, because she thought that the Soviet-backed Nkomo would somehow have been better than the Chinese-backed Mugabe, for whom she nevertheless secured a knighthood? Her support for apartheid South Africa, an anti-British revenge republic set up in a former Dominion of the Crown?

The list goes on, and on, and on. No wonder that, as you do not appear to have been told, she ended up having to be removed by her own party. No wonder that the only people with a good word to say about her mercifully live thousands of miles away, in the United States. And no wonder that John has been nominated by Frank Field and Kate Hoey.