Thatcher losing it? What to say?

I'm surprised to find that the news of her dementia doesn't bring me the comfort I thought it would. On the contrary, it makes me think of how common and miserable a condition dementia is and how I can't really wish it on anyone.

The simple truth is that our side was beaten by Thatcher & Co. - with the TUC playing an indispensable role. The battle lasted over years with the decisive conflict in 1984/85, the year long miners strike. This was not a necessary defeat. It was, however, a defeat that shaped our lives, indeed shaped the world. Now, with the slow but real recovery of our side, it is high time to move on and stop fighting the battles of 25 years ago. How and when Thatcher dies and what sort of funeral she has is neither here nor there. No doubt there will be celebrations when she dies and I expect I will take part. But only in order to try to reach closure, so that this particular piece of the past will no longer "hang on the brain like a nightmare", as Marx said.

Our watchword as ever is "Don't get mad, get even" or even better, a Spinoza, one of Marx's favorite philosophers put it, "With regard to human affairs, not to laugh, not to cry, not to become indignant, but to understand." Which involves lots of hard work and making sure that we have learnt the lessons. Moving on does not mean forgetting. In particular, we have to remember not to put our faith in left wing trade union leaders, such as Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones, whose support for the Labour government, and failure to back the miners, printers and others in the 1970s led to the demoralisation which enabled Thatcher first to win office and then to go on and break working class resistance.

The questions we have to be able to answer are "What went wrong?" and "How do we get it right?" My memory of the 1970s and the 1980s as well was of a powerful residual loyalty to Labour, in particular within the trade union movement. This loyalty meant accepting the division between the trade unions dealing with workplace issues, "economics" and the Labour Party dealing with government and laws and parliament, "politics". No recognition that this division of Labour means that the strength of organised workers in the unions can't be used directly for political action. Even when living standards are falling, as they were dramatically in the years running up to the Winter of Discontent, 1978-79, the loyalty to Labour meant that the critics of the government's wage controls, the so-called Social Contract, a policy agreed by the TUC, found it very difficult to get a hearing for action against what many workers saw as "our government"

It is interesting to compare this to the situation today with the continuing decline of Labour Party membership and voter support and serious opposition to affiliation to the Labour Party in all unions. The loyalty is simply no longer there. Loyalty to Labour wasn't the only thing we got wrong and creating the alternative is a job hardly started. But with the decline in loyalty, we can say that at least one of the pre-conditions of making sure that it can be different and better next time is in place.