Perspective

I lived through 12 years of Margaret fucking Thatcher, a mad battle-axe of a leader whose every whim was indulged by a subservient herd of slimy proto-fascists, racists and crooks including Norman “on your bike” Tebbit, Jeffrey Archer (now sadly out of jail again), Jonathan “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice” Aitken, and Keith Joseph (the Karl Rove of “Thatcherism”).

I saw entire industries deliberately destroyed out of spite, just to cut down the power of unions. I saw heavy-handed political censorship of the media via direct legislation. I saw homophobia written into law. I saw taxpayer money pumped into supposedly nonexistent military projects, with no public oversight. I saw people killed in pointless wars and bombing raids. I saw Catch-22 secrecy laws where you could be prosecuted for breaking a law you hadn’t agreed to, and not even told what it was you had done that was illegal. I saw government sell out national sovereignty to big corporations and their unelected representatives.

I wrote letters, I protested, I marched, none of it made the slightest bit of difference. Nobody cared, and with no term limits it often seemed as though Thatcher’s was going to be a true Thousand Year Reich. In the end the only reason we didn’t end up with her mummified corpse ruling from beyond the grave is that her own party turned on her and installed John Major as a more malleable replacement, a man so unimaginative that he literally ran away from the circus to become an accountant.

You think 8 years of mad right-wing crap is bad? Try 20 some time. At least almost half the US seems to care, which is more than can be said for the UK, where people are now so hopelessly used to it that they apparently think they’re lucky to be ruled over by the likes of David Blunkett, a man whose Orwellian aspirations are as bad as Ashcroft’s, yet seem to pass straight into law with little or no resistance.

In short, the world has not ended. Get over it. The USA is no worse now than it was a week ago. The Republicans control everything, just like they did before the election. Life goes on.