Ken Livingstone: “It’s a Tragedy Mrs Thatcher Ever Came to Power”

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Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was a fierce critic of Mrs Thatcher when she was in power. The British media gave him the moniker “Red Ken” for his socialist beliefs during her tenure. Thatcher viewed the Greater London Council, of which Livingstone was leader, as a political threat and a waste of money. In 1986, Thatcher’s government abolished the GLC, putting Livingstone out of a job.

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There are two things to say about Mrs Thatcher. Unlike most politicians, who’re spineless, who never want to actually lead, and who wait to see where public opinion’s going, she had beliefs that almost no one in her cabinet actually shared at the time she became the leader of the Tory Conservative Party. However, she ignored them, she drove ahead, and she made the changes that she believed that Britain needed… you have to respect that. I can’t think of any other modern Prime Minister with that degree of self-confidence and courage in their beliefs.

The tragedy for Britain is that almost everything she believed in was wrong, and almost all the problems that assail us today are the legacy of her neoliberal economics… the high unemployment, the collapse of our manufacturing industry. She inherited a nation that had some problems, but she made them infinitely worse… she deregulated the banking industry, she decided to write off our industry, she wouldn’t build good homes for ordinary people to rent, and she’s left a terrible legacy that’ll take a generation to clear up.

She did terrible things, such as abolishing the Greater London Council because she didn’t agree with it; it was the first real rolling back of democracy in a hundred years of British history. It’s very hard to think of anyone in a modern democracy who’d do something like that. The US President always has state governors and mayors critical of their policy, it’d never occur to them to do away with them. That meant terrible problems for London; we had a decade-and-a-half with no leadership. We actually proposed that we should stop discriminating against black people and against homosexuals; we recognised that women had equal rights… hardly insane, but just a bit ahead of its time.

Clearly, [the state funeral] isn’t right. The only politician of my lifetime that had a state funeral was Winston Churchill, who was a decisive force in the defeat of Adolf Hitler. If we’re to think about anyone today, it should be those whose lives she destroyed. We used to have a sound manufacturing industry; she wiped it out. Look at people’s lives… our suicide rates have gone up since the financial crisis; the bankers abused all the freedom that she gave them. We had a country used to virtually full employment before she got in… ever since, we’ve had people and whole communities just written off.

Overwhelmingly, it’s a tragedy Mrs Thatcher ever came to power. I respect the courage of her convictions and the way she led; the tragedy is she led us in the wrong direction.

9 April 2013

Ken Livingstone

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_04_09/Its-a-tragedy-Mrs-Thatcher-ever-came-to-power-Ken-Livingstone-211/

9 April 2013. Maggie the Hag Passes… An Era Passes, As Well (With Reflections on the New Era Coming)… Thank God!

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This was a colloquy with a Cabinet member… I’m in regular type; they’re in italics:

Ding, dong, the witch is dead… Maggie Thatcher croaked. It’s the End of the Neoliberal “End of History” Era…

She was a truly wicked being. I hope you do a good exposé of the hag! 

She was the worst of the Unholy Trinity. Gorby was only a Western brown-noser, and Slobberin’ Ronnie was only a figurehead for unelectable oligarchs… but Maggie was a True Believer. She’s the authoress of the present wicked age that we live in.

I can’t stand any of them, but especially not Gorbachyov. You’d be one of the few people here that know how much all the former Soviet peoples despise him and Yeltsin.

Gorby’s lower than Yeltsin was. Yet, Gorby’s a nonentity… waste no time on him. Interesting things I’m hearing… one of my friends at the Centre says that VVP might put in a “Red monarchy” (her words). That is, a communist government, a strong Church, a strong army, with a tsar as a constitutional figurehead (à la Scandinavia)… after all, VVP’s pushing 60, and he’s the sort to look to the future (he knows that he has ten years left as leader, at best). That’d give Russia a four-point system (not the three-point one it’s had since Pyotr Veliki (including the USSR)), which would be more stable and capable of weathering crises.

Zyuganov has mentioned a “Red Tsar” several times. His job would be to defend the Revolution from enemies and treason. It solves the problem of (real) democratic elections vs a strong and stable leader.

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I wrote this to another Cabinet member:

Is Putin thinking of instituting a constitutional monarchy? After all, the only real organised political force in Russia is the KPRF (United Russia is only an ephemeral bloc; it’s a coterie collected temporarily around a personality). It’d institute a four-point (State-Army-Church-Sovereign) system instead of the traditional three-point (Party or Church-Army-State) system, which is inherently more stable. If so, it means that VVP’s looking to the future (he’s 60 this year, after all… probably, like all of us, he’s feeling his mortality). I’ll guarantee you this… VVP would NEVER put the fatso Maria Vladimirovna and her pack of drooling jackals on the throne (they’re all pro-Western lickspittles, in any case). It wouldn’t be beyond him to put Michael of Kent on the throne (he’d be MUCH more biddable than Maria is, and he’s much more telegenic, to boot).

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I saw this on the net:

I’ll be brief:

BURN IN HELL, THATCHER!

Back to work…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcXi-VYy_Yw&feature=youtu.be

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The passing of Mag the Hag was the end of an era… just as her entrance in the late ‘70s was the beginning of the present neoliberal fool’s paradise. However, her intellectual heirs won’t go quietly… but they WILL go, that’s for certain.

BMD

Canadian First Nations Protest

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On Wednesday, thousands of members of Canadian First Nations held a national day of protest actions to protest against violations of their rights. During the protests, they paralysed traffic on a bridge over the Detroit River on the border between Canada and the USA in Detroit MI, which is the busiest border crossing in North America. The protestors also blocked several major bridges and roads in other areas and staged a protest in Ottawa, the Canadian capital. According to the organisers, they want to draw attention to the First Nations movement, “Idle No More“. The protestors want the Canadian government to abrogate laws adopted in December 2012 that ease conditions for the sale or lease of land on First Nations Reserves as well as weaken environmental controls for many lakes and rivers.

17 January 2013

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_01_17/Canadian-Indians-protest/

Editor’s Note:

The so-called Conservative Party in Canada won a minority of the votes in the last election, but since Canada has a “first past the post” system, most Conservative MPs won with a only minority of the vote (at present, there are three major parties in Canada, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the New Democratic Party). This system was introduced when Canada only had two major parties… now, with three, it’s distorted the will of the electorate. Besides that, the present Conservative Party isn’t an organic continuation of the old Progressive Conservative Party… basically, the radical rightwing Canadian Alliance took over the Party, destroying its old moderate centrist ethos. They’re trying to rape Canada in the same way that the US Republican Party is trying to rape the USA (yes, Virginia, there’s a difference between the Democrats and Republicans, and it isn’t minor, despite appearances). The NDP is growing in power, though… after all, the trend worldwide is leftward and the Reagan/Thatcher nightmare is in its final days. The only question is, “Shall the rich accept their fate, or, shall they fight to retain their present privilege?” Only time will tell the story on that one…

By the way, yesterday, CNN covered non-news such as Lance Armstrong and a football player with an imaginary girlfriend… on the other hand, real news such as this went unreported. None dare call it censorship and shaping of the “news” (CNN is just the other side of the coin from Fox… both are equally crank)…

BMD

Scotland May Opt for Secession

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Scottish Prime Minister Alex Salmond promised to hold a referendum on whether Scotland should secede from the UK, to “win the fight for independence”. Sir Gus O’Donnell, the UK Cabinet Secretary, acknowledged that there’s a very real threat of a division of the kingdom. He said that there was a risk that the UK would cease to be a unified state within several years. In May 2011, the National Party won the elections for Stormont (Scottish Parliament), having received an absolute majority. This influenced the rise of separatist sentiment in Scotland. As shown by the latest opinion poll among Scots, they’d vote for independence if their standard of living rose by £ 500 (24,400 Roubles. 785 USD. 600 Euros) a year. The survey also indicated that only 25 percent of respondents prefer to remain in the UK. However, if the economic situation worsens, then, only 21 percent of Scots would support secession from the UK and 66 percent would vote against independence in a possible referendum.

However, the Scottish standard of living is unlikely to rise by £ 500 a year. According to latest official figures, the British economy is in recession. Recently, UK Prime Minister David Cameron recognised this; he told his colleagues in the Conservative Party that the upcoming 2012 “will be the most difficult time in the last thirty years, i.e. since the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was in power”. In addition, the ties between London and Edinburgh are strong. Tens of thousands of Britons work for Scottish companies, and many more study in universities in Scotland. There’s a similar number of Scots living and working in British cities. More and more Scots seek work in London and other major British cities because of unemployment in their home region. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, until the British economy starts to recover, Scottish nationalists are unlikely to persuade their countrymen to secede from the United Kingdom.

24 December 2011

Sergei Sayenko

Voice of Russia World Service

http://rus.ruvr.ru/2011/12/24/62817214.html