Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Hidden Article

This posting has been hidden because it breaches the Indymedia UK (IMC UK) Editorial Guidelines.

IMC UK is an interactive site offering inclusive participation. All postings to the open publishing newswire are the responsibility of the individual authors and not of IMC UK. Although IMC UK volunteers attempt to ensure accuracy of the newswire, they take no responsibility legal or otherwise for the contents of the open publishing site. Mention of external web sites or services is for information purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.

Thatcher party report

Militant | 15.04.2013 11:28

Five hours in to what must rank as the most pointless political assembly ever staged in this great crucible of protest, it was time for the big moment – the torching of the Thatcher effigy. And then – oops. Just one problem, comrades. The lady was not for burning.

The downpour had soaked the giant papier-mâché puppet and its mop of orange hair (fashioned from a bundle of irredeemably bourgeois Sainsbury’s plastic bags).
Urged on by choruses of ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Dead! Dead! Dead!’, the executioners did their best. After about quarter of an hour, a few Sainsbury’s bags started to smoulder and then fizzled out.

‘F****** bitch,’ growled a youth in combat trousers and ginger dreadlocks who can hardly have been out of nappies when Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street. Typical. You go to all the trouble of laying on a party and the guest of honour doesn’t even have the common courtesy to ignite. In the end, the mob lost patience. They trampled their disobliging effigy to a squelching pulp and went back to dancing and drinking into the early hours of yesterday.

In recent days, people of every age, background and political allegiance have been unpleasantly surprised by some of the reactions to the death of Lady Thatcher. This weekend’s ‘Thatcher Death Party’ in London’s Trafalgar Square was the worst yet. Youngsters brought to the 'death party' were heard chanting anti-Thatcher songs, Various hard-Left inadequates had been big-talking about it for more than a decade, planning a fiesta of vengeance on the first Saturday after her death, tinged with the promise of a re-run of the poll tax riot which helped precipitate her resignation.
The police weren't taking any chances, with convoys of minibuses parked in the backstreets. Wisely, though, commanding officers had given the order for flat hats, not helmets. You could sense the disappointment among the element in the crowd who were itching for a spot of confrontation.
Busybodies in high-vis jackets marked ‘Legal Observer’ rushed around in search of an atrocity, frantically scribbling police numbers on clipboards. The cops stood back with the patronising insouciance of teachers at a school disco. Party poopers!
Occasionally, there was a scuffle. One brave class warrior, face shielded by a scarf, kept popping out from behind his mates and kicking one police officer on the backside. Finally, the policeman turned round, pointed and shouted: ‘Stop kicking me!’ He did. Compared to the poll tax mayhem of 1990, this was handbags. By close of play, 16 arrests had been reported.

The BBC put the numbers in attendance at 3,000, ITV and Sky less than half that. If you included the film crews, photographers, bloggers, Saturday night passers-by, baffled tourists and large numbers of London University students having a laugh – ‘Let’s start a conga!’ bawled one plummy voice – then the whole lot must indeed have been in the low thousands.
The genuine partygoers – a thousand max – seemed to split evenly between those wanting a party and those wanting to engage in earnest denunciation of the She-Lucifer of Grantham.
A handful had gathered under a National Union of Mineworkers banner, retelling war stories from the Eighties. But this was largely a gathering of what might be called Thatcher’s children.
The age span of those arrested was 18 to 44. As far as this lot were concerned, the ‘witch’ can be blamed for pretty much anything unpleasant over the past 30 years or so.

The drinking and dancing went on until the early hours
‘Look at the disgusting poverty around us,’ bawled Jess Bailey, dangling a Thatcher doll from a noose. ‘I can’t get a decent home for my family because of her.’ Ms Bailey said she had been eight when Mrs Thatcher came to power and ‘destroyed my life’.
As she spoke, a well-refreshed male friend started doing something disgusting to the doll. ‘You should show some respect for the dead,’ said a middle-aged tourist with a Spanish accent, finally unable to contain his shock.
‘She never showed no respect to me,’ spluttered a furious Ms Bailey, appalled anyone should be speaking good of the dead.
Up on the balcony of the National Gallery, a not wholly sober lady in a green ballgown teased police by dancing on the outside of the railings. Suddenly, insanely, she dived into the crowd from 20ft up. Fortunately, they caught her.
She turned out to be 39-year-old harpist Rosie Nobbs. Explaining her antipathy, she said: ‘I was a milk monitor and thought it was my fault that the milk stopped coming. I had a responsibility and she took it away from me.

Revellers taunted police officers and a total of 16 arrests were made at the party
'I haven’t taken any work seriously since.’ Fascinating. Mrs Thatcher (then Education Secretary) cut the school milk quota in 1971 – three years before Ms Nobbs was born.
One man had not only brought along a delightful four-year-old called Jack, but trained him to say: ‘Thatcher’s dead.’ Come 11pm, I spotted the poor little chap on the shoulders of a gyrating man (Dad, one hopes) with a beer in one hand and fag in the other. He’ll probably grow up to be a chartered accountant.
Behind the contrived party atmosphere, though, ran a deep streak of menace. .

I saw a rather naïve middle-aged gent trying to film the crowd on a small camera from beneath a Union Jack umbrella.
A hard-faced man in an Ireland football shirt calmly walked up behind him and started ripping his umbrella apart. When the man objected, the brolly-shredder replied darkly: ‘We’ll have none of that here.’
Some had come armed with bottles of champagne, spraying it Formula One-style for the benefit of the television crews – true champagne socialists.
‘I’ve never liked champagne but I’ve been drinking it for days,’ joked an ex-miner from Easington.
The carpet of litter and broken glass by the end suggested that most had been drinking beer, though a rich pong of cannabis hung over the square all evening.
But even the angriest turbo-Trot would have to admit that it was a pretty dreary party. Raging against a dead octogenarian in the rain was never really going to rival Mardi Gras for carnival atmosphere.
At one point, I found myself alongside Romany Blythe, the purple-haired teacher who hit the headlines last week for creating a ‘Witch Is Dead’ website and comparing Lady Thatcher to Hitler.
‘They put me on the front of the Sun and I’ve had to take down my Facebook page,’ she moaned to anyone who would listen. Oh, the perils of celebrity.
Perhaps this unedifying little quasi-demo, this dismal venting of spleen, will have served as a pressure valve ahead of Wednesday’s funeral.
No doubt some of Lady Thatcher’s friends and admirers will be appalled that such an event could even be considered, let alone staged, in the heart of the capital. But it is worth making a counter-argument: with enemies like this, could you ever be short of friends?

Militant

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech