#hs twitter

oh no

I have no idea what this is but

Hi love 💕 no worries! It’s impossible to explain Thatcher’s reign and impact without understanding the political unrest in the ‘70s and ‘80s so I’d recommend doing some reading around that but in short, because I’m currently at work:

Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in Great Britain from 1979-1990 as leader of the Conservative party; the UK’s right wing political party.

The gap between rich and poor widened in the 80s under Thatcher and the negative impact of her government can still be seen today, including inequality, the over reliance of our economy on a poorly regulated financial sector, and also the north-south divide.

She was against immigration, she reduced expenditure on social services such as education and housing, her policies led to the highest rate of unemployment since the 1930s, there were riots when she introduced the poll tax in March 1990, she hated trade unions and was committed to reducing their power (The miners’ strike of 1984-1985 was the biggest and most devastating confrontation between the unions and the Thatcher government) and that hate eventually led to the closure of the mines and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, devastating local communities across the north. She privatised gas, water, and electricity, and while some see allowing people to buy their council houses as a good thing, we’re still seeing the effect of this today with a lack of social housing and huge rent increases in both the private and social sector. She struggled against the sexist prejudices of the time to gain her position but did literally nothing to ease the path for other women. She, unsurprisingly, rejected the idea of socialism and instead promoted the idea of individualism.

She’s especially hated by working class communities because her political decisions affected working class people negatively, but nowadays many people (working class and middle class) hate what she did to the UK. When Thatcher died a lot of people celebrated and “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” went to number one in the charts.

Harry’s tweet about Thatcher’s death is controversial because it’s tone deaf, essentially. It suggests that he wasn’t aware of how divisive Thatcher was and potentially revealed the bubble he’d grown up in / was currently in in terms of political education. I don’t think harry is a Tory now, I think he saw people saying “RIP” and thought that was the right stance to take (it wasn’t) but it showed a massive lack of understanding on his part of the negative impact Thatcher had on the UK.

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This is a bit messy because I’m at work but hopefully that helps a tiny bit.