Socialist batters Thatcherites on national television

Wirral Trades Council vice-chair and socialist activist Elaine Jones appeared on the BBC1 programme The Big Questions on Sunday 8 January – arguing about Margaret Thatcher, and Thatcherism, with other panellists including former Tory MP Edwina Currie and ‘Militant’ Liverpool council leader Derek Hatton.

Currie claimed that Thatcherism had “freed up the economy” and represented a “moral mission” to improve society. She was joined by a free market economist, a millionaire capitalist who rose from a working-class background during the Thatcher government and a bishop who disliked Thatcherism’s record on poverty and inequality but said that at least she “got the unions under control”. Hatton behaved like a “left-wing” court jester, confirming himself for the charlatan he is. (The host asked how he could attack capitalism when he is a property developer.)

Through all this Elaine’s arguments came like a blast of working-class, socialist fresh air, pointing out that Thatcherism freed up and improved society only for the rich, at the expense of the working class and the poor – like the Tory government today. She championed the cause of the miners’ strike and of workers’ struggles against cuts now, making the case for a different society based on human need, not profit. She also demolished Edwina Currie’s claim that Thatcher should be a role model for women – not for working-class women!

As usual, Currie came across as unctuously smooth – unphased when she fielded questions like why Thatcher had supported regimes including Pinochet’s Chile, apartheid South Africa and Ceauşescu’s Romania. But when attacked by Elaine she responded angrily, with mocking and mimicry, obviously rattled and outraged by a working-class woman challenging her ‘betters’.

The Big Questions has a religious bent, and a later discussion on the program was on whether the end of the world is nigh! Elaine intervened to argue that the state of the world is nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the economic and social system we live under – a system we can organise to change.