Glenda Jackson MP

If you missed her speech in parliament today try and find it somewhere.

 

If any one finds a link, I'd like to hear it too. What did she say? I couldn't bear to listen myself to the tory bull****, I'd just have got annoyed, but I'd lie to hear Glendale.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2013/apr/10/margaret-thatcher-mps-pay-tribute-live

 

Here..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDtClJYJBj8&feature=player_embedded#at=25

 

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Some of it:

When I made my maiden speech a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place but Thatcherism was still wreaking, as it had wreaked for the previous decade, the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents.

Our local hospitals were running on empty. Patients were staying on trolleys and in corridors. I tremble to think what the death rate for pensioners would have been this winter if that version of Thatcherism had been fully up and running this year.

Our schools, parents, teachers, governors, even pupils, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising in order to be able to provide basic materials, such as paper and pencils. The plaster on our classroom walls was kept in place by pupils artwork and miles and miles of sellotape. Our school libraries were dominated by empty shelves, very few books, and those books that were there were being held together by ubiquitious sellotape and offcuts from teachers' wallpaper used to bind those volumes so that they could at least hang together.

But by far the most dramatic and heinous demonstration of Thatcherism was certainly not only in London, but across the whole country in metropolitan areas, where every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless. They grew in their thousands. And many of those homeless people had been thrown out onto the streets from the closure of the long-term mental hospitals. We were told it was going to be called Care in the Community. What in effect it was was no care at all in the community.

I was interested to hear about Baroness Thatcher's willingness to invite those who have nowhere to go for Christmas. It's a pity she did not start building more and more social houses after she entered into the right to buy, so perhaps there would have been fewer homeless people than there were. As a friend of mine said, during her era London became a city Hogarth would have recognise. And indeed he would.

But the basis to Thatcherism - and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperate, desperately wrong track that Thatcherism took this country into - was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward ...

What concerns me is that I'm beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis of the spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side. That is not happening now. And if we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from.

 

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Wow. Well said Ms. Jackson, that took a bit of guts. Not scripted either, I liked the line about Hogarth.

 

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Even more guts given there was just her and about 200 Tories sat opposite

 

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Indeed. I liked how the speaker took the fat one to task after he objected, saying Glenda's speech was inappropriate.

 

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Lump in the throat, tear in the eye. I want her for PM

 

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Yep, too right. I appreciate Ed Miliband, Labour and the Lib Dems where in a no win situation but it does just show how unreflective of public opinion parliamentary process is. I think most people want MPs to reflect their views, not watered down platitudes on both sides. Fair play to her for saying what she, and many people thought

 

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It's possible to critique Thatcher's time without being George Galloway and Glenda Jackson did that. Seperated the due respect to the fact a person has passed away from the treacle tin dipped prose that's occured since.

 

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Excellent. The speaker giving the Tory MP a dressing down was almost as good too.

 

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Couldn't agree more about bringing a tear to the eye. As a bloke in his mid 20s I never felt the full effect of thatchers reign but I know what hatred my dad and his dad have for her and they don't hate anybody. The passion she spoke with was not a passing dislike but years of contempt for thatcher and I wish here in selby we had somebody as passionate about their constituency. Instead we've got a bloke In Nigel Adams who's soul aim in life seems to be getting his pictures took with minor celebrity's (Darren gough a fair few times).

Though I don't claim to be up to date with everything regarding thatcher and her cronies I do know she brought many areas to there knees and I'm proud to be the son grandson and great grandson of a line of proud miners who had the guts to stand up and fight for their livelihood and communities......

I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day who's in his 40s and was in support of thatcher and called all miners greedy and cry babies (I went home not long after). He also mentioned the forces getting a 33% pay rise and as a former serviceman couldn't see any fault with thatcher and her policies.....

I may have this totally wrong and don't mean to offend but that's just my take on things.

 

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too late,she's standing down from parliament.

 

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Wow.
Superb. Glenda Jackson you are a legend.

 

Fair play to John Bercow at the end putting that fat tory tw*t in his place.

 

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Excellent post.

 

Fantastic. Top marks

 

Just had a listen.

She had some balls doing that speech.

Jackson did us all proud there.

 

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Great post Selby.
I don't know your situation as regards work etc but thatchers policies towards the industries and their communities are there fr all to see .lads and lasses of your age with no hope no prospects or ambition thrown to one side.
Youngsters who never knew thatcher suffering as a direct consequence of her ideologies.
Some of these youngsters aren't as lucky as yourself Selby you seem to have had great parents and role models to look out for you and judging by your posts are a credit to them.
But some of Thatcher's victims aren't so lucky and some of them turn to drugs or crime in their despair of societies indifference.
When the pits, steelworks and loads of other industries and forms of employment were on the doorstep they were Able to pull themselves up and get on.
Thatcher stopped that with her slaughter of the industrial communities and they now find that nobody cares for them so why care about anybody or anything. Of course some of them would have wasted their lives come wat may but not all you'll probably know some of them.
So when you hear this r other persons talking up thatcher and pulling the workers who took her on down don't walk away look em in the eye this think of your mining family ad laugh at them