Manipulating the Scales.

The present Tory administration in Britain likes to propound the view that people who live on welfare are bad people. They’re lazy, anarchic, dangerous even, and need to be punished. Worthy people – the ones who deserve to belong – are those who work for a living and make their proper contribution to society. (The administration conveniently ignores the fact that there aren’t enough jobs to go around, of course, but let’s not get too rational about this. Politicians rarely do.)

OK, so let’s turn the clock back to a previous Tory administration, the one ruled with an iron hand by the Iron Lady herself. They set about destroying the coalmining industry (along with the steel industry, the shipbuilding industry etc, etc,) so the miners went on strike. ‘Please don’t destroy our jobs,’ they said. ‘We want to work; we want to keep our self-respect; we want to make our contribution to society and belong to it in a proper manner.’ And what did Mrs Thatcher do? She set the dogs on them (in the form of the police, who were told to provoke violence on the picket lines so that the public would see the working man as a thuggish brute out to attack our brave boys in blue, and therefore undeserving of our sympathy.)

Politicians have a most interesting habit of tilting the scales to suit their current agenda, don’t they?

Maybe that’s why a London policeman was sacked today for tweeting that Mrs Thatcher ‘died eighty seven years too late.’ Maybe he was one of those who received instructions from on high.