So Mrs Thatcher is dead. One of the things she is being credited with acheiving is 'breaking the Unions' (ie divesting them of the power they had held to influence how working people were paid and the conditions of their work). This may indeed be true - but is this the good thing it is presented as being. Most of us seem to forget that without the Unions we would for the most part still be labouring in squalid conditions for a pitance and at the complete mercy of employers who could use or discard us as their wont dictated. The rights, such as they are, that we now enjoy were not freely given; they were fought tooth and nail for by the very Unions whose demise we celebrate. There is a greater division now between rich and poor than there has been for the last thirty years and, we are told, it is getting greater by the day. I do not believe that this can be conceived as being good for a country. It seems to me that a state where the wealth of a nation is held by fewer and fewer individuals rather than being enjoyed by the people as a whole cannot be a healthy one. Surely under such conditions discontent and agitation can be the only end result. Yes the Unions did things wrong. Yes they got out of hand. But they also did things right, they also had their place in the improvement of the common mans lot and lets remember that had their power not been so badly damaged by their confrontation with Mrs Thatcher, it is possible that the increasing gap between rich and poor, haves and have nots, that we spoke of above might not be increasing quite so fast.
Another of her acheivements I have heard touted in the last day or two is that she made us all realise that any of us could make it; it didn't matter who we were we all had a chance of getting to the top. Lets look at that. There are something over one hundred ministers of state in the UK, be they of the Government or of the Opposition. Of this group currently fourteen were educated in state schools, the rest in the public school system. The higher up the pecking order of these fee paying schools you go, the more you will see their ex-pupils represented. In a recent survey of the top 2000 influential people in the UK, 80% were found to have been to public schools and the top universities. Radio 4 aired a biographical program on the current health minister Jeremy Hunt where another MP who had been a chum of his at Chaterhouse, a prestigious UK public school remenisced "as we left on the final day the last thing Jeremy said to me was 'See you at Westminster'." The moral of these stories if there is one, is, if you are educated in the comprehensive (state) school education system in the UK then you might make it to the top, you might........but the chances are against it.
