minded promotion of the interests of the wealthy few at the expense of the majority came to an end on May 1.
Almost ewo decades of crusading attacks on the most basic rights of trade unions, on local democracy, on the state pension and on the bed. rock rights and benefits of the welfare state have combined to stoke up massive social divisions.
Since 1979 Tory policies have increased the real income of the top-paid ten percent by a thumping 65%: but the same period has seen the real income of the bottom ten percent slashed by a staggering 13%.
The gap berween rich and poor in Britain is now as great as that in Nigeria. One person in five living in Major's Britain lives in a poverty-stricken houschold. One British child in every three lives in poverty - a higher proportion than any other European country.
This is no accident. Thatcher's government came to office in 1979 with a mission: to smash the strength of the workers' movement, grab the enormous profits to be made from the privatisation of nationalised utilitics, drive up the rate of exploitation in the workplace, and line the pockets of their wealthy backers.
Within a ycar they nad confronted the steel workers, brought in the first anti-union laws and commenced the sale of council houses at knock-down prices. By 1982, with her eyes already on the next election, Thatcher mounted the Falklands War, spending billions to reassert Britain's In 1983 a buovant Thatcher trampled over a miserable Labour campaign to notch up a 144-scat majority, and the following year privatised British Telecom and went for the big battle, provoking the year-long miners' strike and spending billions to defeat the strongest section of the British working class.
Yupples
Yuppies flourished on a diet of inflated property prices, privatisation and tax cuts. In 1986, after imposing increasingly rigid capping on rates, forcing rounds of council cuts, Thatcher dealt anotser blow to local democracy abolishing the GLC.
The 1987 clection took place in the midst of Nigel Lawson's An ill-starred friendship: Major with Neil Hamilton "boom", with Neil Kinnock leading Labour to another miserable defcat.
Exploiting her 102 seat majority, Thatcher went on in 198% to force through the Poll ax and water privatisation, while the market-style NHS "reforms" were hatched up behind closed doors, to emerge as a White Paper in 1989.
1990 saw nemesis for Thatcher in the form of the massive popular pposition to and defiance of the Poll Tax: as the economy plunged into recession, Thatcher's leadership was challenged, and she tcarfuily made way for John Major.
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vull wat, ine maastrient Treaty, the disastrous experiMechanism, and the wafer-thin cl-scat ciecton victory over a "professional" Kinnock campaign in 1992. Since then the Tories, wracked by sleaze, scandal, BSE and bitter divisions over Europe, have resorted to the of privatisation (Rail!) while struggling to cut down public spending - with education cuts in particular antagomillions of their "natural" supporters in the shire counties of "middle England'. Only the massive £3 billion prison building programme has remained intact.
The more "radical" the policies put forward by the Tories have served cably the privatisation of pensions, increased selection in schools.
Their defeat leaves the party demoralised and divided - just what they have done to so much of the country. 18 vicious, miserable years have left scars that will take decades to heal.
The task now is to ensure Labour dumps the policies that have done the damarc