Okay, in my last piece I put up a section from Maggie Thatcher’s own book, The Downing Street Years, showing that her ‘Victorian values’ meant that principle of less eligibility, under which people have been thrown onto the street and left to starve and take their own lives in order to stop them becoming dependant on welfare.
Many people recognised this at the time. It even formed the basis for some of the satire in the 1990s puppet TV show, Spitting Image, which regularly lampooned the Leaderene, along the Royal Family, the president of the US, and just about everyone else amongst the Great and the Good. I found this mickey take of Thatcher’s Victorian values, presented as a spoof ad for the Victorian Britain Theme Park, in the Spitting Image book, Thatcha! The Real Maggie Memoirs (London: Mandarin Paperbacks 1993).
If you can’t read it, the piccie says:
Visit the largest theme park in Europe.
The Victorian Britain Experience
Located all over Britain now!
We’ve recreated a period of history you thought was gone for ever!
Yes, no details have been overlooked to give you the feeling that the clock has been turned back a hundred years. Find out what wages were like in 1850, travel on the very trains used by the Victorians! Visit the same hospitals! Catch tuberculosis!
It’s so convincing you’ll think it’s really happening!
As you walk around the Victorian Britain Experience you will chance upon the sort of melodrama you might have seen in any 19th Century slum. Father is sacked by the wicked factory boss for going on strike. His poor family are evicted from their dwelling as mother is forced to go from door to door singing ‘Who will buy these overpriced dusters?’ and father scrapes together a living delivering pizzas on a moped, er I mean carthorse – oh well you get the idea … I mean there’s rubbish everywhere, the drains smell, all the roads are caving in, the lifts never work – I mean it’s a bloody third world country.
The Victorian Britain Experience
NB Please note that it has not been possible to recreate every single detail of Victorian Britain exactly. We have not been able to show what it would be like to live in a major world power with a massive trade surplus and booming manufacturing industry.
It’s as accurate a depiction of post-Thatcherite Britain as it was when it was written, to take the mick out of Thatcher’s own squalid little tome.
As for Britain becoming a third world country, this is what the Thatcherite authors of Britannia Unchained want – for Britons to work the same long hours for low pay as the peoples in the Developing World. All while they get rich, of course.
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