Wednesday 22 August 2007

Thatcher's Children

Again from The Guardian, Ken Loach, has had a go at Andrew Marr over the broadcaster's apparent 'swallowing of the whole Thatcher ideology'.

"Even Andrew Marr talked about the mighty unions and praised the fact that their power was undermined," Mr Loach told journalists.

"That idea about the unions has passed into the liberal consensus but it is the very thing that created the situation we see in this film.

"Does he really think it was a good thing, given the way people have been exploited as a result, working on the minimum wage? If Andrew Marr says that, he's happy with what we see happens in this film."

2 comments:

Fraser said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Fraser said...

I watched and quite enjoyed Marr's history of Modern Britain.

But he obviously had a big stonk on for Thatcher.

His praise for what Thatcher did for Britain is ludicrous when you think about how much the country outside of London benefited from anything she did.

And he of course completely failed to highlight the social devastation she caused, just to provide a temporary boom for a few hundred already rich Southerners.

The idea that the unions were planning some kind of workers coup d'état fails to take into account the circumstances in which the unions found themselves - fight or die.

That said, Scargill will forever live in infamy for not taking a vote and thus leading the miners on a ill-fated strike that was easily painted by the media as the action of a barmy revolutionary who had little to no interest in democracy.

I think the problem with Marr's reporting is endemic within the BBC - they equate London with Britain far too often and seem to have some 1950s kitchen sink attitude about anyone who lives north of the Watford gap.