I have, over the course of the past few weeks, struggled to find time for anything - and this weblog probably reflects that. But today is so significant that I had to find a few moments to comment on the inherent contradiction which lies at the heart of this culture.

Firstly, it is 25 years since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of this country, a period which began one year before I was born and continued until I was ten years old. The lady was remarkable, for sure. She was, along with Ronald Reagan, by far the biggest contribution to world politics in the last half of the 20th century - I pay tribute to the difference she made by being bold enough to implement a basic political philosophy which is both simple and right. Yet, how quickly we forget.

Today I visited the Ulster Folk & Transport Park just outside Belfast, Northern Ireland - an array of small towns and buildings preserved from the 1900s by way of insight to that era in Irish history. It is astonishing to see how they lived - in small, cramped conditions; with little money or assets; a hard, punishing routine of hard labour and impoverished surroundings. And yet it all seems so foreign to me and everyone else I know in the year 2004; sitting with my Apple Powerbook on a deep, comfortable couch, connected to the world by a multi-media broadband cable, kept warm by a central heating system and flanked by the walls of a room larger than any I saw at the Folk Park.

What has changed? Well; freedom - not to put too fine a point on it. Capitalism. Thatcherism, if you like. At the source of this advance in prosperity, the fundamental shift in living standards and quality of life we now enjoy, are those same philosophical principals employed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, expounded by thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Ayn Rand. That “the state should be small and the individual should be big” was at the heart of the policies which changed the world economy of the latter half of the 20th century, and yet there are some who clearly cannot remember.

Which brings me to the second point leading to my conclusion that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of today’s news bulletin.

Today, May Day, is the rally of the Great Unwashed - that wonderfully attractive group of louts who annually bite the hand that feeds them, trash McDonalds and Gap, decide that those who seek to better themselves are wrong, and declare themselves to be AGAINST that which Thatcher and others stood for: freedom. They are ‘anti-war’, they are ‘anti-globalisation’, they are ‘anti-capitalist’. They are socialist politically, claiming to stand for those in poverty, but they are blinded by their passion from seeing the only system in human history which has EVER delivered a sheer transformation to living standards in general, bringing so many hundreds of MILLIONS out of poverty - capitalism.

And THAT is the inherent contradiction at the heart of the society of May 3rd, 2004.

It seems 25 years is a long time for some.

————–
John Wright

johnwright@softhome.net