Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet set to to kill the poor, they killed the
poor, and they got away with it.
---
In England in the 1980's, unemployed males aged 16-70 had 1,24 times the death
risk of employed males from the top three socio-economic groups. Unemployed
females aged 16-70 had 1,48 times the death risk of employed females from the
top three socio-economic groups.
In England in the 1980's males (16-70) living in rented housing without car
access had 1,54 times the death rate of males living in privately-owned
housing with car access. For females the extra risk was similar: 1,56.
In the 1980's, living in the North of England reduced male life expectancy
after 25 by 1,8 years. In the 1980's, living in the North of England reduced
female life expectancy after 25 by 1,3 years.
[Andrew Sloggett and Heather Joshi. Higher mortality in deprived areas:
community or personal disadvantage? British Medical Journal 309 (1994): 1470-1474]
---
The actions of the Thatcher government are, in historical perspective, mass
murders. They are a historical fact, of major importance in post-war British
society. Yet they are almost totally ignored by British sociology. This
silence constitutes a de facto complicity. The BSA as the professional
association has a clear institutional guilt in this matter.
It is interesting to compare the attitudes of British sociology to those of
the now well-publicised Holocaust deniers. In this case it is the
establishment that is the Holocaust denier: those who speak of Thatcher's
murders are socially, politically and academically marginalised. I would be
surprised if any single member of the BSA is prepared to publicly call
Thatcher a mass murderer.
Some of the strategies used by the profession are those of Holocaust deniers
such as David Irving. They include...
- treating it as 'crankish', 'loony', or 'hysterical' to talk of mass murders,
or even of differential death rates.
- the insistence on proof of malicious intent by specified persons, and
insistence on judicial standards of proof for all individuals in large-scale
historical events. These are favourite tactics of Holocaust deniers such as
Irving (who makes much of the fact that Hitler apparently never gave a direct
order for the Holocaust).
- questioning the statistical evidence out of existence
- claims that some (or all) of the victims died a natural death.
In addition there is a direct censorship within the academic world. For
instance, I would expect refusal to publish any article using terms such as
'mass murder' or 'mass killing', in relation to class differentials in death
rates under Thatcher.
Imagine a world in which 99% of academics were clones of David Irving, and the
difficulty of discussing the Holocaust under circumstances. Yet that is an
exact parallel of the situation which now exists, with regard to the Thatcher
cabinet's mass murders.
---
Paul Treanor
How many people did Thatcher kill?
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/thatcher.html
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