Quote Originally Posted by redgunamo View Post
Oddly enough, Mrs Thatch, I think we can say, seemed to share Hillary's innate lack of sympathy with workers in heavy industry so maybe background trumps politics here? They both come from business/entrepreneurial families,
don't they. Understandably they'd take a dim view of generations of sheeple trudging down coal pits to get lung cancer or whatever.

On the other hand, many traditional Labour supporters liked her, as you say, and she in return seemed to appreciate the Home Counties wideboy, cash-in-hand painter and decorator types just as much as she appeared to cherish the various chavs and spivs filling up the City. In the United States, Hillary's solid urban support would, I guess, be their expensively-educated sons and daughters.

As I used to enjoy telling Jaguar George, before he moved on, it wasn't Labour that deserted the workers; the workers themselves deserted the workers. Backing globalisation has simply meant moving the working class poor and their jobs "offshore" so at least nobody has to look at them anymore. As you suggest though, they may not have been brilliant jobs in the first place, not lucrative like playing professional football or being a 24-hour fast food delivery service racketeer or anything, but at least they were our jobs.

Over time though, it was bound to leave them somewhat vulnerable at the ballot box, certainly to anyone who was actually able to display a gut-level respect or admiration for "our" workers, whichever side of the political spectrum they were from. Anyway, at least until mass immigration from the third world really kicks in again.
Agreed with all that about The Iron Handbag, though I'd add my take that what she promised the aspirational was the individual solution, which is going to look faster and more glamourous than the old collective solutions offered by the labour movement that she was busily dismantling. Rise out of your class rather than with it. Which is fine, but it's not going to work for everyone. There was a load of other stuff around community that was bound up with the old labour movement which tends to get forgotten about now. Social values of a traditional and conservative nature. She smashed them up too.

As for globalisation, it's literally a race for the bottom where the winner is the one who can do the job for the lowest amount of money, in the worst possible conditions, and the losers get even less than that. And trendy liberals love this because the word 'global' makes them sound thrillingly internationalist, cosmoplitan and all that stuff, unlike those ghastly racist plebs who hate foreigners. Of course, it's never the jobs of the trendy liberals that come under threat.