I'm still too much of a punk to pass Thatcher's death by without comment. I hated this woman long before I knew the details of her reign as Iron Chancellor (er, Lady...): Quashing the miners' strike. Starting a pointless little war in the Falklands that killed hundreds of Argentine peasants. Vicious class war against the poor, non-whites, and anyone who refused to subscribe to a mythologized, authoritarian view of British history. A successful campaign to push the British political spectrum so far to the right that Tony Blair won in the early '90s on a platform that wasn't much different from Thatcher's original platform in '79. Hopefully she's burning in hell with her good pal Ronnie. Together those fuckers and the oligarchs they fought so successfully for set the scene for the Second Gilded Age.
Anyway, in the early 1980s punk rock was still capable of speaking the truth about a given time and place, and I don't know of better testimony from the reality of Thatcher's England than British punk from about 1980-84. Crass exemplified that shrillest, most dogmatic but also fundamentally decent and humane response to Maggie's reign of terror. While the British press bombards us with tales of how great the Milk Snatcher was, tune into this classic bit of hysterical rage and don't believe the hype:
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