“What a twerp!” might cover it, PaulT.

I’m 47 this year, and though I’m Irish I also remember the Thatcher years; the “Milk snatcher,” the Falklands war, the Spitting Image caricature that seemed so true to life, the Miners’ strike and union-busting, the football hooliganism, the riots, Hillsborough, Heysel, “No such thing as society,” and much, much more.

These were the days of Loadsamoney and in the years that followed Labour lost the plot because they utterly refused to update their ideology to fit the emerging reality. Thus it was that Labour’s policies created an expanding bourgeoisie for Socialists to despise. By bashing the aspiration culture as well as the Royal Family they doomed themselves to be forever described as “the loony left” by the right-wing tabloids, which tapped into the hopes of increasing affluence of the entrepreneurial generation.

When New Labour came out the idea was to win the Loadsamone vote, which had been going to the Tories over fears that a Labour government would steal the hard-earned cash out of the plasterers, etc., who were now able to afford to buy their own homes, acquire assets, and go on holiday to exotic locations such as Barcelona… don’t laugh; a mere decade before such a trip would have been way beyond the means of the common man. In the Eighties the bucket-and-spade brigade were complaining about foreign food and people not “torking English proper-like” in Spanish resorts. We’d never had it so good… if we were in the right place, at the right time, and could get to our jobs on our bikes. The South’s economy took off while the North languished.

Nowadays what the Tories have reaped they are sowing. Getting rid of caps on rent (a Thatcher government policy) forced the cost of living up to the point where the BBC and ITV are now using studios in Salford near where I live. As a result of new media industries moving north, local service industries are taking off. However, we also have a growing homelessness problem because the market’s invisible hand is too busy counting the money being made to do anything about it. Also, chuggers. There are so many charity workers stopping people in the street to ask them to subscribe or make donations that I just march past them all. That’s in addition to the plague of beggars, many of whom are homeless. We’ve got Labour running Manchester but they’d rather punish the homeless or play down their numbers than try to help them. Did I mention that Thatcher claimed her greatest achievement is New Labour?

Tony Blair may have been consigned to the Z-list but his faithful followers live on, boldly going where Thatcher went before. Even Corbyn’s not immune to this. You see, what people tend to forget is that yer actual flat cap-wearing “Come-the-revolution, mate” socialists tend to be socially conservative. This includes being somewhat xenophobic. So we’re caught in an ideological pincer movement: the socially conservative xenophobes on one side and the neoliberal market-trusting copy-cats on the other, and that’s just in the Labour party. The Tories are much worse.

I know this and I’m Irish. What’s the AC’s excuse?