h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://moxy-fruvous-lyrics.wonderlyrics.com/Stuck-In-The-'90s.html

On a different tack, in some respects we're still stuck in the Eighties... sometime in 2001 or thenabouts, meejya pundit Charles Shaar Murray made the insightful comment that "we are currently in the twenty-second year of Thatcherism".

(I suppose this means that 2005 is the twenty-sixth year of Thatcherism)

What I remember is feeling a deep cynical disbelief in the idea, floated around in the early Nineties, that somehow the new decade represented a change from the grasping materialism and "me-first!" selfishnes of the Eighties, as if we'd somehow all learnt overnight to b e nicer people with a social conscience.

My instinctive reaction was "Bollocks, the Tories are still in power, even if Thatcher's gone, and they're as greedy and uncaring and corrupt as they ever were, and we still have the sort of attitudes that f***ed up the Eighties and the sort of people in power who gave the lead to everyone else behaving like that"

Didn't change much when the event we'd spent seventeen years hoping and praying and working and fighting for finally happened in 1997: Labour got back in, we were looking to them to do radical and right things to reverse Thatcherism and dismantle a lot of the crap the Tories had left us swimming in, this is what we had been consistently voting and fighting for since 1979, after all.

Fat chance: New "Labour" just proved itself to be an alternative Tory government with a red rose in its lapel as camoflage.

There was an anagram: "I am Tony Blair MP" became "I Am Tory Plan B"

And here we are now, in the twenty-sixth year of Tory government and Thatcherism!

I couldn't agree any more if I'd said it meself. In fact, I did say much the same sort of fing in a conversation entry on My Little Tony. I'm reading "1984" again with my Higher English pupils, and I'm finding it hard not to lapse into ranting "This is bloody happening now!" at them every few pages.