Impact of Thatcherism

That the Parliament considers that, during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister, the UK Government made a series of policy decisions that were severely detrimental for many people across Scotland; recognises that, in what it sees as a direct result of her policies, thousands of industrial workers, particularly in the steel and coal industries, were made redundant, and considers that this was made significantly worse by a failure of Thatcher’s administration to provide relief to those impoverished communities through either alternative employment opportunities or welfare support; believes that Thatcher’s decision to privatise many publicly-owned industries, including gas, electricity and water in England and Wales, resulted in decades of underinvestment and higher consumer prices; acknowledges that a former head of the diplomatic service, who held the position during the latter years of Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister, reportedly described her foreign affairs perspective as xenophobic in his memoirs, evidenced by what it sees as her callousness to the plight of black people in South Africa during Apartheid, and to Vietnamese people fleeing to escape the war in their country, as well as to people in Cambodia during the genocide under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, to whom her administration reportedly provided military support; believes that her administration's policies also made the lives of LGBT+ people significantly worse, and that they promoted homophobia by forbidding schools to teach homosexuality as acceptable, and considers that the values that it believes Margaret Thatcher embodied are not in keeping with those that are held by the vast majority of people living in Scotland.