So I am posting the letter on my blog instead.
-David
To The Editor, Tribune:
Your extensive coverage of the damage caused by Mrs Thatcher
overlooked two scandalously salient acts of political recklessness
she perpetrated.(April 19- May 2)
Mrs Thatcher used the nuclear industry to undermine the miners in the
dispute in the early 1980s. She planned it over four years earlier,
something we know from the minutes of the Cabinet ministerial
Committee on Economic Strategy (E(79) held on 23 October 1979, barely a few
months into Mrs Thatcher’s first term in power, initially leaked, and now
posted on the Thatcher Foundation web site.
They record: “… a nuclear [energy] programme would have the
advantage of removing a substantial portion of electricity production from the
dangers of disruption by industrial action by coal miners or transport
workers.” (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346)
The nuclear industry trades unions were complicit in Thatcher’s attack
on the mineworkers, by running the Magnox reactors to their rattling
limits, and exacerbated a radioactive waste management problem by
creating wastes for which no proper storage had been prepared. The payback for
today’s taxpayers is a bill of £70 billion - and rising - for the
clean-up, a substantial proportion of which was due to Thatcher's action in
1984.
In Thatcher’s own memoirs, The Downing Street Years , a 915-page
volume covering her time as prime minister, Thatcher does not even once mention her
government’s sales of arms and military equipment to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
As the 1992-93 Scott Inquiry into arms-to-Iraq uncovered, until the time Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Baghdad had been a profitable recipient of U.K. arms for over a decade.
From 1980 to 1990 under Thatcher’s Cabinet, the United Kingdom provided £3.5 billion in trade credits to Iraq. This support continued on either side of Saddam’s ordering the poison gassing of Iranian conscript troops in 1983-84, and of his own people in Halabja, Kurdistan, in 1988, killing 5,000 innocent civilians.
Trade export credits to Iraq rose from £175 million in 1987 (before Halabja) to £340 million after Halabja, according to a press release from the then Department for Trade and Industry. Five months after the Halabja massacre, Thatcher’s foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe, noted in a report to Thatcher that with the August 1988 Iran-Iraq peace deal agreed, “opportunities for sales of defence equipment to Iran and Iraq will be considerable.”
In the months running up to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and with his record of poison gas use publicly known, Thatcher’s government sold Iraq three tons of sodium cyanide and sodium sulphide (used as nerve-gas antidotes), dual-use civilian-military equipment including Matrix Churchill.
As the 1992-93 Scott Inquiry into arms-to-Iraq uncovered, until the time Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Baghdad had been a profitable recipient of U.K. arms for over a decade.
From 1980 to 1990 under Thatcher’s Cabinet, the United Kingdom provided £3.5 billion in trade credits to Iraq. This support continued on either side of Saddam’s ordering the poison gassing of Iranian conscript troops in 1983-84, and of his own people in Halabja, Kurdistan, in 1988, killing 5,000 innocent civilians.
Trade export credits to Iraq rose from £175 million in 1987 (before Halabja) to £340 million after Halabja, according to a press release from the then Department for Trade and Industry. Five months after the Halabja massacre, Thatcher’s foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe, noted in a report to Thatcher that with the August 1988 Iran-Iraq peace deal agreed, “opportunities for sales of defence equipment to Iran and Iraq will be considerable.”
In the months running up to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and with his record of poison gas use publicly known, Thatcher’s government sold Iraq three tons of sodium cyanide and sodium sulphide (used as nerve-gas antidotes), dual-use civilian-military equipment including Matrix Churchill.
I was seriously shocked to read - in Tribune of
all magazines - a special pleading by Hugh Scallion, general
secretary of the shipbuilding and engineering unions, that
£100 billion of taxpayers’ money be devoted to replacing the Trident
nuclear WMD system – when there are huge social priorities for public
investment, and Trident undermines not enhances our national
security, as well as being illegal.
They would join the nuclear industry unions in ignominy in their
backing of Thatcher if they succeed in getting Trident investment ahead
of schools, hospitals, housing, skills training and environmental
improvement.
Thatcher also replaced Polaris with Trident in 1980.
Fraternally
Dr David Lowry
[former director of the European Proliferation Information Centre
(EPIC), London]
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