Thatcher – My Part in her Downfall

by John Sadden

It is good to see Mr Russ Olson of the library staff inspiring pupils in the art of the comic/graphic novel. Russ has encouraged me to share my experience as a local newspaper cartoonist, the briefest of careers, counted in days, curtailed by a lack of skill and a political difference with the newspaper’s rather right-wing ethos.

This year is the 40th anniversary of the election of Thatcher as Prime Minister and the beginning of the shifting of politics to the right through successive governments, both Conservative and New Labour. It was a drift which has brought us to where we are right now.

In 1990 I applied for a freelance job of providing a daily topical cartoon for the Portsmouth News. It paid £15 per cartoon, a sizeable addition to my poor salary. To my surprise I got the job.

It was a time of change and not much of it for the better. Thatcher’s government removed workers’ rights, dismantled the industrial base of the country, stigmatised the LGBT community, flirted with racism and legitimised greed. It also introduced the poll tax, a regressive means of extracting more money from those with little.

I was young and imagined that things could be changed, that wrongs could be righted that justice would prevail. I was, however, old enough to know that subtlety and humour would be more effective than direct criticism.

The cartoons reproduced here were intended to show that it was not just a “lunatic fringe” (as the media called opponents) who opposed the poll tax, but that a sizeable proportion of the general, apolitical population felt similarly. And so it proved. The poll tax was Thatcher’s undoing.