What could possibly make the Thatcher t-shirts that have been causing the TUC so much grief this week even more offensive? Well the fact they are paid for out of the public purse registers pretty high on the scale. Mark Wallace has exposed the fact that the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre who were selling the t-shirts are publicly funded organisation:

“According to the DUWC 2011 Annual Report, their Chairman is Cllr Graham Baxter MBE, the Leader of North East Derbyshire Council… On page 8 of the same report, the “Fundraising” section lists money received from Bolsover District Council, North East Derbyshire District Council and Chesterfield Borough Council, as well as grants from no less than 11 County Councillors.”

Why the taxpayer is picking up the tab for this lot remains to be seen, but Conor Burns MP, who is a close friend of Baroness Thatcher, is not happy:

“Whilst we are well used to these grotesque and deeply unpleasant sentiments from the left – something ironically that is absent in reverse from the right – this plumbs new shallows.

More than twenty years after she left office the left cannot forgive her for one thing above all else: she won.

To ask people to celebrate when Lady T dies is obscene. To ask the tax payer to pick up some of the bill to produce this Frankenstein merchandise is possibly unlawful.

I am asking the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to ask his Department to launch a full investigation as to whether this so-called “Unemployed Workers” (surely an oxymoron?) Centre has misused public money.

Lady T always belived in protecting the taxpayer.”

Sound.