Thatcher has gone ...

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Last few months were spent at the Ritz in London, a private apartment !

Yet the State foots the bill to bury her.

She decimated parts of the UK particularly in the North, her heavy handed 'I am right' attitude will never be forgiven for the damage inflicted.

Her good point was to break the bizarre strength of the Unions, they needed put in their place. But the welfare bill rose extravagently, mainly due to all the manual workers thrown on the dole (sorry .. permanent sick) also witness hired henchman McGregor and British Steel.

I believe its St Pauls they have the 'do' .....this is OTT for her debatable merit.

She was wrong on South Africa and the Falklands was most lamentable, ie sink the Belgrano ! A bizarre episode indeed in British history.

So much of UK manufacturing was shut down, allowed to wither, her obsession with the 'service economy' was obscene.

I detested her hectoring 'I know best' attitude, granted we needed a little of what she had but i still think of her as a dictator.

Not entirely true - it's being shared with her estate, if I remember rightly.

To be honest, her estate should fund it all (with the exception of the police presence).



That damage wasn't deliberate. It's also worth mentioning that some parts of Northern England did suffer a lot (though also note that this picture isn't universal - other working-class people thrived, my mum included), but the pits were, in large part, uneconomical. They were losing money. Any government in the 1980s would have had to stand up to the unions. It should have been done long before then. Heath tried to take on the unions and failed in the 1970s and they sent him packing. Wilson was shafted by the unions too.

What do you do with an industry that is failing and where the people running that industry are forcing you to hand over more and more money?



If Heath or Wilson had managed to do it and deal with their deranged intransigence and flat out unwillingness to compromise, then Thatcher wouldn't have needed to happen.

The change was far too quick and brutal and nowhere near enough provision was put into sorting out different sources of employment in those pit villages. Mining really was it for them. (Although I notice you never see miners remembering anything about the danger of their work, either.)

Also, the very Labourite Harold Wilson closed more mines than did Margaret Thatcher. Mention this to the irrational Thatcher-haters, though, and you get silence.



She opposed Apartheid and thought that it had to end. She did not want sanctions, though, as she thought it would harm the poorest in South African society (and possibly may have made the National Party even more brutal towards them).

So we should have said to the Argentine fascists: here you go, now you've invaded British territory you might as well keep it? The Falkland Islands had to be retook for a number of different (and all good) reasons. The Falklands War was because Argentina invaded and colonised someone else's islands, and luckily for the Falkland Islands those islands had the protection of the UK.

The Falkland Islands will be British for a very long time to come now, and literally no-one at all wants Argentine sovereignty there.

As for the Belgrano: a senior Argentine military official of the time later wrote an article saying that he believed that sinking the Belgrano was a legitimate thing to do during a war.



You know that the manufacturing sector was at its highest point during her term when she left office?



And there was me thinking that she was a democratically elected leader of a Western country.

And the longest serving P.M. in British history.

She was re-elected. Someone must have liked her.

ruveyn

And that is an insult to her memory. There was a petition last year, calling for the privatisation of her funeral, as a fitting tribute:

It is a shame that the petition did not reach the 100000 signatures required for a response. It is an even greater shame that a government claiming to support the principles the Iron Lady stood for now shamelessly betrays them through an orgy of public spending!

Thatcher closed down a higher proportion than Wilson or Heath though. Proportion seems to be more important than raw numbers. The number of mines closed in each five year period was falling, but then the proportion jumped when Thatcher came in.

Here are some figures:

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/leftw ... tcher.html

I don't have time to work out the exact number now, but if Wilson/Heath/Callaghan closed the worst performing 20% every five years, and then Thatcher closed the worst performing 35%, that's pretty damning.

Closing down coal mines that are bleeding money is damning?

ruveyn

Wrong. Robert Banks Jenkinson served 14 years in office, and this was after the Act if Union 1800. Before that, William Pitt the Younger served longer in the British government. The longest serving PM in British history was Robert Walpole, who altogether served over 20 years in office.

Don't lefties hate coal anyways? It seems rather disingenuous to whine about ending subsidies for coal mines that make no money while at the same time demonizing coal as a pollutant and use global warming as a boogyman. Do you want reopen those coal mines? Anything to get a vote I guess.

I'm not left, but responses like this make me LOL and face-palm.

I think it is a time to reach for the OED and look up 'conflation'.

I'll forgive you if you are born after the 80s.

Of course the USSR was the champion of the green agenda.

Quite a few right-wingers have mentioned the nonsensical hypocrisy of that position.

I created similar thread earlier
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp5326875 ... t=#5326875

I really don't know why people seem to think that all "lefties" share the same views any more than all "righties" share the same views.

For a start, global warming isn't a view held by the left, rather climate change denial is a view held by sections of the right. You don't need to hold a specific political opinion to believe scientific facts.

Socialist working class people are different people to the middle class Greens. Most of the "Greens" or other liberals who object to the use of coal would probably say that Thatcher should have provided more support for the working classes who relied on the coal mining industry, just as most reasonable (and a lot of unreasonable) right wing pundits are.

Whether or not global warming is happening is irrelevant, the left advocates increased regulation of industry and big government because of it. That has nothing to do with science.

And yes, I am aware that working class people and the useful bourgeois idiots don't share the same goals. Perhaps they should reevaluate their voting alliance and misguided ideology.

What does "advocating big government and demanding increased regulation" have to do with demonising a polluting substance?

In this country, the traditional working classes tend to vote Labour, whereas the progressives tend to vote Liberal Democrat and the Green lunatics (as well as other environmentally sensitive people who don't realise how disastrous the Green environmentally policy is) tend to vote, erm, Green.

There were many who loved her up to a point, but in the end even her own constituents turned on her because of her blind insistence on the poll tax.

She won three times because there was no strong opposition. It is similar to Blair, during his time in power there was no strong opposition to him so he won 3 times.

Now we have a situation where our choices are even more dire. We can choose Cameron, Clegg or Milliband! I reckon nobody will go out and vote at the next election.

No, they didn't. She was toppled by the pro-euro elements in the Conservative Party. She never lost the support of her constituents. The poll tax made her unpopular among many, though.

The Tories seem to have hastily put together a fudged version that had some of the features of the poll tax after Thatcher's fall from power.



That isn't her fault. The Labour Party was pathetic, and it had its own problems with the far-left infiltration to deal with.



I can't remember lots of people really supporting Blair when he was in office, though. Not even in the North East, where Jonathan King could get elected on a red rosette.



Or Farage.

I can't see me voting for any of the three political parties now for at the very least ten years or more.