The Enemy Within: Miner's strike and the Tories today

[Ernest]

The joys of the close season on NSC means we get this very interesting debate.

So just taking one of the issues raised IF Thatcher hadn't beaten Heath in the Tory leadership election of 1975, and she'd just disappeared to the back benches do people honestly think this country would be in a better state today?

For all the bad things she might have been perceived to have done she also did a lot of good.

Interesting article about 'Sailor Ted' in the Daily Mail today and why he never married, maybe that contributed to his unpopularity

 

[Soulman]

Interesting article about 'Sailor Ted' in the Daily Mail today and why he never married, maybe that contributed to his unpopularity

I think "Sailor Ted" is probably more unpopular now, i kid you not, he allegedly ran into a lot of buoys whilst aboard the Morning Cloud as well.

 

[Brian Fantana]

If we ever play Donny or Barnsley again, do a detour to Goldthorpe or any of the nearby pit villages. If Boro don't go up, likewise Easington. See what happened to those places, and many, many more. ....

As someone who lives in an ex-pit village in County Durham, you can still see the effects of the closures in terms of the number of people unemployed. Whilst I can see that it was very, very difficult for the ex-miners to find alternative employment in the area when the pits closed, we're now at the stage where there ARE quite a lot of opportunities in the North East, but the younger generations that have followed display no interest in pursuing them. I know this, because I talk to some of the young people in my village pretty much every day. They'd rather be on benefits than take a job in retail, in a call centre or an engineering firm.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

'Thatcher smiled as the printers were beaten'

Too right she did, as an ex printer with hindsight, we were taking the pixx!

Rare occasion that I have to agree with you. I worked for an obscure offshoot of Reed Business Publishing in Perrymount Road in Haywards Heath in the early Eighties. If you didn't join a print union, you couldn't be hired. Joined SOGAT '82 by default. There were tales of owners of printworks who were not allowed to walk onto the floor of the printworks that they owned else the print unions would be out on strike like a shot. Overstaffed shifts slept soundly all the way through nightshifts without doing a stroke of work. Every year while I was there the union negotiators would negotiate another half hour off the working week til at one point, when we were down to I think 32 hours, the management said, OK for sure, you can have a 31.5 hour working week, but you'll then be classified as part-time workers. That soon put a stop to that particular tranche of negotiation! But, from a purely selfish point of view, the Elselvier Reed Pension Scheme, due to union pressure, turned out to be an absolute MINT for its members. Only worked there for four years in the early eighties, don;t even remember contributing, lost track of the pension for 20 years, but turns out to be worth almost as much as the pension fund i've been shovelling money into all these years. Can't recomend strongly enough that you try and trace your long-forgotten company pensions through the free Government Pension Tracing service. you'll more than likely be gobsmacked at what is owed to you.

 

[Lenny Rider]

Interesting article about 'Sailor Ted' in the Daily Mail today and why he never married, maybe that contributed to his unpopularity

The Mail really seem to be cranking this 'murky past' stuff up, must be squeaky bum time in more than one prominent household.

 

[e77]

The joys of the close season on NSC means we get this very interesting debate.

So just taking one of the issues raised IF Thatcher hadn't beaten Heath in the Tory leadership election of 1975, and she'd just disappeared to the back benches do people honestly think this country would be in a better state today?

For all the bad things she might have been perceived to have done she also did a lot of good.

The Labour party offered next to no opposition for most of the 80s by electing Foot then the SDP splintering off.

Had Healey won in 1980 Thatcher might have had less of a free reign.

 

[e77]

Anyway, Neil Kinnock said it best: 'The miners didn't deserve him, they deserved much, much better. My view is Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill deserved each other. But no-one else did.'

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

The joys of the close season on NSC means we get this very interesting debate.

So just taking one of the issues raised IF Thatcher hadn't beaten Heath in the Tory leadership election of 1975, and she'd just disappeared to the back benches do people honestly think this country would be in a better state today?

For all the bad things she might have been perceived to have done she also did a lot of good.

With the resources the UK has, it should be THE European power-house. The fact it isn't, and you're asking this question, is all you need to know IMHO.

 

[Igzilla]

I doubt there were many women that could have stepped up to the plate of cabinet ministers back then.

Now you have suggested that she wasn't a feminist icon I found this article http://www.theguardian.com/politics...n/2012/jan/05/margaret-thatcher-feminist-icon

This is a quote from it "Girls who grew up when she was running the country were able to imagine leadership as a female quality in a way that girls today struggle to do. And for that reason she is still a figure that feminists would be unwise to dismiss."

Not my words

Similarly, from the same article, (direct quotes):
1: Time may be a great healer but the idea of Thatcher as a feminist icon is as laughable as it is insulting to all those other great women who have fought tirelessly for equal rights.
2: Mrs Thatcher is a much more of an icon as a matriarch than as a feminist campaigner. Her political power was never expressed in terms of battling against the male establishment, but as a political personality who dominated the masculine, clubby power structures that she inherited.
3: A feminist icon is woman-positive and woman-identified. She openly fights machismo and misogyny. On rape, domestic violence, childcare, benefits for single mothers, discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual inequality, Thatcher did nothing.

And so on...

 

[Igzilla]

The Mail really seem to be cranking this 'murky past' stuff up, must be squeaky bum time in more than one prominent household.

There's plenty of stuff circling on the internet (not just about the aforementioned), interesting that the Mail is presumably getting closer to it. Do they have any evidence?

 

[Lenny Rider]

With the resources the UK has, it should be THE European power-house. The fact it isn't, and you're asking this question, is all you need to know IMHO.

Better resources than the all singing all dancing Fatherland?

 

[seagullsovergrimsby]

Similarly, from the same article, (direct quotes):
1: Time may be a great healer but the idea of Thatcher as a feminist icon is as laughable as it is insulting to all those other great women who have fought tirelessly for equal rights.
2: Mrs Thatcher is a much more of an icon as a matriarch than as a feminist campaigner. Her political power was never expressed in terms of battling against the male establishment, but as a political personality who dominated the masculine, clubby power structures that she inherited.
3: A feminist icon is woman-positive and woman-identified. She openly fights machismo and misogyny. On rape, domestic violence, childcare, benefits for single mothers, discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual inequality, Thatcher did nothing.

And so on...

Maggie will be remembered as a cult - or is that the sort of typo you expect to read in The Guardian ?

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Better resources than the all singing all dancing Fatherland?

As good as. It's a very wealthy country, with a lot of very bright people in it. I feel it should be doing a lot better than it is.

 

[Norman Potting]

Listened to part of a discussion on the R2 Sunday morning "God Slot" show about a new book - "God and Mrs Thatcher". Looks quite interesting but I was taken by this bit from a review in the Indy online-

For better or worse, she was the ultimate conviction politician, convinced that her moral values gave her a way to make the world better. The idea (inspired by John Wesley) was that if you gave people freedom to become prosperous, they would save more and give more. They would realise their obligations and be kind to those worse off.

It didn’t work like that, as Britain boomed and greed became good. She was baffled, suggests Dr Filby, who believes rather surprisingly that Margaret Thatcher had too much faith in the goodness of humanity. “When she said there was ‘no such thing as society’ it was not a negative or flippant statement but an optimistic rallying cry for individual moral responsibility to oneself and to one another.”

Asked by Frank Field MP to name her greatest regret in office, Mrs Thatcher apparently said it was not taxing the rich enough: “I cut taxes and I thought we would get a giving society, and we haven’t.”

It appears that she hoping to create a generation of benevolent capitalists keen to put back into "society" (even thought she allegedly said there is no such thing). Instead we got "Loadsamoney". Perhaps we would all better off is she had been a Quaker instead of a Methodist!