Search results

Impressive -- where is it?

I detest the coalition government and what they're doing as much as anyone, but they're hardly "far right"

It means more than half. So Thatcher never had a majority of the population, or of the electorate, or of the voting electorate who voted for her. End of story. It's not a point that's debatable on the basis of political ideology. It's a simple point of arithmetic and English language. I admire...

No, but they look like intelligent, friendly, right-thinking kids. Great stuff!

Or alternatively, not everyone works 9-5 in this flexible,deregulated Thatcherite market economy... I certainly don't, but (just to counter your pathetic stereotyping) I work long hours and very hard.

In my view, if they campaigned on their actual record rather than being put into a defensive fluster by the misleading picture painted by the Tory press, Labour would be in a stronger position than they are. All your quote shows is Labour reacting to negative media-driven perceptions of this...

Could you give precise details of how exactly Labour made the system easy for benefit scroungers? To my certain knowledge, right from the off, the post-97 Labour government bent over backwards to tighten up on benefit eligibility, and to introduce so-called "conditionality" into the unemployment...

Glad to see that someone has changed the thread title back to something slightly more neutral

The truly inspirational Baroness Thatcher - RIP Unfortunately, these are hard facts which you are quoting, so unlikely to carry much weight with the Thatcher eulogists on here

We more or less agree, so a good point to stop!

Yes, we'll have to disagree. Not least because the majority of sociology, and indeed social science, has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Most social scientists today (which would include a range of disciplines: sociology, economics, political science, social psychology) would not describe...

Yes, that was a typo. Sorry about that -- the OPEC price rises were in the early 70s, so they did lead to the inflation that I referred to. I agree with you about today's politicians, but not really about red brick universities (of which Sussex was never one -- also Sussex was founded in 1961...

I'm nearly 60, so I was very much around in the 70s. I remember it differently from you, however, as a fairer, gentler more equal society. Inflation was indeed quite high, but that largely originated in the oil price hikes of the early 80s. One advantage of strong unions was that they managed to...

The truly inspirational Baroness Thatcher - RIP Thinking about it, it seems to me that the fact that there is at least something approximating a debate on here, with both extremes of views well-represented, is quite refreshing, and probably reflects the mixed views about this controversial...

Well the fact that I disagree with you shows that it is debatable. That's what "debatable" means -- it's when people take different sides in an argument surely?

"on its knees" is debatable. I remember it well as not a bad time in lots of ways (in many respects better than the current situation, both socially and economically). My point though was to challenge the cavalier use of statistics -- that it was Labour who gave us 3m unemployment as kevtherev...

Complete tosh. Unemployment got no higher than 1.4m under Labour in 1979 (considerably lower than it is today, by the way). It then shot up from 1979 onwards, under Thatcher, peaking at 3.2m in 1984 (more than twice as high as under Labour). It was Thatcher who got it up to over 3m. She then...

Repeating this sort of nonsense hundreds of times doesn't make it true. If you look at this chart of public sector debt as a % of GDP in the UK since 1900, you can see that the period of Labour government from 1974-1979 doesn't stand out as particularly bad...

Eh... who deregulated the financial system in the first place??

BBC tweet: "Margaret Thatcher dies following a strike" Well done BBC Margaret Thatcher dies following a strike... on Twitpic