Baroness Thatcher - Dead / RIP

[HOFNSKIN]

All she did for this country was sell off our wealth, close our industries, make us dependent on the bankers and turn us into a selfish, uncaring society. The only thing she can possibly be respected for is doing what she said she would and yet people still voted for her. She was a disaster and we have still not recovered.

Let the party begin.

 

[Not Andy Naylor]

My thoughts go to her family at what must be a very sad time she is proving to be as divisive in death as in life a huge political figure who changed the face of British politics I never voted for her her way was never my way of seeing the world but she made politics intresting unlike todays bunch none of which make my blood boil like she could as such I admired and despised her in equal measures RIP mrs T

And she abolished punctuation too, judging by the above.

 

[KZNSeagull]

The ultimate conviction politician. Whatever you thought of her policies, oh how today's bunch could do with a 10th of her guts. RIP.

 

[Hillian1]

An old woman, with dementia, probably didn't even know who she was or what she had been previously dies.

Lets have a party.

I despair.

 

[Durlston]

Proof that only four hours sleep a night will catch up with you in the end......

 

[East Preston Gull]

Re: Baroness Thatcher - RIP

All she did for this country was sell off our wealth, close our industries, make us dependent on the bankers and turn us into a selfish, uncaring society. The only thing she can possibly be respected for is doing what she said she would and yet people still voted for her. She was a disaster and we have still not recovered.

Let the party begin.

This country was a shit heap until she took over. She put us back in the black. Gordon Brown and tony Blair loosened the reigns of the banks more than anyone else in history. They allowed the banks to lend 6 times salary on a mortgage instead of 3 and half! Unaffordable house debt and banks back peddling after lending loads to the labour government to build shiny new schools and hospitals on dodgy 40 year contracts. Those two crooks are responsible for this mess, not her...Gawd bless the iron lady!!

 

[Deleted User X18H]

I was very sad to hear of the death of Baroness Thatcher today. The greatest post war leader this country has had.

What I find surprising is, how anyone brought up or living in Brighton or Hove in the late 1980's or early 1990's can vilify her today.

Thatcherism changed peoples lives for the better in so many ways . You cannot have failed in those days to make something of yourself.

She was a genius and gave everyone the chance EVERYONE , to experience wealth . But to do this you had to put the effort in yourself. Whether that meant travelling to the City to work where jobs were plentiful despite your educational or social background. Or working closer to home and making an effort to succeed . The chance was there to make your previous unattainable dreams come true.

 

[Rich Suvner]

Re: Baroness Thatcher - RIP

This country was a shit heap until she took over. She put us back in the black. Gordon Brown and tony Blair loosened the reigns of the banks more than anyone else in history. They allowed the banks to lend 6 times salary on a mortgage instead of 3 and half! Unaffordable house debt and banks back peddling after lending loads to the labour government to build shiny new schools and hospitals on dodgy 40 year contracts. Those two crooks are responsible for this mess, not her...Gawd bless the iron lady!!

Learn your politics and history.
Generalist drivel.

 

[Albumen]

No, they won't.

Most north of watford will.

 

[Scunner]

I haven't read all of this thread, and I am no Tory apologist or Daily Mail reader yet in response to a comment on FB earlier, this is what I thought: 'doing what one says they're going to do, and actually doing it is, unfortunately, something that only happens on a minority of occasions in all walks of life. Thatcher is an easy target for revisionists, and people that weren't there. The fact is that GB was a bankrupt shit-hole in 1979, and a catalytic leader was required to create change. It doesn't matter from which political persuasion - as Blair has proved - true leaders will always create controversy, and will always take the blame, but they are the only ones capable of enforcing change. The rest is mediocrity...'

 

[Surf's Up]

Undeniably, along with Winston Churchill, the biggest par of cojones in British 20th century politics. Unfortunately she didn't understand the meaning of the word "social" as it relates to looking after the halt and the lame. As in life, her death will bring out the best and worst in everyone. Can't say I'll miss her.

 

[Albumen]

Paul Routledge in The Mirror.

Margaret Thatcher is dead - now the inquest must begin on her life and influence
8 Apr 2013 13:43
If anyone is inclined to remind me one should not speak ill of the dead, let me remind them she had nothing good to say about us while she was alive

She changed everything, and for millions it was change for the worse.

There was nothing like her before, and there has been nothing like her since. Thank God.

Margaret Thatcher’s death is mourned by half the nation, and celebrated by the other half. Never can there have been such a divisive figure in British public life.

A Great Maggie Myth has grown up in the two decades since she was forced – in tears – out of Downing Street by her own Cabinet colleagues. Those pygmies were not worthy of her, goes the script. She bestrode politics like a Boadicean colossus. What a woman! What a ruler! What a Brit! What a warrior!

And it has become fashionable to offer unthinking praise at the altar of this myth. Every premier since she was in power has invited her back to Number Ten for advice and a photo-shoot. Every Tory MP worships “the blessed Margaret.”

She is the only Prime Minister to have a statue in the House of Commons while still alive. She is the heroine of endless TV and motion picture films, a legend in her own lifetime.

But now that the Iron Lady – so called by a Russian Communist leader, remember – has passed away , we can, and must, begin the necessary inquest into her life and influence. You don’t have to look far for the evidence. It is all about us.

She decimated our basic industries of coal and steel. Shipbuilding virtually disappeared, along with much of heavy engineering. She tried to destroy our free trade unions through repressive legislation, and damn well near succeeded.

She branded miners fighting for their jobs and communities as “the enemy within”, a foul slur on decent working people and their families for which she will never be forgiven.

She made mass unemployment respectable, and used it as a tool of government. The dole queues were “a price worth paying” under her regime – once described as “an elected dictatorship” by one of her own ministers.

She created a new underclass of jobless men, took away their status as breadwinner in the home and forced millions of women back into the workplace so that families could make ends meet. If she was a women’s champion, I am Meryl Streep.

She sold our basic utilities – gas, water, electricity and telephones – and prices soared. She flogged off the buses and railways, and fares went through the roof.

She sold off the council houses and built no new ones, so there are now more than two million families on housing waiting lists.

She enthroned the profit motive, and unleashed the spivs and speculators in the City of London. She surrendered economic policy to the mysterious dark forces of “the market”, which led UK plc into one recession after another that led to the mess where we are today.

She imposed the hated poll tax on the nation, first in Scotland where she made the Tories unelectable for more than a generation. She then thrust it down the throats of the English, prompting the worst riots in London since the disturbances of the early eighties.

She took us into war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands , when her popularity ratings were rock bottom, to save an isolated British colony - and her own political face. On the back of that operation, she won a cynical landslide in the “khaki election” of 1983. Her enthusiasm for war initiated a new era of British militarism that has yet to run its course.

She hated Europe, shouting “No, No, No!” at every opportunity and made Conservatives think and behave like Little Englanders. She took the UK to the sterile margins of the European Union, but in the end the issue did for her premiership. As it may well do for her greatest fan, Dodgy Dave Cameron.

Yet she took Britain into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in her last year in power at too high a rate of exchange, leading to our humiliating withdrawal on “Black Monday” two years later after the loss of billions of the nation’s reserves.

She tied the nation’s international policy like a tin can to the tail of the attack dog in the White House, President Ronald Reagan, backing his outlandish “Star Wars” system, which came to nothing. She flirted obscenely with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, opposing UN sanctions and dismissing Nelson Mandela as a commie terrorist. She opposed the reunification of Germany.

In Northern Ireland, she sanctioned a dirty war against Republicans, faced down hunger strikers so that 10 of them died, and delayed the onset of the Peace Process that could have come earlier but had to await the arrival of her successor, John Major, who initiated secret talks with the IRA.

She did her level best to wipe the Labour Party off the face of the political map, and only failed because the British people wouldn’t stand for it. She derided Michael Foot, a man with more decency in his little finger than she had in her whole body.

And, let us not forget, she started it all many years earlier in the 1970’s by stealing the school milk from children in her first Cabinet post as Education Secretary to Prime Minister Edward Heath. She saw him off, too.

Now that she’s gone, it’s fashionable to say that “whatever you think of Maggie, at least you have to admire her for sticking to her guns”.

I repudiate this modish claptrap. Look where she pointed those guns – at those who couldn’t defend themselves, their jobs and their way of life. The pitmen, the steel workers, the rail employees, the hundreds of thousands of employees in state sector business thrown on the scrapheap in the name of privatised profits. Businesses now – like water and electricity – largely in the hands of foreign owners ripping off the British consumer.

I lived through the Thatcher years as a London-based journalist for The Times and The Observer, when I reported on all the major industrial, political and social upheavals of her rule.

I do not look back on those times through the rose-tinted spectacles of her admirers. I remember instead the young lads throwing themselves off the Tyne bridges in Newcastle because they had no work.

I remember instead the despair in the inner cities that triggered riots, the hopelessness of the industrial communities devastated by her policies, and the social alienation caused by her “me first” selfish individualism.

And I reflect today on the social and cultural impact of her long rule, a decade that subverted the British way of life vastly more effectively than any of her imagined “enemies within”.

Her baleful political influence spread far beyond her own party. It infected Labour, creating a generation of leaders who largely accepted the Thatcher legacy and built on it.

So, even after she blubbed her way out of Downing Street in November 1990, her domination of public life continued. It is still with us today, in the cuts strategy of the Tory-led government and its relentless attacks on women, working people and the poor. Thatcher may be gone, but Thatcherism flourishes.

Labour has still not disowned her baleful inheritance. Now would be a very good time to start, when she can no longer be wheeled out like a ghastly spectre of yesteryear.

And if anyone is inclined to remind me that one should not speak ill of the dead, let me remind them that she had nothing good to say about us while she was alive.

Any man over 25 who travelled by bus was a failure, she once remarked, dismissing at a stroke working people who have to use her privatised public transport today. That was classic Thatcher, from a woman who famously said “Home is where you come to when you have nothing better to do.” How many homes felt the lash of her “winner takes all” view of the world, I wonder?

It all seems a long time ago, and they say the past is another country. But it wasn’t. It was right here, and my generation had to live with it. Those coming after us, particularly today’s jobless young people and students crushed under a burden of debt, should know how this commercialisation of our way of life came about.

It began with Margaret Hilda Roberts , born into a grocer’s family in 1925 in Grantham, who never saw beyond the bottom line and turned the nation into a cash-cowed society. Rest In Profit, Iron Lady.

 

[lawros left foot]

es

To be fair there was a lot of scum following football in the seventies & eighties. It was the actions of these hooligans over many years that resulted in many stadiums having to erect fencing to stop pitch invasions. You could well argue that the actions of the hooligans that followed most clubs at that time resulted in more deaths at the Hillsborough than was necessary.

How many Hillsborough deaths would you have deemed necessary?

 

[soistes]

This country was a shit heap until she took over. She put us back in the black. Gordon Brown and tony Blair loosened the reigns of the banks more than anyone else in history. They allowed the banks to lend 6 times salary on a mortgage instead of 3 and half! Unaffordable house debt and banks back peddling after lending loads to the labour government to build shiny new schools and hospitals on dodgy 40 year contracts. Those two crooks are responsible for this mess, not her...Gawd bless the iron lady!!

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

 

[blue2]

And she abolished punctuation too, judging by the above.

Fair point

 

[drew]

No idea.

However unlike Churchill she is not having a full state funeral, which I suspect she is entitled to, as technically she was a war time leader.

Where did you read that 'war leaders' are entitled to a state funeral?

Fortunately history will judge Margaret Thatcher on her achievements. People hear how Henry Kissinger recalls her today. To the total nobodies wittering away about Thatcher on NSC- what are you doing with your life? Thatcher will be remembered for centuries - you are known by no-one and will be forgotten in about a fortnight.

Bit of a dumb statement bearing in mind history remembers the likes of Hitler, Napoleon (who had a few good ideas), Stalin etc etc. They are only achievements if you come from (in respect of the politcal spectrum) the right.

From my perspective as someone who got my first job in 1981 and first voted in 1983 she polarised the views of each side and divided society between the haves and the havenots.

In 1979 we had the winter of discontent which some blame purely on Wilson and Callaghan however they didn't exactly inherit a thriving economy from Heath. The unions at the time (and I speak as a union member) were far to powerful and self centered but then is that what we have with the banks now! Union power needed to be curbed but it went far to far. It was a sledge hammer to crack a nut. What is incredible is the way people criticise labour for being funded by union levies yet are quite happy for the tories to be supported by donations from wealthy benefactors.

The decimation of the manufacturing sector during that time meant that subsequently we became over reliant on the financial sector and look where that lead us.

As for housing, are we not in a crisis at the moment due to a lack of available property. It is estimated that 2,000,000 homes were sold under the right to buy programme since 1980 however the problem now might not have been so severe had local authorities been allowed to reinvest the income from sales into new developments (and don't forget the right to buy was first in the Labour manifesto of 1959!!). For what reason did the Tories want people to own their homes? Could it be that it might turn them from labour voters to tory ones?

Next moving on to privatisation. Exactly what did this achieve? All the utilities are owned by foreign companies. Nobody can yet explain to me how the gas that we use in our home changes from one supplier to another. If I switch from British Gas to Eon who is supplying the product. It strikes me that this has just facilitated middlemen making sheds load from buying and selling without ever being in possession of the gas!!! And how we allowed monopolies like the water companies to be sold is beyond me. At the time of the changes we were all told that privatisation would lead to better management but invariably it was the same management in charge as they were when they were publicly owned.

Finally, turning to the NHS, this was decimated by Thatcher with ward after ward being closed. When the tories came to power in 1979 there were 75k nurses in training. When they left in 1997 there were only 25k. Hence the need for massive recruitment abroad over the subsequent years.

Brown seems to have been castigated for being a bully to his cabinet but it appears that this trait is lauded in Thatcher. She also seemed to promote self interests and greed over benevolence which seems completely contrary to her supposed christian beliefs!

At the end of the day, those that are tories will not be swayed against her and those of us that have more socialist leanings will not be convinced that, on the whole, she was good for the country.

 

[blue2]

She absolutely hated football.

I understand not being able to see the pitch with a pint in and was one of hers, hence all the steps leading up from the Concourse then down to the seats

 

[El Presidente]

Economically the UK performed under Mrs Thatcher

Average growth rate 2.2% C+
Unemployment 10.2% D
Inflation 8.4% D

 

[soistes]

The fact is that GB was a bankrupt shit-hole in 1979, and a catalytic leader was required to create change.

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.

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/national-debt-percent-1900-12.png

There was some improvement under the Tories, but not until the "Barber boom" of the late 80s, and this was reversed again under the John Major government in the early 90s. Things are now somewhat worse than they were in 1979 (but still nothing like as bad as they were in the long period 1916-1972), and haven't improved under the current government.

 

[seagullsovergrimsby]

Paul Routledge in The Mirror.

Margaret Thatcher is dead - now the inquest must begin on her life and influence
8 Apr 2013 13:43
If anyone is inclined to remind me one should not speak ill of the dead, let me remind them she had nothing good to say about us while she was alive

She changed everything, and for millions it was change for the worse.

There was nothing like her before, and there has been nothing like her since. Thank God.

Margaret Thatcher’s death is mourned by half the nation, and celebrated by the other half. Never can there have been such a divisive figure in British public life.

A Great Maggie Myth has grown up in the two decades since she was forced – in tears – out of Downing Street by her own Cabinet colleagues. Those pygmies were not worthy of her, goes the script. She bestrode politics like a Boadicean colossus. What a woman! What a ruler! What a Brit! What a warrior!

And it has become fashionable to offer unthinking praise at the altar of this myth. Every premier since she was in power has invited her back to Number Ten for advice and a photo-shoot. Every Tory MP worships “the blessed Margaret.”

She is the only Prime Minister to have a statue in the House of Commons while still alive. She is the heroine of endless TV and motion picture films, a legend in her own lifetime.

But now that the Iron Lady – so called by a Russian Communist leader, remember – has passed away , we can, and must, begin the necessary inquest into her life and influence. You don’t have to look far for the evidence. It is all about us.

She decimated our basic industries of coal and steel. Shipbuilding virtually disappeared, along with much of heavy engineering. She tried to destroy our free trade unions through repressive legislation, and damn well near succeeded.

She branded miners fighting for their jobs and communities as “the enemy within”, a foul slur on decent working people and their families for which she will never be forgiven.

She made mass unemployment respectable, and used it as a tool of government. The dole queues were “a price worth paying” under her regime – once described as “an elected dictatorship” by one of her own ministers.

She created a new underclass of jobless men, took away their status as breadwinner in the home and forced millions of women back into the workplace so that families could make ends meet. If she was a women’s champion, I am Meryl Streep.

She sold our basic utilities – gas, water, electricity and telephones – and prices soared. She flogged off the buses and railways, and fares went through the roof.

She sold off the council houses and built no new ones, so there are now more than two million families on housing waiting lists.

She enthroned the profit motive, and unleashed the spivs and speculators in the City of London. She surrendered economic policy to the mysterious dark forces of “the market”, which led UK plc into one recession after another that led to the mess where we are today.

She imposed the hated poll tax on the nation, first in Scotland where she made the Tories unelectable for more than a generation. She then thrust it down the throats of the English, prompting the worst riots in London since the disturbances of the early eighties.

She took us into war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands , when her popularity ratings were rock bottom, to save an isolated British colony - and her own political face. On the back of that operation, she won a cynical landslide in the “khaki election” of 1983. Her enthusiasm for war initiated a new era of British militarism that has yet to run its course.

She hated Europe, shouting “No, No, No!” at every opportunity and made Conservatives think and behave like Little Englanders. She took the UK to the sterile margins of the European Union, but in the end the issue did for her premiership. As it may well do for her greatest fan, Dodgy Dave Cameron.

Yet she took Britain into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in her last year in power at too high a rate of exchange, leading to our humiliating withdrawal on “Black Monday” two years later after the loss of billions of the nation’s reserves.

She tied the nation’s international policy like a tin can to the tail of the attack dog in the White House, President Ronald Reagan, backing his outlandish “Star Wars” system, which came to nothing. She flirted obscenely with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, opposing UN sanctions and dismissing Nelson Mandela as a commie terrorist. She opposed the reunification of Germany.

In Northern Ireland, she sanctioned a dirty war against Republicans, faced down hunger strikers so that 10 of them died, and delayed the onset of the Peace Process that could have come earlier but had to await the arrival of her successor, John Major, who initiated secret talks with the IRA.

She did her level best to wipe the Labour Party off the face of the political map, and only failed because the British people wouldn’t stand for it. She derided Michael Foot, a man with more decency in his little finger than she had in her whole body.

And, let us not forget, she started it all many years earlier in the 1970’s by stealing the school milk from children in her first Cabinet post as Education Secretary to Prime Minister Edward Heath. She saw him off, too.

Now that she’s gone, it’s fashionable to say that “whatever you think of Maggie, at least you have to admire her for sticking to her guns”.

I repudiate this modish claptrap. Look where she pointed those guns – at those who couldn’t defend themselves, their jobs and their way of life. The pitmen, the steel workers, the rail employees, the hundreds of thousands of employees in state sector business thrown on the scrapheap in the name of privatised profits. Businesses now – like water and electricity – largely in the hands of foreign owners ripping off the British consumer.

I lived through the Thatcher years as a London-based journalist for The Times and The Observer, when I reported on all the major industrial, political and social upheavals of her rule.

I do not look back on those times through the rose-tinted spectacles of her admirers. I remember instead the young lads throwing themselves off the Tyne bridges in Newcastle because they had no work.

I remember instead the despair in the inner cities that triggered riots, the hopelessness of the industrial communities devastated by her policies, and the social alienation caused by her “me first” selfish individualism.

And I reflect today on the social and cultural impact of her long rule, a decade that subverted the British way of life vastly more effectively than any of her imagined “enemies within”.

Her baleful political influence spread far beyond her own party. It infected Labour, creating a generation of leaders who largely accepted the Thatcher legacy and built on it.

So, even after she blubbed her way out of Downing Street in November 1990, her domination of public life continued. It is still with us today, in the cuts strategy of the Tory-led government and its relentless attacks on women, working people and the poor. Thatcher may be gone, but Thatcherism flourishes.

Labour has still not disowned her baleful inheritance. Now would be a very good time to start, when she can no longer be wheeled out like a ghastly spectre of yesteryear.

And if anyone is inclined to remind me that one should not speak ill of the dead, let me remind them that she had nothing good to say about us while she was alive.

Any man over 25 who travelled by bus was a failure, she once remarked, dismissing at a stroke working people who have to use her privatised public transport today. That was classic Thatcher, from a woman who famously said “Home is where you come to when you have nothing better to do.” How many homes felt the lash of her “winner takes all” view of the world, I wonder?

It all seems a long time ago, and they say the past is another country. But it wasn’t. It was right here, and my generation had to live with it. Those coming after us, particularly today’s jobless young people and students crushed under a burden of debt, should know how this commercialisation of our way of life came about.

It began with Margaret Hilda Roberts , born into a grocer’s family in 1925 in Grantham, who never saw beyond the bottom line and turned the nation into a cash-cowed society. Rest In Profit, Iron Lady.

50% of the country will totally agree with this article , 50% of the country will totally disagree with this article.