Baroness Thatcher - Dead / RIP

[jakarta]

Economically the UK performed under Mrs Thatcher

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

Would you be so good as to quote your Source and any Context such as other Countries Performance / Timescale?

 

[Silk]

Re: Baroness Thatcher - RIP

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.

What a pile of utter, fact free shite.

 

[Chicken Run]

RIP Mrs Thatcher.

 

[SeagullRic]

You might not have agreed with her politics (I certainly didn't), however you have to admire her strength and resolve. Today's politicians are so weak & indecisive in comparison.

Not just picking on you (I've heard a lot of people talk about this already) but why do you have to admire her strength and resolve? Are we to admire Hitlers, Stalins, Mussolini's, Mugabe's 'resolve' for the simple reason that they had complete and utter conviction in their beliefs? If those beliefs are selfish, abhorrent and wrong, then what is to admire? You're not going to find me saluting a member of the Ku Klux Klan because of their strength and resolve for white supremacy, and I'm sure I wouldn't find you praising their "strength and resolve" either. Now although it might look like it, I'm not trying to suggest Thatcher had anywhere near that lack of humanity, but to somehow modify criticism of her purely because she believed she was correct and 'took a stand' is laughable.

 

[shingle]

India Knight

My timeline suggests there must have been a lot of angry, politicised 3-year-olds in the late Eighties.

 

[wendy's tackle]

RIP Baroness Thatcher, the greatest PM of my lifetime. She turned a country on the brink of bankruptcy into a beacon of free-enterprise. She proved that anyone can achieve if they work hard enough whatever the barriers. She fought for the common people, so they could live lives previously denied them such as owning their own home and a stake in society. She fought to free people from class systems and institutions that tried to control them. True, some people cannot cope without the nanny state or their union to look after them, but she realised that as a country in a world market economy we could not (and still cannot) afford to carry passengers. If only we had someone of her ilk to govern today.

 

[Deleted User X18H]

Not just picking on you (I've heard a lot of people talk about this already) but why do you have to admire her strength and resolve? Are we to admire Hitlers, Stalins, Mussolini's, Mugabe's 'resolve' for the simple reason that they had complete and utter conviction in their beliefs? If those beliefs are selfish, abhorrent and wrong, then what is to admire? You're not going to find me saluting a member of the Ku Klux Klan because of their strength and resolve for white supremacy, and I'm sure I wouldn't find you praising their "strength and resolve" either. Now although it might look like it, I'm not trying to suggest Thatcher had anywhere near that lack of humanity, but to somehow modify criticism of her purely because she believed she was correct and 'took a stand' is laughable.

And did she do to you? Honestly I'd love to know. What terrible effect did she have on your life?

 

[easynow]

I'm sure many will be celebrating this, but you have to respect her leadership and the positives... RIP

 

[User removed 4]

I was talking about Pork Pie

No you weren't , you responded " this" to dandymans post of "good riddance" which referred directly to the death of thatcher.

 

[W.C.]

Thatcher will be remembered for centuries

Really? British Political History Majors maybe....


for about 20 years

 

[Questions]

Can we the family silver back now ? Good fecking riddance to her.

 

[Elvis]

And did she do to you? Honestly I'd love to know. What terrible effect did she have on your life?

Maybe SeagullRic is refering to the effect she had on the country as a whole and not this Me, me, me approach that so many of her loyal disciples have adopted.

 

[kevtherev]

Can't be arsed and not going to read though 21 pages, of which i'm guessing half the posts are by people to young to know, what an amazing woman she was. This country was on it's knees under Labour in the 70's. Electric on for an hour a day, three day week, unemployment hitting three million, the unions holding the country to ransom. Something had to change and someone had to have, balls the size of an Elephant to see the job through. Sure she made mistakes, everyone in history has. But make no mistake she was a fantastic Prime Minister and a fantastic English woman, who took no shit from no one....R.I.P Maggie, she is probably pleased to have gone, when she looked at the state her once proud country is in today.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

I'm sure many will be celebrating this, but you have to respect her leadership and the positives... RIP

When I have figured out the positives maybe I will.

 

[turienzo's lovechild]

on the news members of the public said she was "a perfect human being" and another guy said he was "glad she was dead"

pretty ridiculous on both sides....can't understand anyone reveling in someone elses death (apart from like hitler or a paedo or something) but also can't get my head round the hero(ine) worship she receives

but then i'm probably too young to understand either points of view

 

[Thunder Bolt]

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.

John Major sold off the utilities.

 

[KZNSeagull]

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.

Whether you agree with this or not, there is a time and place for an article like this. Her death day isn't it. Shows a distinct lack of class and respect imo.

 

[SeagullRic]

And did she do to you? Honestly I'd love to know. What terrible effect did she have on your life?

Read my post again- it had nothing to do with what effect (if any) she had on my life, but was concerned with if she should be seen as a hero purely because she stood up for what she believed was right. I don't think doing so neccessarily merits respect, and gave some examples of people whom are held in very low regard (and rightly so) who also 'stood up for their beliefs'. As usual in any political debate on here, particularly one about Thatcher, you've completely missed the point.

 

[ken tiler]

Paul Routledge's piece in the Mirror is superb. Like Elvis Costello I want to dance on her grave but unfortunately shes going to be cremated. The rewriting of economic history by some under her rule is astonishing - moneratrism/thatcherism was an umitigated disaster. The only good thing she did politically was to get rid of that disgusting school milk which we were forced to drink.

 

[Common as Mook]

Whether you agree with this or not, there is a time and place for an article like this. Her death day isn't it. Shows a distinct lack of class and respect imo.

Only to be expected from the Mirror.

If you read the Guardian tomorrow it will be a watered down thinly veiled version of it. Lack of class