Scott said here in the World News topic about Lady Thatcher

Off-topic posts and replies have been deleted. The topic is about the death of Maggie Thatcher. Argumentative posts directed at other posters about her policies will be deleted.

Stick to the topic, please. I am sure in the next few days there will be more topics about the Baroness and will allow for greater latitude in posting opinions about her legacy and policies.

So, here it is.

Some thoughts on some of the issues of her premiership; no doubt others will add theirs.

Poll tax.

Far fairer than the old rates which preceded it and the council tax, which is really the rates under a different name, which superseded it.

Although maybe some form of local income tax would be fairer still.

Unions.

Broke the power of the unions to hold the country to ransom.

Made the unions more democratic by introducing secret ballots for strikes etc. so removing bullying and intimidation of workers by shop stewards. Ditto with making flying pickets etc. illegal.

Council house sales.

Buying your council house was possible before she came to power, and sales were actually on the increase. She made it easier and more popular.

The mistake was in banning councils from investing the money raised in building more social housing. This led to the shortage of same.

Allowing councils to do so would also have given a much needed boost to the construction industry.

Falklands war.

I hope that had Labour been in power that they, too, would have reacted in the same way; but I can't quite bring myself to believe it.

Miners strike

Scargill used the government's plans to close a few pits which were geologically unsafe or uneconomic as an excuse to call a national strike; breaking the NUM's own rules to do so.

He remembered that his predecessor had brought down a government and hoped to do the same. But he was not half the man Gormley was, and Thatcher was twice the man Heath was!

Scargill's bullies and intimidation towards the members whose interests he was supposed to represent meant that at first the strike was mostly solid. But as it wore on more and more miners saw through him and wanted to return to work.

Scargill's refusal to let maintenance workers go underground during the strike meant that many pits fell into disrepair and so were unsafe to reopen once the strike was over.

Scargill is responsible for far more pit closures than Thatcher.

Apartheid

Despite the claims of her detractors, Thatcher was never a supporter of apartheid; indeed she condemned it at every opportunity.

She did not, though, believe in economic sanctions, although she did support the sporting boycott.

She believed that talking to the South African government was better than isolating them. According to those who should know, such as F. W. de Klerk, she was right.

Privatisation

Some good, some bad.

Telecoms; yes. I doubt we would have the vast range of choice and services now available under the old state run system.

Utilities; no. The supply of these essential services should be run on a non profit basis.

Railways; no. No one has ever run a national railway at a profit. The only reason companies can do so now is because they receive massive subsidies from the state.

I am aware that there were other state industries which have been privatised, some by Thatcher's government and other's since, but I feel the above are the three most important.

I think, like everything, it depends on where you are starting from. For my family she was a saviour, prior to maggie my mum would never have been able to buy her own home & couldn't even get an allders card without her husbands signature. As a single parent she had zero options. Maggie gave them to her & she took them & created the kind of life & security for herself & her children she could never imagined.

Also if you look at where she entered the race, the country was on it's knees, she broke the unions because they had to be broken.

I just shake my head at the unionists who have romanticized the unions, there is nothing noble about living in filth & dead bodies piling up cause no one was available to bury them. She did what she had to with the full support of the country.

Best PM since Churchill.

She and Ronald Maximus were the A Team!

I think she was attempting the impossible. She had a vision of making Britain Great again.... but the material to do so just wasn't there. But she was a person you couldn't be indifferent about.

Compare her with Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron.... and you will see what a great leader she was.

Greatest PM since the often underrated Attlee (I don't think Churchill was a great PM.... an inspiring war leader, but he would have been a disaster in peacetime).

In his speech in the House of Lords yesterday, Lord Tebbit said that she was one of the two great peacetime PMs in the last century.

The other one, he said, was Attlee for laying the foundations of the NHS and the welfare state.

I agree.

BTW, for those non Brits who may not know, Tebbit was a member of Thatcher's cabinet until caring for his wife after she had been paralysed by the IRA bomb in Brighton meant retiring from active politics.

Clement Attlee was the Labour leader, and so became PM, in their 1945 landslide victory.

Well, hatred has a face and a name:

The woman behind an internet campaign to organise street parties to
“celebrate” the death of Baroness Thatcher has been identified as a
Romany Blythe, a 45-year-old community drama teacher from south London.

Her daddy must have been a minor or just a disgruntled socialist or something...

As a yank I always liked her and dream that the whitehouse was occupied by someone with equal skills and beliefs.

I hated that she repealed the truck act. I think it's that. Which allowed employers to stop paying us weekly. Other than that, she was in the right place at the right time. Best speech by a Labour leader of the time was Neil Kinnock. The one where the Liverpool contingent walked out. The truth hurt.

George Galloway's view:

Tramp the Dirt Down
The old saw that one shouldn’t speak ill of the recently dead cannot possibly apply to controversial figures in public life. It certainly didn’t apply to President Hugo Chavez who predeceased Margaret Thatcher amidst a blizzard of abuse.
The main reason it must not preclude entering the lists amidst a wave of hagiographic sycophantic tosh of the kind that has engulfed Britain these last hours is that otherwise the hagiographers will have the field to themselves.
Every controversial divisive deadly thing that Thatcher did will be placed in soft focus, bathed in a rose-coloured light, and provide a first draft of history that will be, simply, wrong.
As is now well-known, I refused to do that today on the demise of a wicked woman who tore apart what remained good about my country, and set an agenda which has been followed, more or less, by all of her successors. I certainly wasn’t prepared to leave the obituaries to those who profited from her rule or those who have aped her ever since.
So here is my own memory of Thatcher and what she did in her time on this earth.
ctd
http://redmolucca.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/tramp-the-dirt-down/ (08/04/13)

George Gallaway

Everyone is, of course, entitled to their opinions; even George Galloway.

The man expelled from the Labour party for bringing it into disrepute.

The man who has to change constituencies at every election because he never gets reelected in his previous one.

The man who said to Saddam "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigably."

The man who had to repay nearly £2000 of improperly claimed expenses when he was a director of the charity War on Want.

The man who said "I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life."

The man who rarely turns up in Parliament and, apart from blair when he was PM, 5 Sinn Fein MPs who don' t attend on principle, two MPs who had died and the Speaker and Deputy Speaker who are ineligible to vote, the man who has attended the fewest divisions (up until Sept 2009 just 93 out of a possible1,113!). Still draws his MPs salary, though.

(Source)

In 100 years time people will still know who Thatcher was; I doubt that Galloway will be remembered 10 years hence.

Didn't see any mention of banking deregulation, what a great idea that was on balance I think I would have been less thoroughly screwed by inept union leaders than rapacious bankers.

Pray tell how you have been screwed by rapacious bankers.

Meanwhile, from the Financial Times; Markets Insight: Bank deregulation part of Thatcher legacy

As with so many policies at the time, this upheaval was not the product of ideology........

..........the real architect of the historic deal struck between Cecil (later Lord) Parkinson, the secretary of state for trade, and Sir Nicholas Goodison, chairman of the stock exchange, to liberalise securities trading in London was not a politician. It was David Walker, then a director of the Bank of England, now Sir David and chairman of Barclays

He and his colleagues at the BoE saw their role in relation to the City much like that of a sponsoring department in Whitehall. They worried about a lack of competitiveness in parts of the Square Mile. In particular they were concerned that a stock exchange club that excluded foreigners and operated a different dealing system from that of the US had become a backwater in a world of rapidly globalising capital flows.

In the aftermath of the Latin American debt crisis big companies could raise finance more cheaply in markets than from banks, which meant the City needed reinvigorated securities markets to keep up.

It was also behind New York in new risk management products such as interest rate and currency swaps, which had proliferated since the break-up of the Bretton Woods semi-fixed exhange rate system and banking deregulation.

With hindsight, one of the big regulatory shortcomings in the 1980s and 1990s was a failure to recognise the need for a bigger capital buffer as financial institutions took on more market risk and cross-border counterparty risk..............

Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and it is true that things did not work out as well as the archtects desired; as explained in Big Bang's shockwaves left us with today's big bust from The Guardian.

But would things have been better or worse without it? As Hamlet said; there's the rub!

a wicked woman who tore apart what remained good about my country

Aah, the romance of cooking over an open fire by candlelight while the garbage is piled waist-high in the street outside

The Poll Tax had in its infancy some merit....yet it was introduced too quickly and in haphazard fashion.

The idea of people paying on the basis of ability to pay hadn't been properly thought through (or done so in such a lordly fashion as to be designed to break a government).

You really have to wonder what the Tories were thinking with this one....it destroyed them for generations in Scotland and cost Thatcher her Governance.

Truth from a personal point of view is I was 18 years old and received a notice to pay the full amount.

This was a huge sum for me....from paying nothing to near two months wages.

Many were in the same boat in full knowledge that we would be paying nothing were we English.

I will never vote for the Conservative party.....and there is a whole generation who feel the same in Scotland.....we have experienced their bigotry and contempt and anything else can only be an improvement.

Quotes from various Brits taken from the UK press:

STEVE BELL: The Guardian cartoonist showed Mrs Thatcher in a burning tomb saying: 'Why is this pit still open?' Her words, a reference to the coal mines which closed in the 1980s, are delivered to a weeping David Cameron and George Osborne. His trademark is to draw Mr Cameron with a condom on his head and Mr Osborne in bondage gear. A third wailing figure resembles Cabinet Minister Oliver Letwin.

By his signature on the cartoon, Bell wrote 'after Gustave Doré' – the 19th-century French artist who illustrated Dante's masterpiece of the Middle Ages, The Divine Comedy, which begins with the Inferno, a description of his journey through Hell.



ANNE SCARGILL: Ex-wife of former NUM leader Arthur Scargill, said: 'She was intent on smashing the trade unions and in it she smashed the country.

'She called us the enemy within. There was only one enemy within and that was her.

'When you think about what's happened yesterday I know it's probably not good but I was really really happy…that woman caused us such distress and upset and here we were fighting for survival, not for a wage increase, and she's just smashed our communities and the woman she what… she weren't a woman she was evil.'

DEREK HATTON: The former Liverpool councillor said: 'The issue isn't about whether she is dead. I regret for the sake of millions of people that she was ever born.'

'She promoted a form of greed in business that we've never known before and it's continued ever since. She actually changed the whole face of this country in a way, that you know, people wouldn't have even anticipated.

'Even her successors got away with murder, literally, for example Blair in Iraq, that they wouldn't have got away with had it not been for what she did.

ALAN CUMMINGS: The chairman of Durham Miners' Association, said the timing of the events, on the 20th anniversary of their pit closing, was 'remarkable' and 'one of those quirks'.

He said: 'She couldn't be cremated on a better day. We are planning to have a colliery band and we are inviting ex-miners and their families to go back over their memories of the strike and what has happened since the closure of the pit. I couldn't stand her. She had a very patronising manner and I could have put my foot through the television whenever I saw her on there.'

MORRISSEY: The singer tweeted: 'Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out.'

JOEY BARTON: The footballer posted: 'I'd say RIP Maggie but it wouldn't be true. If heaven exists that old witch won't be there.'

KEN LOACH: The film director said: 'How should we honour her? Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she would have wanted.'

FRANKIE BOYLE: The comedian tweeted: 'All that Thatcher achieved was to ensure that people living in Garbage Camps a hundred years from now will think that Hitler was a woman.'
'Commenting on the £3 million it is estimated it would cost to provide Mrs. Thatcher with a state funeral, the comedian Frankie Boyle remarked that for the same money you could buy every person in Scotland a spade and they would dig a hole so deep they could deliver her to Satan personally.'

IRVINE WELSH: The author wrote: 'So, if u take out Orgreave, destroying communities, Belgrano/Falklands, Hillsborough, protecting nonces, child poverty, Pinochet, she was ok.'

PETER TATCHELL: The gay rights activist tweeted: 'Thatcher was an autocrat. She suppressed miners, civil liberties, inner cities, local government & #LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people]
Former The Smiths frontman Morrissey said: 'She had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out'

Former The Smiths frontman Morrissey said: 'She had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out'

RUSSELL BRAND: The comedian, in an article in Huffington Post, said: 'If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and “follow the bear”.'

ANDY KERSHAW: The former Radio 1 DJ tweeted: 'She was uncaring about the disadvantaged and counted Chile dictator Augusto Pinochet and Jimmy Savile among her friends. To Thatcher, Nelson Mandela was another terrorist. The discord she brought to this country is still deafening.'

MARK STEEL: The comedian wrote: 'What a terrible shame – that it wasn't 87 years earlier.'

ROSS NOBLE: The comedian tweeted: 'Bloody typical that Thatcher dies when I am in Australia. I hate to miss a good street party.'

ALEX CALLINICOS: Professor of European Studies at King's College, London, and member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, he said: 'Murder was Thatcher's business. Sometimes the murder was metaphorical – of industries and communities. It still destroyed people's lives. Sometimes the murder was real. Thatcher over-saw the ongoing dirty war in Ireland.'

ERNESTO ALBERTO ALONSO: The president of the National Committee of Argentine Falklands Veterans said: 'She will be remembered as a leader who brought nothing positive to humanity.'

This was the woman

Was Thatcher a ’Champion of Freedom and Democracy’? Don’t. Be. Silly.

George Gallaway

Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols has more intelligence than George Gallaway:

Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten attacks hate mobs celebrating Baroness Thatcher's death as 'loathsome' and calls for respect

• John Lydon says he will not be former prime minister's 'enemy in death'
• Says show the dead respect and finds her death parties 'loathsome'

Former Sex Pistol John Lydon says those now celebrating Margaret Thatcher's death are 'loathsome'.

Lydon,famously known as Johnny Rotten when he was the singer in Punk icons The Sex Pistols back in the 1970s as Maggie was rising to power, added:

'I'm not going to dance on her grave."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307183/Margaret-Thatcher-dead-Sex-Pistol-Johnny-Rotten-says-hate-mobs-loathsome--calls-respect.html'> You Tell 'Em, Johnny!

Now, this is truly nauseating to say the least:

Senate Democrats blocking resolution to honor Lady Thatcher:

One would naturally think it impossible that anyone would
hesitate – even for an instant – to honor the woman who tackled
communism head on as prime minister of Great Britain. Lady Margaret Thatcher was
a principled politician who helped to foster the special relationship
between Great Britain and the United States that we all benefit from
today.

A Senate resolution to honor Lady Thatcher was supposed to pass last
night. However, per well placed sources on the Hill, Democrats have a
hold on the resolution.

To refuse to honor a woman of such great historical and political
significance, who was deeply loyal to the United States, is petty and
shameful. One truly has to wonder, what is it about Lady Thatcher that
gives them pause? Her unfaltering commitment to freedom? Or perhaps the way she fought for individual liberty and limited government?

Source

A truly great person.

I don't think it is a secret that Obama prefers Chavez to thacher

Thatcher

The attacks on Thatcher since she died are what is called bolting the stable door after the horse has gone. Another way you can describe them is as vultures not daring to attack until their target is dead.

Yes, she made mistakes.... but the person who makes no mistakes never makes anything.

Will anybody bother to celebrate when Blair or Cameron dies?

The thing that gets up my nose about the detractors is that the policies they condemn would have been forced on ANY political leader of the time who was in power.

Baroness Thatcher is accused of dismantling a lot of the manufacturing businesses in the UK. Most of these jobs went to Far Eastern factories where wages were much lower. This would have happened anyway, unless the governement subsidised the industries (with what?).

The car industry was badly managed and rotting from within, due to union bloody-mindedness. The car industry now produces more cars than in the 70s, efficiently and with very few problems.

It is cheaper to buy coal from Australia than to mine the remaining resources in the UK. (Even in Vietnam it is cheaper to buy Australian coal).

Council houses were being sold before the election that brought Maggie to power. The proscription on using the money gained for new housing was to force many Socialist local councils to balance their books. At whatever level of public service you are in, you must balance the books - there is not an infinite supply of money. Politicians - and the general public - are learning this the hard way now.

She was the leader needed at the time, whether she was a great leader will be seen by history in fifty or a hundred years' time. Now is too early to judge.

Quotes from various Brits taken from the UK press:

Well that's a pretty fair representation of quotes from the left to the........................err extreme left.

Particularly liked the inclusion of Joey Barton on the list, one well known for the use of his head, tho maybe not in a cerebral manner

Now, this is truly nauseating to say the least:

Senate Democrats blocking resolution to honor Lady Thatcher:

One would naturally think it impossible that anyone would

hesitate – even for an instant – to honor the woman who tackled

communism head on as prime minister of Great Britain. Lady Margaret Thatcher was

a principled politician who helped to foster the special relationship

between Great Britain and the United States that we all benefit from

today.

A Senate resolution to honor Lady Thatcher was supposed to pass last

night. However, per well placed sources on the Hill, Democrats have a

hold on the resolution.

To refuse to honor a woman of such great historical and political

significance, who was deeply loyal to the United States, is petty and

shameful. One truly has to wonder, what is it about Lady Thatcher that

gives them pause? Her unfaltering commitment to freedom? Or perhaps the way she fought for individual liberty and limited government?

Source

A truly great person.

Unfaltering commitment to freedom? that's a joke!

Was Thatcher a ’Champion of Freedom and Democracy’? Don’t. Be. Silly.

Bad.

I don't think it is a secret that Obama prefers Chavez to thacher

And why wouldn't he?

Chavez made poor people richer,

Thatcher just made poor people!

This was the woman

Was Thatcher a ’Champion of Freedom and Democracy’? Don’t. Be. Silly.

Ah yes, a piece in The Huffington Post, well known for it's impartiality (not!); written by Mehdi Hasan; a man who has described non Muslims as "people of no intelligence" and "cattle!"

Take that serioulsy? Don't. Be. Silly.

This was the woman

Was Thatcher a ’Champion of Freedom and Democracy’? Don’t. Be. Silly.

Ah yes, a piece in The Huffington Post, well known for it's impartiality (not!); written by Mehdi Hasan; a man who has described non Muslims as "people of no intelligence" and "cattle!"

Take that serioulsy? Don't. Be. Silly.

The facts are irrefutable whoever may be reporting them, she was a friend of all those dictators!

The world is not black and white, but she saved Britain from financial collapse and deserves credit for doing it.