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Thatcher is dead.

vetteman said:
Leave it to Hobbit to post the sentiments of a Communist rag, who's eventual plans for Britain would have rivaled only by Hitler's.
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could you expand that thought? upto the point where it may make some form of sense?
 
KingOrfeo said:
Hey, if the British people are, and still, all that hostile to Thatcher's memory, how is it that the Tories are now in power once again?
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IN PART BECAUSE THEY ARE PROPPED UP THE YELLOW TORY LIARS, AKA THE LIBDEM PARTY, IN A CONDEM COALITION.. I.E. NO BODY ACTUALLY VOTED THEM INTO GOVERNMENT.
 
Christopher Hitchens wrote in 1990:

Lessons Maggie Taught Me
Christopher Hitchens April 8, 2013

This article originally appeared in the December 17, 1990 edition of The Nation.

"I make up my mind about people in the first 10 seconds, and I very rarely change it." So The New York Times quoted Margaret Thatcher as saying on the day of her resignation. I would be happy to think that the statement was truthful, since within minutes of first being introduced to me, Thatcher lashed me across the buttocks with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper.

It happened in the course of an exchange of views about Rhodesia in the late fall of 1977, when she was still leader of the opposition and was pandering to the racists in her party and the electorate. Influenced perhaps by the fact that we were meeting in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords, I made the mistake of bowing as if to acknowledge some point of hers, and she took swift advantage of my posture by shrieking, "Bow lower!" and plying the document above mentioned. Like the British electorate, now shaking itself after more than a decade of Thatcherite pouvoir, I often look back wistfully upon that spanking in the hope of decoding its significance.

Within one year of being elected Prime Minister, in 1979, Thatcher had reversed herself and overseen the transition of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. This achievement of hers, often overlooked, came after half a dozen Labor Foreign Secretaries had simply abdicated in the face of the white settler revolt. Nor was that the only instance of her breaking the rules of the stale, centrist, stagnant British consensus. By the Anglo-Irish agreement at Hillsborough she gave up Britain's absurd claim to exclusive sovereignty over Northern Ireland. And after her first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev she became the first capitalist politician to declare that he was for real and meant business. It is absolutely safe to say that no Labor Prime Minister would have had the nerve to do either of those two things.

So as I stood in the courtyard of the Louis Quinze embassy on the Rue Faubourg St.-Honore on November 20 and saw her absorb the news that she had failed with her own party, I felt an unbidden emotion of regret. There seemed no disgrace in rejection at the hands of the Tory parliamentary caucus --as ripe a collection of opportunists and bond salesmen as you could meet in a day's march. I found myself hoping that she would make a fight of it, if only to expose the real disgrace, which is that under British "rules" such a caucus can, on a secret ballot, change the government in an afternoon.

It is easy to summarize the foulness of the Thatcher years: the combination of Malthus and Ayn Rand that went to make up her social philosophy; the police mentality that she evinced when faced with dissent; the awful toadying to Reagan and now Bush; the indulgence shown to apartheid; the coarse, racist betrayal of Hong Kong; the destruction of local democracy and autonomous popular institutions. Yet every Tory in the House had voted gleefully for all of those things, and one of them, her newly anointed clone, John Major, has disagreed with Thatcher only from the right. While on the ostensible issue of principle, a common European system. Labor's conversion has been too late and too shallow to be convincing.

Christopher Hill, perhaps England's greatest living historian, pointed out to me in the summer of 1988 that Thatcher had quarreled with the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Church of England, the Inns of Court, the University of Oxford and the Chiefs of Staff--every ancestral prop of the British state. Detestable though she was, she was a radical and not a reactionary. She has not been removed for any of her offenses against democracy or decency. Rather, she has been deposed by those who worship only opinion polls and their own skins and who yearn for a quiet life and business as usual--living gallantly off the fat of the land.

"An end to conviction politics," smugly wrote Peter Jenkins, Fleet Street's most devoted practitioner of consensus journalism. Let us hope not. "Thatcherism" has made possible a movement for a serious, law-based constitutional republic in Britain and has hacked away at the encrusted institutions and attitudes that stood in its path. Thatcher has herself shown that there is power and dignity to be won by defying the status quo and the majority rather than by adapting to them. If the British left, which she froze into immobility like Medusa, could bring itself to learn from this, then we might not have to look upon her like again.
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Octavian said:
Not only am I old enough to remember when she was in power but I am also old enough to know how chaotic it was in the years that preceded her. Did you live through the 3 day week when the unions defied the elected government? I did!
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So did I. I also lived in South Yorkshire after she'd destroyed the mining and steel industries there. You trying to say that was a good solution to the problems that had gone before?
 
LallyH said:
So did I. I also lived in South Yorkshire after she'd destroyed the mining and steel industries there. You trying to say that was a good solution to the problems that had gone before?
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Not necessarily but as with any oganisation all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It was the miners who declared war on the government, not the other way round.
 
dolf said:
because anyone who would make a career of seeking a position that gives them power over everyone else is bound to be a bit of a twat.
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Yeh, but why has that problem gotten so much worse since the 1980s?
 
hobbit. said:
IN PART BECAUSE THEY ARE PROPPED UP THE YELLOW TORY LIARS, AKA THE LIBDEM PARTY, IN A CONDEM COALITION.. I.E. NO BODY ACTUALLY VOTED THEM INTO GOVERNMENT.
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Yeah, what do they stand for, again? The LibDems, I mean. I've heard them characterized as standing to Labour's right, but also as standing to Labour's left.
 
Octavian said:
Not necessarily but as with any oganisation all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It was the miners who declared war on the government, not the other way round.
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Not buying it. She set out to destroy the mining unions who she believed had too much political power. She engineered the dismantling of our manufacturing industries and the sale of our nationalised utilities with the excuse that they would be more efficient, cheaper to run, and that the funds raised by the sale would be reinvested to improve the infrastructure of the railways etc.

Well that worked out well for us, didn't it?
 
"Are you traveling alone?"

"Yes"

"Anything to declare?"

"No."

"Have you ever visited the UK before?"

"No."

"What's the purpose of your visit?"

"To dance upon the grave of Margaret Thatcher."
 
...a series of crippling strikes came to a head during the winter of 1978 and '79... that era was dubbed "the winter of discontent."

"The railway unions went on strike — the railroads are important for commuters in this country — hospital workers were on strike, even people who dispose of dead bodies were on strike," he said. "The sense that we were, the nation was, unraveling in front of our eyes was quite powerful."

During the 1979 election campaign, Thatcher repeatedly drove home the message that it didn't have to be like this...
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...she was the prime minister for the hour — that decade — that we needed... And she's left a permanent legacy, but she left a good deal of unhappiness and misery and broken lives.

...Thatcher was never widely loved — or even liked. But, he said, you had to admire her.

I'd have to, in a grudging way, say that what she achieved was extraordinary and formidable..., And I don't think anyone else could have done it...
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NPR
-Jackie Northam




 
LallyH said:
Not buying it. She set out to destroy the mining unions who she believed had too much political power. She engineered the dismantling of our manufacturing industries and the sale of our nationalised utilities with the excuse that they would be more efficient, cheaper to run, and that the funds raised by the sale would be reinvested to improve the infrastructure of the railways etc.

Well that worked out well for us, didn't it?
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How did it work out? E.g., how does the UK's privatized -- sorry, privatised railway system today compare with the old British Rail?
 
KingOrfeo said:
Now, now, if you can't say something nice . . . De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all of that . . .

RIP one of the greatest statescritters of the 19th Century!
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Didn't you just say... 19th Century?

The Iron Lady will be remembered.
 
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