I have carefully considered this and I would say no. For a few reasons, 1) she didnt want it 2) a socialized funeral surely goes against all her preachings? let the multi multi millionare family pay or at least part pay. 3) we're bankrupt and the fact were able to spend tens of millions on this funeral (that will be the hidden cost eventuALLY) in times of austerity is morally wrong. this added to the many milllions spent of the jubillee too seems obsene. I think todays tribute is more than enough. Ive watched every speech and enjoyed all but 1. the endless pro feminism garble by one female tory. none of these women mps are fit to swing her handbag,like her or loathe her, she came through the system, no anti democraic women only short list, no chance, I wouldnt have voted for her in a million years, but she did it on merit.

meanwhile thousands die of fuel poverty thanks to her privatising the utilities, the fuel , the vat rises , the nat ins rises all combine to cripple the poor and small business. and the millions of industrial workers (the ones who survived or didnt kill themselves) wonder to this day why she treated them all with such contempt. all they ever did was try to work to feed their families.

why didnt she privatise the coal pits? why didnt she evaluate which were th emost economic.incidentally 1 pit stayed open in wales, the big pit in the rhondda valleys. it made £300 million in the 15 years after she closed it. proving her decision to shut it wrong and frankly absurd. sadly none of this has been mentioned today

where did u hear or read that?

I begrudge every penny - let the millionaires pay or the Beastly Barclay brothers !!

I heard that on BBC news. Wonder how much.

Hey wouldn't it be great if all the miners turned up and threw coal at her coffin !!

I do agree that surely such a funeral goes against all of her self serving preachings.

Wow someone paying for their own funeral, how novel. Prime Minsters get their salary for life so the cost of her salary has been picked up by the taxpayer since she retired yet we still have to foot part of the bill for her funeral, the security is going to be on a par with the Olympics :suspect: but that went on for two weeks...we are constantly hearing how the police are overstretched yet they can all be pulled from their day jobs to provide security for this? It would make some sense if she died in office, we can only hope John Major, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown don't meet the grim reaper anytime soon as presumably they will get the same send off?

I can only assume having seen Mark Thatcher on the news saying how humbled he is that the Queen is attending that the family are pushing for this for their own self serving purposes and riding roughshod over the wishes of their mother.

Will there be a media blackout on any trouble, as there will be trouble no doubt.

No

The possibility that there is going to be protests reminds me a bit of the activities of the Westboro Baptist Church.

the miners are above this, they showed way more dignity than she ever did. the miners are heroes to a man. theres a 1000 years of world class coal left , but she flooded the mines after shutting them. thankfully slowly but surely theyre reopening several drift and open cast mines in wales. no one in SOUTHERN england seems to begin to appreciate what king coal means to the welsh, there is also the abandonment of the slate quariies, the lime, the wool, the gold , the silver, the copper, the steel too.....cardiff was the single biggest coal exporter IN THE WORLD...the 1st ever million pound business deal on record took place at the coal exchange in tiger bay....all the gold you see on the queens throne and the house of lords is ALL pure welsh gold. wales is the oldest inhabited part of the UK and perhaps its for this reason its grown so rich in some resources or perhaps this is why the original britions lived in wales.

mining had taken place in wales for at least 750 years, hirwaun was the biggest coal pit in the world, blaenavon alone had 130 drift mines, hundreds of thousands flocked to wales for this massive industiral revolution, visit cardiff bay (tiger bay) today and you will still find a multi cultural happy community where many people are black or mixed race. they were welcomed with open arms and the local working class people showed very little racism towards them. ask any black person from that area and he / she will confirm this remarkable community of people.

the blaenau ffesitniog slate quarry is sstill the biggest in the world and all those communites were 100% self sufficient building homes from the slate, fuelled by the coal and exporting to the world via cardiff and llandudno, wales also produced 66% of the entire worlds copper using recipes 4000 years old and refined in the great orme north wales, it was this ingeuity that gave the welsh the reputation for being mercurial and mystical people and lead to them using the mythical dragon as its national emblm... they were living the dream in many ways

Ive read the 5th century mabinogion and the welsh/britons were a free spirited people, they didnt wish to have leaders or to be lead. this ultimately made them relatively peaceful home loving self sufficient tribes. but also made them vulnerable to attacks by the vikings, the anglo saxons and the french in future centuries...

all the coal and copper and cannonballs for lord nelsons ships were produced in wales, the copper was placed on the bottom of british ships and made them unsinkable which in turn helped him defeat the french and ultimately let britain rule the waves for a few centuries

delighted to say though tata has a huge mine reopening in port talbot to fuel its steel works , still the largest in the uk. theyve used new methods of drilling to find the rich seams easier and as a drift mine will be able to use machinery to find this coal with far less danger, ill health and greater safety.
the little steam trains remain and the coal mining expertise remains and has been passed on from one generation to another. when the welsh suffered harship they quietly left and took their industrial expertise to argentina, pennsylvania (usa) and russia to name but a few. their ingenuity in these areas and in forming the unions to run them proved massively successful. welsh communities were built and pennsylvania was named after welsh immigrant william penn, they settled there as the place best suited to their industrial agenda and also most similar to wales itself.

maggie thatchers destruction of coal will be remembered but the spirit and heritage of these great people will outlast her disastrous industrial legacy

How? The activities at Westboro Baptist Church have not one thing in common with this issue.

They organise demonstrations at funerals, which are supposed to be respectful occasions. They are not political events.

All of it,not some of it,should be paid by her estate and other interested parties, nothing should have to be paid from Govt funds from taxpayers.
Not a single pence.

Neither should taxpayers fund any other Prime Minister's funeral in any way too.
I doubt many would have not agreed with Winston Churchill's funeral being funded by the State but certainly no other PMs should be.

This funding of her funeral with public funds in part and all this near proclaiming her a Saint is going to really sour this funeral.
This is really becoming bizarre now.

Don't get me wrong I'm not condoning any protests at her funeral far from it, and as I have said in the other thread I believe it plays right into the hands of those who seek suppress the opinions across many communities in the UK if they were to do this.
However I do see it as inevitable, this crass display of elitist squandering of public funds will be the straw that breaks the camels back.

You and I have not agreed a lot recently but I found this a fascinating post to read and so really well said The Truth.

I agree, a very informative and interesting post truth thanks :)

''The coffin bearing Lady Thatcher's body will be carried through central London to her funeral service in a horsedrawn gun carriage attended by an honour guard of more than 700 military personnel, while gun salutes are fired from the Tower of London, the Ministry of Defence has said.

The former prime minister may have requested a ceremonial rather than state funeral before her death, but the published arrangements reveal plans for an event involving scarcely less pomp – and one carefully calculated to burnish her image as a military leader and emphasise Britain's victory in the Falklands war.''

Just sickening.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...tary-personnel

The Truth's long soliloquy does not address the fact - and I raised this earlier but no one addressed my point, predictably - that our coal mines during the late 70s and early 80s were so uneconomical that we were importing coal from Australia. Australia! It was actually cheaper to bring it half way around the world than it was to dig it out of our own ground. While miners were claiming pay rises of around 30%, the tax payer was keeping the unprofitable mines going. It was unsustainable.

Yes, yes, the mines were unprofitable, but Thatcher pulled the support plug on them without a second thought to the economy of the towns that survived off them. There was no support net for those who would be left jobless. That is the issue that people have with what Thatcher did, the industries were suffering, but Thatcher pulled the plug on them without even thinking about any of the communities that would suffer.

Were the unions and the miners not aware that the mines were unprofitable and being supported by the taxpayer? Did it come as a shock to them? I actually agree that the government of the day was wrong not to put in a support network for those areas affected by mass unemployment. However, I also think that the unions claiming 30% payrises and striking every time they didn't get their own way, are culpable. It wasn't the government that made British coal mines uneconomical, it was the unions.

I did address the point livia and I have to say your interpretation of what happened is suitably skewed.
We we told the seams were exhausted, that was the reason for pits closing, but that was later found to be a lie after she had had the mines flooded.

2,000 invited to the funeral including "celebs" Shirley Bassey, Jeremy Clarkson and Terry Wogan :D:

This is getting ridiculous now, it's near turning into a circus. Yet we are asked to show respect, for what, this overblown sort of show.
How dare any money from public funding be used for this. I can think of far more deserving causes than this.

I cannot see the slightest merit in the way this is being planned and set out.

Is it going to be on TV?

I think you will be able to be sure of that 100% InOne.

Indeed. I have no idea who is driving this whether it is Cameron et al, or Mark T et al, but whoever it is has not got their finger anywhere near the pulse of how the nation is feeling, and I don't care how much of an EU rebate Thatcher got, that was her job to do the best for England. If an accountant gets a nice fat tax rebate for his client he doens't expect the client to pay for his funeral :D:

Pay per view.

What's next, a performance by One Direction outside St Paul's and a ****ing firework display?

Sounds about right!

Totally agree Cherie, I am just dismayed at the tackiness of it all now. It is becoming a farce.

Yep, for three hours from 9:15am on BBC1

http://www.radiotimes.com/episode/wb...oness-thatcher

Ahhh, I'm not in the country then anyway.

Missed this post before, great response Jack.

whats new? the elitists in london have never given a damn about the masses....except on election week....the vast majority of british prime ministers have actually all come from the same class in eton....does anyone bellieve the UK is a real democracy? its a constitutional monarchy, class, insider dealing for the chosen few and in breeding is all that counts. how do you think these clowns end up with 100s of millions of pounds? hard work lol

The fact is the unions failed but thatcher went from one extreme to another and failed even worse. she wasnt even capable of having a conversation or an analysis to work out which pits were most economic. she didnt even look to prvatise them, which for her us surprising.

all she had to do in 1979 was lower taxes and yes privatise a companies.
instead she privatised nearly all the wrong things, put taxes up on small businesses and the working man/woman

to be frank, I think she was the single worst leader we have ever had.....she had a 10/15 year boom , but now were bust

people ask why didnt anyone turn it around? how she destroyed manufacturing base and drowned the mines. we have barely any industry left. meanwhile the germans as always seemed to build astronger more balanced economy where public and private worked together to keep industries strong

thatcher was an idiotic and selfish mean spirited pm

the total lie she was somehow for the aspiring small businessman (somehow her dad being a greengrocer was endlessly used as a reason for us to believe she was a supporter of the little man- LIES) is disproved by

- more than doubling vat
- rasing fuel prices and tax on fuel prices every year
-scrapping apprenticeships
-removing any incentive to employ
-increased regulation on small business
-increased national insurance
-raised taxes on the poor
-fuel pverty thanks to her creating utilies monopolies. energy/water/pricaes have gone up by over 1000% in real terms since thatcher came into power. how many have frozen to death, tens of thousands.

oh but wait she let people buy their homes? to buy your home you had to give up any housing benefit allowance....were these people really better off? oh and spening on social housing fell 68% under thatcher... meanwhile she deregulated the corporations, gave less support to agriculture and allowed the supermarkets to collude and fix prices

meanwhile the majority of steel works and industrial plants she did close, yes and some were very profitable, she dismantled brick by brick and reassembled in africa , where workers were paid peanuts and the tories sat on the board as shareholders.

meanwhile her son was an arms dealer

terrific people eh?

thatcher enslaved us to corporate greed. our exports collapsed. all the things she said like dont spend what you dont have etc she did the OPPOSITE. UK has over £1 trillion public debts but $9 trillion total debts (thats $144,000 each) were at war because we cant afford not to be...did she ever hear of dont put all your eggs in one basket? well she did....all finance and servives, no industry, no productivity, no exports....and she didnt see it coming? everyone else with a brain did

her plan was a small and spiteful plan scribbled on the back of a postage stamp.
the fact she wouldnt collaborate with anyone, she wouldnt find common ground, she wouldnt listen, compromise or reach agreements with people with shared interests , meant in the end she was the rich mans puppet. nothing more. somehow her idiotic negotiation skills are lauded as great and even amusing. in reality its bone headed. she didnt work in union with anyone unless then 100% cowtowed to her every demand. she didnt have the patience or empathy for any subtlety or nuance. her long term plan for the UK is a disaster

heseltine did one thing right when he got her booted out....mind you he was just as guilty about selling off the crown jewels

Another very interesting read The Truth.

Actually the glitz and way over the top planning of this funeral is going to be I expect looked on very quickly as a great misuse of any public funding and sadly a rather undignified one too.

Finally somebody takes the time to write down the reality of thatchers legacy... Superb post.... Well done !!! 10 out of 10.....

''meanwhile the majority of steel works and industrial plants she did close, yes and some were very profitable, she dismantled brick by brick and reassembled in africa , where workers were paid peanuts and the tories sat on the board as shareholders.''

This was the real reason for privatisation, take industry and public utilities and split them into nice little earners for other tories.
then watch all the lovely kickbacks come rolling in.

I agree, and yet privatisation was sold to the masses as the way to generate wealth with share proposals and discounted shares. But as you point out the real reasons were more connected their own personal wealth generation.

To be honest the more I read into the policies and actions of thatcher and her cronies the angrier I become. Before her death I like a lot of people disliked her intensely , but after really examining her policies and the effects of her actions in all their murky shady double dealings I now quite frankly despise the woman and may be heading down to London next week to voice my displeasure.

I wish people would do their homework re Thatcher before coming on this forum praising this hideous woman who really has damaged this nation more than most people will ever know....!!!!

Interesting to hear andrew neils' memory of meeting her at her home for an interview in the 60s when he was a mere journo , he actually mooted to her the idea of making social housing more affordable to the working classes by offering a discount, thatcher looked at neil quizzically saying, "oh no, but that wouldnt help our people" as neil said she of course meant the rich middle classes. that really does say a lot about her greed is good , way of thinking. you can bet the real reason she brought it in was also for selfish reasons ie. get people off housing benefits and also to get them voting for her.