[Omah]

Originally Posted by GiRTh

There is no question in my mind that she DID NOT make decisions that were best for the UK. She made decision that possibly increased the class divide and made the spread of wealth more uneven. The poll tax/community charge is exhibit A. How can anyone argue that was for the good of the country? The miners strike was simply about winning to show how powerful she was and definitely not for the good of the country. I could go on but those are two of the top of my head.

Originally Posted by Kizzy

Exactamundo, the onus is on amassing the greatest wealth for a select few.
What does this remind you of?

I think I know the answer to that .....

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by lostalex

no, the ONUS is on the British people and their democratic system, because she was democratically elected. She was elected by and supported by the PEOPLE of the UK. and it's unfair to put the onus on a single person in a democratic system.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time...

[arista]

Originally Posted by Omah

Well, I've set up the bonfire and I've just started work on the Witch - I want the effigy to as lifelike as possible .....

I am sure a Demo may be there trying to get on TV news

[the truth]

Originally Posted by lostalex

appreciate where you are. Without Thatcher would you be better off? or did she do a service for her country?

All of her detractors, i'd like to ask you, do you think she made her decisions wanting to harm to your country? or do you think she made decisions based on what she believed would be best for the UK?

I don't believe for a second that she ever wished any harm on the UK or it's people. She did her best under extremely difficult circumstances.

She made decisions based on what she believed at the time were the best decisions for your country.

She wasn't APPOINTED like the house of lords, or BORN INTO IT like the royals.

She was ELECTED.

no she did act out of spite imho a lot of times...the miners strike was perfect example. every single mine closed and the police used to batter the strikers. a sad time. she could at the very least have assessed which were the most economic pits and concentrated the resources into them. instead her ego got in the way and she had to destroy all miners and all mines. crazy

she destroyed all the industries, the steel works in particular too. yes the unions were out of control but they grew out of a need to protect workers rights and improve health and safety measures after the tragedies of aberfan colliery which was allowed by the rich slavemasters to collapse onto of a village school and kill 100+ children....she disamntled british steel works and rebuilt them abroad paying peanuts and owned and run by british millionaires. this practice went unreported by the right wing press

the bills now from the utilities are enslaving the poor and seeing thousands die of cold in the 6th richest nation on earth? what a disgrace. the nhs too was underfunded, though I would argue it is even worse now despite labours billions

she was in bed with murdoch who we now see for what he truly is, she helped create this deregulated financial sector too, then you have HILLSBOROUGH....which is is just enormous example of the cruel leadership she brought to bear.


Im not saying she was all bad, she was right on europe, she was mostly right on the falklands, she did make us richer overall, but it benefitted the few at the top mainly

also the right to buy seemed a fair plan imho but its now lead to a shortage of homes?

Id argue economically she didnt really practice what she preached on small business as the regulations grew and vat grew massively under her to 17.5%
on the world stage it was easy to preach against communism but she and reagan didnt preach against the excesses of the excessive free market either

it just seemed she was a massive power broker for the elite. she just didnt find the right balance , her ego seemed to get in the way

anyway rip maggie

[Nedusa]

She was an elected Politician NOT born with a silver spoon in her mouth like our "Royal" Family, I agree on that.

However, as a politician her choices directly changed the course of this Country and in my opinion adversely affected the lives of millions of ordinary hardworking people + their childen and their children. By destroying the Unions she also destroyed the bulk of our Heavy,Light and Manufacturing industries and in the process condemned whole communities, whole towns into desparate unemployment which in turn has helped to precipitate the terrible situation we have today with millions of people young and old forever destined to search for non existant work whilst struggling to survive on benefits and hand outs.

Her desire to smash Union control has shaped the Britain we now live in. The unnatural haste to deregulate public utilities for profit also forms part of her tragic legacy, to put profit for the few ahead of ensuring all citizens young and old sick and infirm can afford to heat and light their homes was truly despicable and taken together with the above and her actions re sinking the General Belgrano during the Falklands war and the introduction of the "Poll" tax ensures that her legacy will always be viewed ultimately as very damaging for this Country and the majority of its hardworking people.

[the truth]

Originally Posted by Nedusa

She was an elected Politician NOT born with a silver spoon in her mouth like our "Royal" Family, I agree on that.

However, as a politician her choices directly changed the course of this Country and in my opinion adversely affected the lives of millions of ordinary hardworking people + their childen and their children. By destroying the Unions she also destroyed the bulk of our Heavy,Light and Manufacturing industries and in the process condemned whole communities, whole towns into desparate unemployment which in turn has helped to precipitate the terrible situation we have today with millions of people young and old forever destined to search for non existant work whilst struggling to survive on benefits and hand outs.

Her desire to smash Union control has shaped the Britain we now live in. The unnatural haste to deregulate public utilities for profit also forms part of her tragic legacy, to put profit for the few ahead of ensuring all citizens young and old sick and infirm can afford to heat and light their homes was truly despicable and taken together with the above and her actions re sinking the General Belgrano during the Falklands war and the introduction of the "Poll" tax ensures that her legacy will always be viewed ultimately as very damaging for this Country and the majority of its hardworking people.

this is 100% correct. not even the most sycophantic tories can deny it. the damage done to britain long term will be felt in 300 years time.

[Omah]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War#Casualties

In total 907 were killed during the 74 days of the conflict:
Argentina – 649 Ejército Argentino (Army) – 194 (16 officers, 35 Non-commissioned officers (NCO) and 143 conscript privates)
Armada de la República Argentina (Navy) – 341 (including 321 in Belgrano and 4 naval aviators) IMARA ( Marines ) – 34

Fuerza Aérea Argentina (Air Force) – 55 (including 31 pilots and 14 ground crew)
Gendarmería Nacional Argentina (Border Guard) – 7
Prefectura Naval Argentina (Coast Guard) – 2
Civilian sailors – 16

United Kingdom – A total of 255 British servicemen and 3 female Falklands Island civilians were killed during the Falklands War. Royal Navy – 86 + 2 Hong Kong laundrymen
Royal Marines – 27 (2 officers, 14 NCOs and 11 marines)
Royal Fleet Auxiliary – 4 + 6 Hong Kong sailors
Merchant Navy – 6
British Army – 123 (7 officers, 40 NCOs and 76 privates)
Royal Air Force – 1 (1 officer)
Falklands Islands civilians – 3 women killed by friendly fire


Of the 86 Royal Navy personnel, 22 were lost in HMS Ardent, 19 + 1 lost in HMS Sheffield, 19 + 1 lost in HMS Coventry and 13 lost in HMS Glamorgan. Fourteen naval cooks were among the dead, the largest number from any one branch in the Royal Navy.

Thirty-three of the British Army's dead came from the Welsh Guards, 21 from the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, 18 from the 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, 19 from the Special Air Service, 3 from Royal Signals and 8 from each of the Scots Guards and Royal Engineers. The 1st battalion/7th Duke of Edinburgh's Own Gurkha Rifles lost one man killed.

Two more British deaths may be attributed to Operation Corporate, bringing the total to 260:
Captain Brian Biddick from SS Uganda underwent an emergency operation on the voyage to the Falklands. Later he was repatriated by an RAF medical flight to the hospital at Wroughton where he died on 12 May.[105]
Paul Mills from HMS Coventry suffered from complications from a skull fracture sustained in the sinking of his ship and died on 29 March 1983; he is buried in his home town of Swavesey.

There were 1,188 Argentine and 777 British non-fatal casualties.

Those casualties could have been avoided but The Witch used a war to bolster her popularity .....

[Jack_]

Not all socialists want to dance on Margaret Thatcher's grave. I want her to go on and on

Despite the manifest failures of Thatcherism, talk of celebrating her death is futile. Concentrate on building an economy that works for working people

Few things drive the right-wing press into self-righteous apoplexy more than Thatcher-hate. It was on display at the TUC conference last week, where T-shirts pledged that trade unionists would “dance on her grave”. On Saturday, it was reported that some Liverpool fans – finally vindicated over the sickening travesty of Hillsborough 23 years on – were chanting “we’re gonna have a party when Maggie Thatcher dies”. Several Facebook groups are dedicated to organising festivities for just that eventuality.

Personally, I dread Thatcher’s death. It will be a nightmarish blend of the hysteria that followed Princess Diana’s tragic accident and a month-long political broadcast for the Conservative Party. “She put the ‘great’ back in Great Britain,” our impartial media will lecture us; those who dissent will either be purged from the airwaves or demonised as spiteful lefties. Senior Labour politicians will feel obliged to join in the serenading of a PM who, in many cases, laid waste to the communities they represent. I hope she goes on and on.

But the right refuses to understand why, more than two decades after she was deposed, Thatcher is still despised by a large chunk of the population. As far as they are concerned, it is nothing more than spite from a hate-filled left, still furious at being comprehensively defeated. It speaks of the “sheer nastiness of a certain kind of leftie”, as the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan put it recently. “I remember the sense of despair, the conviction that Britain was finished” before Thatcher came to office, he added. Well, at least Britain is flourishing now.

A reasonable right-winger would accept that her 11-year rule opened up the greatest divisions Britain has experienced in modern times. Whether or not they regard that as unavoidable, they would realise that Thatcher-hate is just one manifestation of it. Perhaps if a Labour government had reduced the prosperous middle-classes of the Home Counties to mass unemployment and poverty, and stockbrokers desperate to save their livelihoods had been chased by police on horseback through the City of London, they would understand the bitterness. Thatcher hate is not kneejerk anti-Toryism: after all, there will be no champagne corks popping when John Major dies, and there was no bunting on display to celebrate the deaths of Ted Heath, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Macmillan or Anthony Eden.

Thatcher is reviled by some not just because she crushed the left, the Labour movement and the post-war social democratic settlement. It is because she did it with such enthusiasm, and showed no regret for the terrible human cost. A war of sorts was fought in the 1980s, and the vanquished – as is often the case – were left with unquenchable bitterness: my own family among them.

The year I was born in Sheffield, unemployment had reached 15.5 per cent, or nearly four times higher than when Thatcher marched into Downing Street. My parents watched a flourishing city devastated, and at such speed. My mother recalls the once-thriving industrial suburb of Attercliffe, with its foundries with arc furnaces and the flicker of flames as you passed. Within 18 months, it was reduced to ruin: the buildings demolished, leaving deserted wasteland surrounded by weeds and fences. When Thatcher came to deliver a speech at Sheffield’s Cutlers’ Hall in 1983, my eldest brother was among those throwing eggs. During the miners’ strike, my father was at Orgreave days before the infamous Battle; with mounted police chasing miners across fields, it looked like a medieval battlefield. Heavily pregnant with my twin sister and I, my mother saw convoys of police vans heading to Orgreave, an army against the enemy within.

Britain’s industrial ruin was unavoidable, Thatcher’s apologists argue. Industry was inefficient and crippled by union bullyboys: Thatcher’s Chancellor Geoffrey Howe told me he “often questioned the suicide note of much of British industry”. But it was sabotage. First, the abolition of exchange controls allowed the City to thrive at the expense of other parts of the economy. Then they allowed the value of the pound to soar, with interest rates hiked to 17 per cent, making borrowing – crucial for manufacturing – prohibitively expensive.

Sir Alan Budd advised the Thatcher government and feared they “never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation”, but rather it was a highly effective means of increasing unemployment, “an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes”. Working-class communities were trashed – and, in some cases, never recovered – because of an ideological crusade.

Reflecting on the miners’ strike a few years ago, even Thatcher’s right-hand man Norman Tebbitt accepted that “the scale of the closures went too far”, with the result that “many of these communities were completely devastated”. As Jack Straw noted last week, Thatcher’s government needed “the police to be a partisan force” during such industrial upheaval, creating a “culture of impunity” in the police force. At Orgreave – with the support of the mainstream press – the miners were blamed for the Battle, until years later the police force was forced to cough up hundreds of thousands in compensation. And it was the same force – dubbed “Maggie’s Boot Boys” – that smeared those who had died because of their own incompetence and contempt for working-class people at Hillsborough.

According to Thatcher’s champions, she fixed our “broken economy” and unleashed an era of prosperity. Odd, then, that Britain’s most sustained period of growth and increasing living standards were the three decades after the war, with their high taxes on the rich, strong trade unions and state interventionism.

Since Thatcher unleashed the era of low taxes, weak unions and free markets, growth has been lower and less equally distributed, and we have had three dramatic recessions. Our current predicament has everything to do with New Labour’s failure to unpick the financial deregulation Thatcher pioneered. “You weren’t even alive then,” Thatcherite acolytes lecture a largely anti-Thatcher generation, the first since the Second World War to face a worse lot than their parents, with few prospects of getting an affordable home thanks to her mass sell-off of council housing. A new generation of leftists represents a backlash against the demoralisation of their routed parents.

But while Thatcher-hate is understandable, it is futile. Celebrating the prospect of her death has become an admittedly macabre substitute for the failure to defeat Thatcherism. The Iron Lady will die knowing her legacy is stronger than ever. It will only be worth celebrating when Thatcherism is finally purged from this country, and a Britain run in the interests of working people is built. Then we really can rejoice.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...n-8143089.html

[Omah]

Originally Posted by arista

I am sure a Demo may be there trying to get on TV news

The crew are booked for 20:30 .....

[Kizzy]

Lots of facts have come to light following the revelations of her practices were exposed due to the 30yr rule.

[Nedusa]

Originally Posted by Omah

Those casualties could have been avoided but The Witch used a war to bolster her popularity .....

I agree , even during a war you still have a moral duty to limit the loss of life, when faced with the situation re the General Belgrano which was steaming away from the conflict zone, the decision should always have been to monitor the ship NOT order it together with over 300 young lives to be destroyed.

This was not the actions of a wise leader, but more of a naive politician drunk on power.......!!!!

[Livia]

Originally Posted by Omah

Those casualties could have been avoided but The Witch used a war to bolster her popularity .....

I wondered how long it'd take for some shiny-arsed critic who considers themself to be some kind of military strategist because they've read something online that agrees with their own agenda, from the comfort of their armchair, to use this occasion to criticise and diminish the people who fought and in some cases died in the Falklands conflict.

[GiRTh]

Originally Posted by Livia

I wondered how long it'd take for some shiny-arsed critic who considers themself to be some kind of military strategist because they've read something online that agrees with their own agenda, from the comfort of their armchair, to use this occasion to criticise and diminish the people who fought and in some cases died in the Falklands conflict.

So where do you stand on Thatcher's legacy? I agree she will go down as probably the greatest PM of the past 40 years simply because we can still see her influence on the country over 20 years after she left power but I did not agree with much of what she said or her policies or her ideology.

[the truth]

True. Our hearts still bleed for those millions of miners and their families and the destroyed communitees left behind, when thse things afffects you directly the affect is way more profound.

As Ive said before the best statue Ive ever seen is not the endless ones of rich leaders and war generals, not the endless duke of wellington statues, not even the Brunel statue in neyland nor the mighty nelson column. Nope, my favourite one (ok equal with aNeurin Bevans) is the ten foot miner with his coal pick at cerdiff bay. call me a softee, but those blokes truly knew a hards day work for an honest days pay, risking life and limb to feed their families. They were of course never protected or respected well enough by the power brokers, but much beloved and respected by their communities..its said in some pits they had to climb 2 miles in pitch darkness before they even started digging...riddled with dampness, disease and TB , only to end up sick and dying and with a kick in the teeth from the bosses....

One story I heard from a man who was 13 when the coal-pit collapsed on him, as he sat there buried alive for 48 hours he managed to stay calm and survive by playing imaginary chess with his brother who wasnt even alive.....life was hard and short for these men, hard drinking ,hard working and dead way before their time...But they had self respect, once dubbed the bow legged lords of the underworld....

But the shafts were never built wide enough or deep enough or safe enough.....with the technological advances coal mining would be way easier nowadays, they can also find the rich seams easier. These politicians should have put their egos down and evaluated which were the most economical pits and kept those open and concentrated more their men and resources into making those pits work. sadly they were incapable of compromise and a 1000 years of coal, jobs and communities were lost all for the sake of a few egos.

As I admired the sculpture a lady waltzed past, I asked her if all miners really were that big, she answered "course at mun hes welsh inee Politicians will come and go but the coal miners spirit lives on

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by Livia

I wondered how long it'd take for some shiny-arsed critic who considers themself to be some kind of military strategist because they've read something online that agrees with their own agenda, from the comfort of their armchair, to use this occasion to criticise and diminish the people who fought and in some cases died in the Falklands conflict.

I have no idea what a 'shiny-arsed critic' is, we all have a perspective livia it is not in any way intended to be a slur on anyone who lost their life in any war.

[Omah]

Originally Posted by Livia

I wondered how long it'd take for some shiny-arsed critic who considers themself to be some kind of military strategist because they've read something online that agrees with their own agenda, from the comfort of their armchair, to use this occasion to criticise and diminish the people who fought and in some cases died in the Falklands conflict.

Wonder no longer ..... but you've both misread and misunderstood the post .....

The criticism was directed at the Witch for sacrificing young lives on both sides of the "Conflict" in pursuit of popularity .....

[Mitchell]

Just rip tbh

[AnnieK]

RIP...that is all. A sad day for her family and friends.

[Marcus.]

Margaret Thatcher rip

[Lee.]

Her family must be devastated.. she's still a mother regardless of how she ran the fountry.

She can go rot in hell as far as I'm concerned though.

[Shaun]

She was a fierce bitch. Unfortunately a lot of emphasis on the bitch. Don't necessarily agree with her politics and actions, but a strong woman and admirable in my eyes.

[Me. I Am Salman]

she's like a huge chunk of my revision awks

[joeysteele]

They do say if you have nothing nice to say as to someone then it's best to say nothing at all.
So all I will say is R.I.P.

[Shaun]

This did amuse me slightly... http://www.isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/

[Omah]

Originally Posted by Lee.

Her family must be devastated.. she's still a mother regardless of how she ran the fountry.

She can go rot in hell as far as I'm concerned though.

Yeah, RIH .....