Margaret Thatcher RIP?

[Atheist-Lite]

Love her out hate her...I can't recall a stronger sole party pm we've had

Strength =/= Wisdom

The only man or woman who ever went into parliament with good intentions....
failed to keep his powder dry.

[mistermack]

Margaret Thatcher is hugely overrated for some things, and underrated for others.
I find I disagree with almost every part of her "legacy".

Firstly, she doesn't get the credit she deserves for ridding this country of the ruling trade unions.
It's easy to look back, and think that it was easy. It wasn't. They broke Ted Heath and twisted the various Labour leaders round their little finger. So I think this was her major achievement, and lasting legacy.

But the thing she is famous for, winning the Falklands war, was in my opinion a complete fuck-up by her government. The Argentines should NEVER have been given the impression that we wouldn't fight.
And the islands should have been properly defended, long before it happened. The war was her fault in the first place.

And winning power for 13 years really made her reputation. Yet that wasn't her doing at all.
The Labour party GAVE her power, by being totally split, and electing unelectable leaders.
And by promising to give away our nuclear deterrent, unilaterally.
So I don't give her ANY credit for winning elections. A chimpanzee could have beaten Kinnock, and would probably have made a better prime minister.

[Warren Dew]

Firstly, she doesn't get the credit she deserves for ridding this country of the ruling trade unions.
It's easy to look back, and think that it was easy. It wasn't. They broke Ted Heath and twisted the various Labour leaders round their little finger. So I think this was her major achievement, and lasting legacy.

I thought this was the main thing she was hated for. I certainly agree it was her main achievement.

And winning power for 13 years really made her reputation. Yet that wasn't her doing at all.
The Labour party GAVE her power, by being totally split, and electing unelectable leaders.
And by promising to give away our nuclear deterrent, unilaterally.

Also the trade union socialism thing and the resultant broken economy.

[Atheist-Lite]

She also tried to control the base money supply through monetrism which failed heroically - worth considering with all the current digital money printing which is presumably gonna vanish into a 'toxic bank' if it becomes fiat bits of paper rather than bits of bits.

[John_fi_Skye]

I agree with everything Rum said.

I was in the pub with a couple of friends in about 1981, when she was in the depths of her mid-first-term unpopularity, and my friend Woody, with the prescience of Nostradamus or the Brahan Seer, said that the only way she'd win another election would be either to start a war and win it, or to arrange an assassination attempt and survive it. He's been doing the pools for years with much less success.

I did and do hate her, but more for what she stood for than for herself as a person. She was enormously good at what she did. I just hate what she - aided and abetted by halfwits like Scargill - did.

[cronus]

The end is near for the slayer of industrial civilization.

[cronus]

[odysseus]

The country just goes into a repeat cycle.. Labour give us all a great time by spending like a man with 12 arms, the Tories have to sort the mess out by screwing everyone. They're all self-serving arseholes.

Largely this ^^^

Hating Thatcher is just childish IMHO. It's just always easier to blame someone else

I don't know... it really depends on whether yours was one of the sectors that she screwed or not. She had a pretty devastating effect on heavy industry, which is one of the things needed to bring money into the country rather than just recirculating what is already here like a lot of the service sector.

[Cormac]

Half the time I think it's just "fashionable" to hate Thatcher. There are so many people who do who weren't even born for most of the time she was PM. The country just goes into a repeat cycle.. Labour give us all a great time by spending like a man with 12 arms, the Tories have to sort the mess out by screwing everyone. They're all self-serving arseholes.

Hating Thatcher is just childish IMHO. It's just always easier to blame someone else

[cronus]

Half the time I think it's just "fashionable" to hate Thatcher. There are so many people who do who weren't even born for most of the time she was PM. The country just goes into a repeat cycle.. Labour give us all a great time by spending like a man with 12 arms, the Tories have to sort the mess out by screwing everyone. They're all self-serving arseholes.

Hating Thatcher is just childish IMHO. It's just always easier to blame someone else

Over heard some old respectable looking codger saying he hoped the knife slipped earlier on.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

For a moment there I thought Ele was posting again.

[Audley Strange]

Actually, as a person, I hate her, she was a hangover of Victoriana and lost Imperialism. However the U.K. needed a right fucking slap in the chops when I was a kid and she provided it, brutally from Establishment to the common man.

[cronus]

Actually, as a person, I hate her, she was a hangover of Victoriana and lost Imperialism. However the U.K. needed a right fucking slap in the chops when I was a kid and she provided it, brutally from Establishment to the common man.

Not sure about that. The mines are flooded now and the only way to get at our vast coal reserves now is damaging open cast mining, which will happen as the oil price tips.

[Audley Strange]

Actually, as a person, I hate her, she was a hangover of Victoriana and lost Imperialism. However the U.K. needed a right fucking slap in the chops when I was a kid and she provided it, brutally from Establishment to the common man.

Not sure about that. The mines are flooded now and the only way to get at our vast coal reserves now is damaging open cast mining, which will happen as the oil price tips.

Ah yes I forgot that the U.K. was nothing but mines. Fuck the mines. Let's talk about the old boys network, the union sinecures, the entitled sloppy fucks (not all of by any means) in the public sector who had jobs for lives no matter what they did wrong. She said "there is no such thing as society" and she was right. Just lots of greedy little groups of self interested lazy bastards, from the rich to the underclass and she exposed that and supported those who supported her.

Which to be honest is more than Labour ever did. Almost every Labour government started out with supposed good intentions, betrayed their voter base and then fucked up the nation in some way or other.

Thatcher at least never pretended she was "of" and "for" the people. It was what made her repugnant that made her effective.

[Rum]

What else do you expect? 'Society' is about interest groups and their power. Not much else.