I understand that at certain “street parties” held to “celebrate” the passing of the late Lady Thatcher one of the songs of choice was “Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.” As others have observed, many of the charming, upstanding individuals who attended the gay events were not even born when Thatcher came to power. Why was she so hated?  Why does this persist?

I think the first reason is very simple. She broke all taboos by being a woman. She emerged from a world dominated by the male Old Boy Network in Parliament and on the wider political stage. The heavyweight union bosses who wielded power over much of the country like so many latter day robber barons were not moisturizing metrosexuals. They were a largely Marxist bunch of middle aged, heavy hitting chauvinists. Neither the comfortable, old school and discredited public school boys of the Right who had been content to let the country stagger to towards a lingering, less than genteel obscurity, nor the Left’s bully boys of the Politburo-in-waiting looked well on this alien, active, female persona who was willing to challenge their entrenched interests.

But that alone does not explain it. I think part of the answer lies in the cross fertilization of “feminism” and left wing ideology.

One of the nastiest intellectual habits of the intellectual Left is that it prescribes set political agendas or menus which must be followed by rote or diktat, and in full. If the first course is the emancipation and equal treatment of women, the main course must be a smorgasbord of left of centre, politically correct social attitudes. Any deviation from this norm, and from this prescribed package of values and policies provokes a “moral” outrage which requires the vilification of the “deviant” who has strayed from orthodoxy. That vilification can often be carried out with all the zeal of a medieval religious fanatic confronting a so called “heretic”, that is someone who had the temerity not to follow God’s will as revealed to the zealot.

Therefore, so much greater the ire and rage of the Left that the first woman in the Western World to become leader of her nation did not wear an African style turban whilst dancing and whooping round Greenham Common airbase,  singing Joan Baez songs. She was a tough, no nonsense, plain speaking woman from middle England clad in twin set and pearls. She was the kind of woman who would, if given the chance, treat public spending in the common sense way she would manage a family’s finances, who would stand up to the menace of the Soviet Union and whack errant French euro-apparatchiks with her hand bag. To coin her own famous phrase, No! No! No! This did not fit the Leftist feminist agenda at all. This still so irritates the feminist Left that it either ignores Thatcher, or demonizes her as not really a woman, but somehow a proxy man, something which has been done to many woman of history who had dared to raise their voice in a man’s world. Listening to a discussion with Thatcher’s recent biographer Gillian Shepherd today, Shepherd pointed out that in the past year or so there had been something like 60 books on feminism published in the United Kingdom. Almost none of them made reference to Margaret Thatcher, and where they did so it was in uniformly negative terms. Yet it is hard to appreciate the sheer scale of her personal breakthrough at a time when it was still unusual for a married woman to have their own bank account, single women struggled to get mortgages, and the less than 3% of university lecturers were women.

Listening to another interview with Ann Widdicomb, the hapless interviewer put what he seemed to think was an important point: couldn’t Thatcher have done more to promote women in her government? Widdicombe treated the question with brutal disdain worthy of Thatcher. Thatcher was not in office to promote women, she snapped. She was in office to turn the country round and deal with immense problems. Heresy indeed!

She committed another crime in the eyes of the intellectual Left by going to war, and worse, winning a clear and decisive victory. This was reactionary, and contrary to the prescribed script of decline and defeatism. I often encountered this attitude abroad. I remember being lambasted by a young Swiss man who decided to vent his opprobrium about Britain’s inexplicable and wholly unreasonable behaviour given Argentina’s lawful and friendly taking back possession of the “Malvinas”. Given that this young gentleman hailed from a country which remained steadfastly neutral as the legions of Nazi Germany swept both West and East, I thought it was probably a bit pointless to discuss the merits of taking a stand against military regimes which stamp control on populations at the point of a gun. But to me and most people at the time the Falkland’s issue was and is entirely clear. A military Junta sought to impose its will by force on a free people under the British flag who did not want their rule. That required and justified a military response. It was the very epitome of the Augustinian concept of a just war. In many ways it made her; I think she would have lost the subsequent election without it, and Britain was blooming lucky to win, but it woke in Britain a new sense; a sense that we had not completely lost all touch with an illustrious past. That we were a nation, and that we were no longer a joke. That we had a woman who could change things, a leader. The Left disliked all of this.

Thatcher’s next crime was to threaten revolution. She threatened the Establishment. That Establishment comprised of both the failed and impotent grandees of the Right, and the dreary, defeatist, and pacifist intellectual consensus of the Left. Both parts of this consensus are in fact deeply snobbish, and Thatcher was their very antithesis. Not only a woman, but a woman from a background which was truly horrific, the petit bourgeois lower middle classes. And she embodied the views, tastes and attitudes of those classes. She was a walking, talking, Daily Mail brought to life. Thatcher was by birth, experience and necessity a meritocrat and on the side of the little  man with a shop, or the worker who might want to own his own home. Neither the privileged elite of the Right and the Left (think “Tony” Benn) could bear this. It challenged the deep rooted paternalism which required the serfs to know their place, and stay in it.

Then there is the constant charge that she “wiped out” whole industries and blighted communities. Thatcher had the fortune or misfortune to arrive at what I would contend was the inevitable dénouement of the Industrial Revolution. From its heydays of the Victorian era, the dynamic of the British economy had stagnated, or remained in not just an industrial but even more importantly a psychological straight jacket. In terms of the actual viability of many heavy industries, whole sectors such as coal and steel were in many ways simply not viable in their then state. Anyone who had the misfortune to own a car manufactured by the “master craftsmen” of what was called British Leyland could attest that the quality of much of British manufacturing was shoddy to the point of embarrassment. I had to drive an Austin Allegro once, so I know.

This presented and continues to present an enormous structural problem for not just the economy but for whole communities which had been built around and depended on these strategic, but doomed industries. I can well see that there could be differences in the management of change, that perhaps more could have been saved here and there – but in the macro economic and social sense, large communities such as the mining towns and villages of Wales and South Yorkshire had become wholly welded to these industries which I would argue were, like the mammoths of old, about to come to terms with oblivion in a changing world. Taking the long historic view, World War II was still relatively recent memory, and had artificially preserved these industries for a few decades more. This could not last. But the times were changing. New industries, technologies and nations were beginning to emerge. It was, in other words, the beginning of the end for the mammoths. The only question was how long it would take for them to die out.

Britain is a highly tribal, class conscious nation, and its working class traditions and outlooks often tend towards stasis. There is an old saying about the difference between Britain and America and can be illustrated thus. A British miner and an American miner were having a chat over a beer.

The British miner says: “I am a miner. I am proud to be a miner and I have worked hard all my life. I want my son to be a miner like me.”

The American miner says: “I am a miner. I am proud to be a miner and I have worked hard all my life. I want my son to be an engineer/doctor/wall street trader” [add aspiration of your choice].

In short, whilst there were no doubt admirable values to be had in no doubt hard working, close knit communities, these generated communities also fostered an insular culture, highly tribal, resolutely and determinedly working class in their allegiances and attitudes, and unable to change. I suggest that these communities were the product of generations of social conditioning derived from social patterns set in the rather brutal furnace of the industrial revolution. In these communities there were not only valuable and laudable virtues of community and hard work, there were also less attractive attitudes such as a culture of belief in entitlement, narrow mindedness, and an entrenched belief that they were entitled for these industries to exist, and to be supported by the State if necessary.

I would argue that they were doomed. To take an example, I heard a woman from Liverpool berating Thatcher today for having “destroyed” her city and ruined her family. But you only have to walk around today with your eyes open to see the problem. Liverpool is a port. Its trade with the world brought in vast riches and shaped and created a city with magnificent buildings. But today the docks are empty. There are no trading ships. Trade has changed. Trade has gone elsewhere. Thatcher did not destroy Liverpool. In a sense, Liverpool’s reason for existence ceased.

Thatcher refused to accept a form of eastern European model in which one of the main functions of society was to glorify and maintain heavy industries which were inefficient, loss making and ultimately beyond salvage. She refused to follow that model, and the results were what they were.

With her twin set and pearls, clipped diction, lower Middle Class persona and frankly blunt and sometimes confrontational attitude, Thatcher was not just an instrument of doom, but the incarnation of all the class attitudes these communities could not understand and loathed. She was the perfect hate figure upon whom the anguish of industrial and social extinction could be focused.

That brings me to the biggest “crime”, the Miner’s Strike and taking on the unions. The Miner’s Strike was a hard time and its confrontations and divisions still echo. But I suggest that Thatcher’s approach and attitudes to the strike and indeed to Trade Union reform as a whole have to be understood in context. I remember the earlier Miner’s Strike in 1972 and the power cuts that went with it that had reduced the Heath Government to impotent irrelevance. I remember the IMF having to bail Britain out. I remember 1978-79 and the Winter of Discontent. I remember the rubbish piling up, fuel shortages, bodies going unburied as the gravediggers refused to turn up. I even stood on a picket line myself. I remember the 98 per cent tax rate.

I will not be far from the only commentator to make the point, but by 1979 there was the sense that Britain might fade into total collapse like some once gloriously beautiful woman, now wracked and impoverished by alcoholism and dying a quite unmarked death of an unknown tramp in a back alley, soaked in her own urine. That is what living in Britain felt like. I will add that there is another school of thought, which is that if things got much worse, Britain might have convulsed into armed revolution not of the Left, but a putsch by the Right, and a truly authoritative Fascist regime take power.

Thatcher’s remit, mandate, conviction and overwhelming achievement was to take on this challenge and reverse decline. It was a Britain in which the brutal and Luddite, Marxist Unions stood as an apparently all powerful, unchallengeable, entrenched and militant interest group which was a direct challenge to democratic rule. It was a Britain in which all sense of ambition and hope was being slowly throttled. Britain was slowly turning into Albania.

Politically, in stark terms it came to whether the country was to be run by the elected government of the day, or by the Unions. From the perspective of a political historian my view is that the Miners’ Strike had less to do with the economics of the coal industry, and more to do with a set piece clash between the mightiest and most militant Union of all, the NUM. I know the Yorkshire mining areas quite well, and have even had my dealings with some of the protagonists in that drama, and I have no doubt that the issue could with no great exaggeration be boiled down to this: who runs the country, Arthur Scargill, or the elected government? The clash was, to use the word Marxist theory loves so much, “inevitable.” Scargill looked for it, wanted it, and miscalculated. Thatcher foresaw the clash, and after backing down once, made preparations and stood firm. I suggest that however nasty some of the incidents of that clash were, any other result but defeat for the Union and the miners would have presented a clear and present threat to the democratic institutions of the country. As I say, I have had some involvements with the area, and I will only say Arthur Scargill is not a man you want to have running the country. Or, indeed, anything. Ever. Anywhere.

What was her achievement? Former MP and noted columnist Matthew Parris was a junior member of staff in her private office and put the matter this way. He said that Thatcher took on the dominant “intellectual” doctrine of the day, which was rooted in a belief in the long term decline of Britain, and on the Marxist premise that this was some inevitable historical process. Margaret Thatcher, he said, took the view that one person, with clear and moral vision and purpose could take on the decline of Britain head on and that we could take our destiny back into our own hands. That one person could change things. In doing so she again preached a heresy for which the left of centre intellectual establishment has never forgiven her.

She may have gone a bit barmy in the end. She probably lost perspective. I met her once, at a dinner in Manchester in 1993 which was part of her tour promoting the first part of her memoir, “The Downing Street Years”. All sorts of people attended; the left leaning firebrand barrister of choice Michael Mansfield QC was on the next table. Her after dinner speech was something like 40 minutes long, delivered without notes. It was hugely impressive, clear, forthright, and combative and touched with humour. The standing ovation was extraordinary, with even Mansfield on his feet.

Readers may be amused to know that your author is not and has never been a card carrying Conservative. In fact, I was a founder member of that most muddled headed mix which was called the “Social Democratic Party”. With that in that context I heard a very balanced appreciation of Margaret Thatcher from David Owen, by far the most sensible of the “Gang of Four”.  He found her judgment of many social issues and the consequences on social policies often flawed, but as to the necessity to fight two wars, one external against military aggression and one internal against Union aggression, he was generous and positive in his praise.

I think Margaret Thatcher, for all the faults she may have had, had a courage, directness and genuine sense of conviction which I simply fail to identify in politicians of today. She had more balls than Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clegg and Miliband put together. If she was tough, maybe she had to be. If she was ruthless, maybe she had to be. She was of her time. She changed Britain’s perception of itself. And for that she will be both loved and hated, probably in equal measure.

Sigillum

Lucozade April 13, 2013 at 19:15

Mewsical,

Re: “This morning, while trying to turn James Robertson Justice into a
pedophile, they are now accusing a poster calling him/herself “Hunny” over on
their sad little blog of being me, because “Hunny” disagrees with them.

Lol, what’s the site called?

Re: “They also took exception to Moor Larkin noting that they were only
accusing dead people, and then one of them actually said, “Is he dead?” We are
wallowing in the mire with the truly ignorant here”

They can’t know that much about him then. Maybe one of them will accuse him
of sex crimes in 1985. But why are they doing it?

Mewsical April
13, 2013 at 21:04

Here Luco – as to why they’re doing it, for attention more than likely.
Btw, to be accurate, they took exception to Moor calling Margaret Jones an
educator and then spewed more hatred and bad spelling/grammar in her general
direction. The “Is he dead?” query was because “them” (I assume everyone in
the blogosphere that is talking about this) are accusing the Duncroft women
of only accusing dead people. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself.

Edited by Anna: Sorry mewsical, I have deleted that link. This
blog has a high readership particularly in the main stream media – I don’t
intend to give them the benefit of a link from this platform. You’ve said
yourself that when I linked to your blog your readership lurched
upwards – I don’t see why I should do the same for them. They really are
just peddling bitchiness and malicious gossip.

Lucozade
April 13, 2013 at 21:23

Mewsical,

Re: “spewed more hatred and bad spelling/grammar in her general
direction”

Lol. Oh dear.

Well note it wasn’t all the 1977 to 1979 girls from Duncroft who made
complaints back in 2008, only 3 out of 13….

Moor Larkin April 13, 2013 at 21:44

@lucozade

1977-1979?
I thought this was all about 1974 and Clunk-Click…….

Lucozade
April 13, 2013 at 22:04

Moor Larkin,

Re: “1977-1979?
I thought this was all about 1974 and
Clunk-Click…….”

Really, the Exposure, Panorama and Newspaper reports have told us
nothing and stories have changed throughout….

Mewsical April
13, 2013 at 22:03

Hey, Anna, good move, thought Luco might be able to go in and grab it.
However, have a look back at the Whine thread. I think it’s in there as
well. That’s where I initially found it. The poster complained that they
thought the subject matter was libellous (and was quoted over there, btw).
See post just beneath yours that is highlighted in blue.

Lucozade
April 13, 2013 at 22:09

Mewsical,

It’s funny how they all knew to give themselves food names, lol….

Mewsical April 13, 2013 at 23:36

Yes, they’re nuts.

Anna
Raccoon April 13, 2013 at
22:27

Thanks – and sorry about that!

Mewsical April 13,
2013 at 18:39

@ Luco – the stupid is comment was of course leveled at those silly women.
This morning, while trying to turn James Robertson Justice into a pedophile,
they are now accusing a poster calling him/herself “Hunny” over on their sad
little blog of being me, because “Hunny” disagrees with them. They also took
exception to Moor Larkin noting that they were only accusing dead people, and
then one of them actually said, “Is he dead?” We are wallowing in the mire
with the truly ignorant here.

Tony Harrison
April 13, 2013 at 20:53

Curious digression ISTM but more to the point, avoid lambasting the
“truly ignorant” in any paragraph written with such slipshod spelling &
syntax.

Ho Hum April 13, 2013 at 22:11

If by slipshod spelling, you are referring to ‘pedophile’ and
‘leveled’, maybe you are truly unaware that Mewsical lives in the United
States, in which place those forms of spelling are correct?

Mewsical April 14, 2013 at 01:24

Thanks HH!

Mewsical April 13,
2013 at 16:35

Defending liberty by hitting someone with a baseball bat? Oh please.

Tony Harrison
April 13, 2013 at 20:45

If someone threatens you – whether in the street with a knife, or by
preparing to invade your country, or trying to subvert your society by mass
lawlessness, the traditionally correct, universally approved and somewhat
logical course of action is to defend yourself by whatever means seem
appropriate. This can seem a confusingly subtle concept, I appreciate.

Ho Hum April 13, 2013 at 21:56

Is that subtly different from the other traditionally correct,
universally approved methodology for dealing with mass lawlessness, in
which civilised countries normally create some state body to enforce the
country’s laws, for the benefit and protection of all its citizens, and
for that body to deal with any thug trying to take the law into their own
hands by walking down the street with a baseball bat and using it to hit
those with whom he or she disagrees?

Daedalus
X. Parrot April 13, 2013 at
22:45

Re: “Baseball Bat” Defence

I can see at least three scenarios where Mr. Harrison would be
perfectly justified and entitled to adopt his “baseball bat”
defence.

1.
In the case of an invasion by a hostile force which overwhelmed
the conventional protectors of law and order. E.g. what could have
happened in 1940 or during the Cold War.

2.
When a riot starts and the forces of law and order are too
cowardly or politically correct to protect the normal citizens, e.g. the
riots of 2011.

3.
When one is in one’s house and being burgled by a violent
criminal who uses force against you.

4.
A normal citizen mentions their objection to an extremist,
lefty agitator dancing on the grave of a frail, old woman and then the
lefty agitator uses the baseball bat against the objector.

Sorry, last one was a micky take dig at the hippy, morally relativist
appeasers on this thread.

Ho Hum
April 14, 2013 at 00:39

Good. At their simplest, and if called for on the basis of
immediacy, I’d agree with you on all four, as they all seem to be
quite lawful. I haven’t I actually written anything that can, properly
construed, be taken otherwise.

So who are the hippy, morally relativist appeasers on this
thread?

Mina Field April 13, 2013 at 16:20

Well Ho Hum, thats you told, lol….

Ho Hum April 13, 2013 at 21:47

I know, but I ‘m puzzled. If I’m blocking the target by standing on the
sidelines, is he in the crowd shooting at the players or a player shooting
at the crowd? It sounds like a South American football match. Whichever, I’m
probably helping keep someone alive for a few more days……..

Tony Harrison
April 13, 2013 at 13:32

This is trivial and I doubt very much if it’s useful, since you’re some
species of apathetic social-democrat with no interest in defending liberty and
possibly no survival instinct… But let’s say my baseball-bat-wielding
instincts would wait until the Leftists’ jeering turned, as inevitably it
does, into random demonstrations of violence and/or violence directed at
specific individuals & institutions. I trust this satisfies your pedantry,
but I doubt it. People like you are almost worse than those who would actively
assault our liberal institutions at the drop of a hat: at least one knows
where one stands with them, but you’re just useless baggage, pootering
helplessly on the sidelines and blocking one’s view of the target.

Tony Harrison
April 13, 2013 at 11:10

“Authoritarianism”? BS! It’s called self-defence. I deprecate the
initiation of violence, while celebrating the duty of all interested in
liberty to defend it whenever the authoritarian collectivists of the Left (or
whoever) threaten our liberty. The dismal detritus jumping around in the
streets, “celebrating” the death of MT, are either Leftists or their useful
idiots. There are no “versions of liberty”, just liberty – perhaps you’re
confusing this with “democracy” a famously moveable feast as in “People’s
Democratic Republic” etc.

Ho Hum April 13, 2013 at 11:49

‘I deprecate the initiation of violence,’

Oh, goody. So what did you mean by this?

‘The Leftists jeering in the street over MT’s demise, and those present
on this discussion, make me want to wield a baseball bat uncommonly hard.
They really do need sorting out, terminally.’

You can’t have it both ways – or do you just not understand what you
wrote? I wouldn’t have wasted my time otherwise.

pandionhaliaetus
April 12, 2013 at 20:55

The witch is definitely not dead. If you want to see a real witch, take a
look at Glenda Jackson ranting in the House of Commons. I cannot begin to
fathom why the left wing in this country are motivated solely by spite and
envy. Oh, yes I can. Margaret Thatcher stood up to all the
socialist/marxist/communist self-entitled bullies that were holding the
country to ransom and gave them all a well-deserved spanking. It speaks
volumes that they had to wait until she was dead before they could summon
enough courage to spew their bile.

Mewsical April
13, 2013 at 16:33

You know, there is a ‘mute’ button on your remote, and I believe a
function to change the channel and watch something else.

Tony Harrison
April 12, 2013 at 20:47

Very well written piece, thoughtful and well informed. Pity some of the
visitors belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Judaea school of
thought – and they’d neglected to take their medication. Thatcher is the only
former PM whom I remember with respect – full stop. Of course she wasn’t
perfect, just far superior to the creeping nonentities before or since. Of
course the Left hate her – they would, wouldn’t they… The Leftists jeering in
the street over MT’s demise, and those present on this discussion, make me
want to wield a baseball bat uncommonly hard. They really do need sorting out,
terminally.

Ho Hum April 12, 2013 at 22:12

Ah, the joys of differentiating between the loons of the right and the
loons of the left. One lot prat about, spouting bile about another on that
which they really know little of, but at least wait until the recipient has
popped her clogs, and the other spouts bile at anyone who doesn’t share
their view, and threatens to help them pop their clogs on some sort of
compulsory basis, even before they reach their threescore years and ten

How to choose? You could spin a coin all day long and it would still
finish standing on its edge. Idiots, both.

Tony Harrison
April 12, 2013 at 23:23

Don’t affect such a degree of fucking loftiness. Make some kind of a
stand, establish your own position – if you have one. Ultimately this kind
of thing comes down to conflict, even of the violent variety. Make a
choice.

Ho Hum
April 12, 2013 at 23:51

What, you mean as in plump for the better of the two evils? No
thanks. I’ll take the lesser of two equivocally bad choices, perhaps,
but not that. And it’s not being ‘lofty’. It’s maintaining one’s
integrity, whilst being thoroughly unpopular with almost everyone

Tony
Harrison April 13, 2013 at
07:37

Predictably feeble! Those like myself on the side of liberty
threaten no-one else’s, since we do not prescribe, but lessen the
bonds of the State: those on the Left by definition threaten our
liberty, since they prescribe a collectivist ideology that is
inevitably coercive. The two positions are incompatible, and conflict
will occur inevitably. Those such as you don’t so much decline to
choose the lesser of two evils, as you snottily put it, as sit on the
fence hoping the nastiness will pass you by. Unfortunately for you,
you get sharp fence-posts up your fundament that way, rammed there
vigorously by both sides… The price of liberty is not just eternal
vigilance, but a readiness to engage in superior violence when called
for.

Moor Larkin April 13, 2013 at 10:07

@TonyHarrison

I agree with the broad thrust of all that you just said, but
(there’s always a but) I may well not agree with everything else that
you ever say. Therefore I can never truly be “always on your side”. It
is reasonable to take a side whenever there is violence threatened,
because violence can only be ever be matched by violence – except for
those very rare cases where you have someone like Gandhi, who prevails
by sheer weight of numbers. Tactics may also come into play
occasionally.

Ho Hum
April 13, 2013 at 10:42

The two positions probably are largely incompatible, but when those
seeming to indicate that they are from the right imply that they would
propose the initiating of violence to establish their version of
liberty, I’ll call it for the authoritarianism that it really is, the
idiocy of thought that underpins it, and the lack of real difference
there is between the evil that is inherent in authoritarianism
emanating from either right or left. Just as I would had you seemed to
be from the left. That’s hardly sitting on the fence. And don’t make
the mistake of presuming its inherently pacifist either

Frankie April 12, 2013 at 18:26

Margaret Thatcher ‘…had more balls than Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clegg and
Miliband put together.’

Spot on. An excellent post.

Love her or hate her you have to respect the fact that Thatcher achieved,
with the odds heavily stacked against her, and smashed the ridiculous glass
ceiling that many fantastically bright, driven women in today’s society would
still be banging their heads on. The situation viz men and women is still not
perfect but Thatcher did an immense amount, accidently or no, to ensure that
the world of business realises that women are a serious force to be reckoned
with, and quite right too.

She had the cojones to cause our armed forces to sail down to the South
Atlantic and kick those cheeky blighters out. No way our politicians would
dream of doing anything like that now and nor could they, because they have
got rid of our capability to dictate policy in that way i.e. with a big stick.

I can remember in the 1970′s sitting in our house with my parents around a
candle because there was another power cut, as those other cheeky sods the
Unionistas had gone on strike. Remember how those commie buggers held the
country to ransom, going ‘off on one’ every five minutes, and ruling the
roost. Perhaps things have gone too far the other way now but Scargill and his
ilk were trying to ruin the country and, unfortunately, in any war, and it was
a war between the Government and the Unions, there were casualties. When one
looks now to see that most of the coal fired power stations are in the process
of being taken off line, for global warming/polutive reason, one cannot help
but think that Sigillum is right and that the mine workers were a terminal
case, but they just didn’t know it yet.

I was abroad when news of her death was announced, and had to rely upon
CNN, which was a bit tedious to be honest. In fact, how their news channel won
ANY award for anything is beyond me. Rubbish, but, be that as it may, it
struck me that the news of this 87 year old’s death filled the news for the
whole evening and was the sole topic of conversion for several hours. One
cannot say that about many people of that age. Mandela, definitely, when it
happens, but not too many other people. I think Thatcher was wrong on many
things, but regardless of my personal opinions, I admired the fact that she
made a decision and stuck to her guns. She had a backbone, a feature sadly
lacking in politicians of today.

I, personally think that if a person of Thatcher’s combatative attitute had
their feet under the desk at No.10 now then we would not be in the mess we are
in now. No nonsense is what we need, not this pitiable succession of faux pas.

I also think that the campaign to get the ‘Ding Dong’ song to No.1 in the
week of Thatcher’s death is appalling, utterly lacking in the basic respect
each human being owes to another, but not suprising, given the state of the
country at present. I was astonished to read that a serving Metropolitan
Police Sergeant actually tweeted comments celebrating the death of Thatcher,
before informing the Professional Standards Department of his actions and
resigning. What on earth is going on when a person, presumably of at least
some intellect does something so utterly stupid and moronic? I thought that
the person who cleverly left a pint of milk on Thatcher’s doorstep was far
more subtle and amusing.

Time to emigrate perhaps.

carol42 April 12, 2013 at 19:31

Between this and so called ‘plebgate’ what on earth is going on with the
met? He should not have been allowed to resign, therefore keeping his
pension, no punishment for bringing disgrace on his uniform. I used to
respect the police now I don’t trist or believe anything they say or do.

Ho Hum April 12, 2013 at 22:25

He may have had a jar or two, and woke up to realise what he had done?
Who knows? As to why he felt so intemperate, who knows what he had
personally experienced? We may never know, and rushing to judgement in
ignorance is the province of fools. Anyway, in such circumstances, better to
go quickly, with as much dignity as possible, isn’t it? We may not agree
with the sentiments he expressed, but his conduct subsequently, from what we
can glean, seems sound. Unless anything more, untoward, comes out, this one
sounds more sensibly closed than raked over

Ellen Coulson (nee
Dunn) April 13, 2013 at 15:24

Anyone know who owns the rights to the Ding Dong song? Perhaps the owner
could be persuaded to donate all proceeds to the Thatcher family/government
to help fund the cost of the funeral.

Anna
Raccoon April 13, 2013 at 16:25

What an excellent idea Ellen!

Edited to add: Pity! The OCC said in a statement yesterday that because
the song was “out of copyright (and therefore in the public domain), there
are a number of versions of the same recording (taken from the 1939 movie)
available to buy across several digital retailers.

Mewsical April
13, 2013 at 16:28

Yip Harburg’s estate is not about to get involved in anything to do
with this – he wrote all the lyrics for the Wizard of Oz (including Over
The Rainbow, which he actually wrote last minute while waiting for his
wife to run a quick errand at Schwab’s drugstore). I would imagine his
family find this all a bit distasteful.

Bill
Sticker April 12, 2013 at 16:10

Anna, those planning to have a re run of the poll tax riots during the
funeral may be faced off in a local derby against Millwall fans.

See this Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9990334/Football-fans-vow-to-confront-anti-Thatcher-demonstrators.html

Could get real interesting real fast. My money’s on the Millwall fans.

Anna
Raccoon April 12, 2013 at 17:40

Definitely – but who would have suspected they were Thatcherites!

Bill
Sticker April 12, 2013 at 18:36

Anna. It’s an observed oddity that some of the most dangerous denizens
of the terraces have deep peer loyalties tied up with local and national
football teams. Thatcher was an arch patriot, ergo she supported the
national footie team. Therefore certain Millwall fans no doubt see her as
being ‘on their side’. Nothing to do with being Thatcherites; more to do
with football tribalism.

Miss Mildred
April 12, 2013 at 11:18

The longer a PM stays in office, the more there is to grump about. Maggie
was bossy and that was very much needed, for the time it took to do what the
electors wanted. Stop the union bosses from throwing their weight about and
making us the laughing stock of Europe and get us off the ropes money wise.
She rose to the challenge over the Falklands, and dealt effectively with the
activities of a brutal dictator like Galtieri. We have to wait for vicious
dictators to die or a bloody coup or a vicious civil war to remove them.
Calling her by that hackneyed, overused term ‘bully’ is too facile. She did a
very effective job and was removed after voting, no shots fired, no fuss.This
lot we have now are wimps compared to her. She was a strong bossy, opinionated
lady. The lads didn’t like being bossed about by a woman who had been so
successful at what she had set herself to do. How can anyone say she made UK
people harsh when there is the cult of the victim, public weeping, piles of
flowers by the roadside and a rampant compensation culture? No stiff upper lip
anymore, just wimping and wailing and whining over the minutest slight.

Timbo April 11, 2013 at 16:22

Superb post and generally excellent comments. Brought back lots of
memories. Can anybody identify the smell of (new, fresh, unsoiled) IZAL? Very
characteristic.

I was between Mexico and Venezuela in 1980 having fled the UK in 1978. The
difference between the two countries could not have been more marked;
passionate histrionic support from the venezuelans for the argies while
several mexicans just shook their heads and forecast that they would have
their butts handed to them as soon as the Royal Marines arrived.

Maggie’s involvement in speeding the demise of the military dictatorship in
Argentina is not sufficiently noted.

Would that there were more like her.

Ho Hum April 11, 2013 at 16:47

‘Maggie’s involvement in speeding the demise of the military dictatorship
in Argentina is not sufficiently noted.’

True. Excellent point. But, and not to at all try to denigrate the
benefits Mrs T brought to the Argentines, Pinochet’s help to the UK at the
time probably gained him too many brownie points for Chile’s good.

Moor
Larkin April 11, 2013 at 16:53

@Timbo

I listened with rising bemusement to someone from the Argentine embassy
or somesuch, being interviewed the other night, and he was mumbling
platitudes about how if Maggie had not been so precipitate back in the day,
that the Junta would have stepped back and negotiated in due course. I sat
there and thought that if the Argentines can have so quickly forgotten their
own “Disappeared”, well, history is evidentially bunk.

Mewsical April
11, 2013 at 20:10

Moor, (and everyone else) pop over to my blog and have a look at the
photo I just put up! CNN used this in their Thatcher obituary. The photo
went international three times in five minutes. You can’t make this stuff
up.

Ho Hum
April 11, 2013 at 20:23

That is priceless!

Moor Larkin April 11, 2013 at 21:06

@Mewsical

I did spot his last night, or was it the night before? When did she
die? I’ve forgotten already. Got my tribute copy of the Daily Mail safe
though….
I
can only put it’s appearance down to the fact that the photo comes up on
most internet searches for Savile/Thatcher these days and I can only
assume that CNN journalists don’t do any more actual investigating than
their British brethren do, these days.. ……
I’ve
dropped a line or two at your blog too.
Do you know we have another
police operation just now *investigating* whether the No10 of Thatcher’s
day was a den of paedophilia? Don’t laugh, it’s true.

Anna
Raccoon April 11, 2013 at
21:11

Brilliant spot mewsical!

Mewsical April 11, 2013 at 22:23

This ran on American TV, as well as the photo with Pinochet.
Despite some attempting to note that CNN don’t know who Savile is,
etc., I would imagine the London bureau was responsible for finding
photographs for the broadcast. Someone there has a sensayuma, that’s
for sure!

Moor, was just thinking last night that Thatcher is bound to get it
now from the paedophiliacs, and by crikey, here they come!

Ho Hum April 11, 2013 at 16:06

But, to be as even handed as ever, and just reassure you that you have not
entirely lost the plot….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txBZ8cH1eVc

Moor
Larkin April 11, 2013 at 16:11

See!!
I KNEW I was right!!…..

Moor
Larkin April 11, 2013 at 15:49

@fatsteve

I don’t recall any “brain-washing” going on to make people vote for
Thatcherism. They just did it. I do remember vociferous attempts by the meeja
at brain-washing to make them NOT vote for her. One regular weekly session was
called “Spitting Image”, but the electorate chose to just laugh at it…..
Brain-washing
ruling cliques only really came in with Alistair Campbell and Mandel, his
sohn.

Speaking of TINA…… She has the Willy’s about Rupert Murdoch elsewhere in
these comments, and I fully concur with the aspect of her world-view that some
kind clique thing existed, but it was started between his organisation and
Blair Inc….. Wize up… join….the….dots……

But that’s all over now. The next big date looks like being 2015. If the
Scots are oot the hoose by then, then I think you may well be seeing a new
dawn in UK politics anyway. If not, then it would be nice to think we can all
put Maggs and Tone behind us, and all move on to the next thing together.

Ho Hum April 11, 2013 at 16:01

It may be just natural selection, but either way, perhaps this will help
your fading memory….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JKvNoZzOEw

Fat Steve April 11, 2013 at 14:41

Well Moor Larkin you bought into the the TINA argument (There Is No
Alternative) —no different as I see it as any citizen in any country who
follows the ruling cliques brainwashing about how marvellous their rulers are.
As to Romanian Orphans —–well lovely to think Thatcherism was their saviour
though quite how you come to that conclusion rather escapes me —perhaps you
will emlighten?

rabbitaway April 11, 2013 at 13:42

Whilst we’re in the 1970′s, wasn’t it about this time we saw the emergence
of ‘born again Christians’ ? Don’t hear much about these fella’s now, but we
do have a ‘lorra’ born again’ers :

Born again ‘VICTIMS’ ???

Ho Hum April 11, 2013 at 13:50

Fashions change. The media now call such people ‘committed’ Christians.
Probably to distinguish between them and all the other odd ‘born againers’
that you rightly say have mushroomed. In much the same way as ‘born again
Christian’ was used in its time to distinguish between them and ‘nominal’
Christians in the 70s. In due course, when we have gone full circle, and
they are likely to be known as ‘Those Oddballs in the Gulag’s Correctional
Facilities’

rabbitaway April 11, 2013 at 13:35

@Mud’
I hate to ask – but “what’s bronco ” ?

Mudplugger
April 11, 2013 at 15:50

“Bronco” was another brand of that ever-so-abrasive bog-roll like IZAL,
although usually in interleaved single-sheets, rather than rolls. Even
rougher than IZAL, although still marginally preferable to quarter-pages of
the Daily Mirror, if only because there was less print to come off the
Bronco.

But in that outside toilet, in the infamous winter of 62/63, you didn’t
hang around long enough to get picky about the paperwork.

mike
kemble April 11, 2013 at 12:43

Thank you for such a well written well informed article. Unfortunately, you
cannot convince the brainwashed ‘loony left’ because those that can remember
Maggie in office are braindead and those that were taught in socialist
comprehensives are also brainwashed. It make my blood boil to see people who
were not even born spouting the marxist package, deleivered free to your
braincells, on what it was like under Maggie.

Let me tell you braindead amoeba’s – Scargill used the miners in an effort
to remove a democratically elected government just as he did in 72. He thought
that this ‘mere woman’ (his words) would fold quicker than that wimp Heath. He
fought a war ahainst a female leader using the miners as weapons, he also got
the maintenance men out, a major crime in mining. The mines fell into
disprepair and became too dangerous to re-enter THATS why they closed, it was
not Maggie – it was SCARGILL. The coal is still there but Scargill caused the
mines to be declared unsafe. It would have cost more than we could afford to
reopen them.

If you want to dance on a grave – DANCE ON HIS; he killed you off.

I was in the Engrs Union. We worked opposite the T&G. Every 5 minutes
they had a dispute about something whilst we just watched. The production line
at Vauxhalls was stop start stop start, all T&G’s fault. When they walked,
we stayed, got paid, and cleaned up. It cost Vauxhall a fortune. Their answer
was automation, robots don’t strike. Many people ended up not working there
anymore why? Because the Unions forced Vauxhalls hand.

Unions thought they ran the country, they did, thanks to Heath &
Callaghan. They tried it with Maggie, and got fried. Why do you think
successive labour governments have not tried to reverse Maggie’s Laws, passed
by Parliament? Because they know she was right. If we had the Unions as they
were back then, this country would be a non productive backwater of Europe
with zero employment, no money with Unions leaders living in Mansions funded
by the Union, like Scargill.

Daedalus X.
Parrot April 11, 2013 at 20:04

To: Mike Kemble

Completely agree with everything you say, except that the Union leaders
ARE living in mansions.

Until the NUM chucked him out just a few months ago, brother Scargill’s
second home was a £1.5 million apartment in a millionaire’s enclave in the
Barbican in the City of London.

You couldn’t make it up. A bit like John Prescott taking his workers out
of work to play croquet outside his luxurious grace and favour mansion.

Fat Steve April 11, 2013 at 12:29

Well whatever the topic some magnificently witty prose —-moisturising
metrosexuals and menstrual militia being amongst the best.
Rather than
enter into the Punch and Judy show of Oh yes she was/Oh no she wasn’t or worry
too much on her place in ‘History’(adopting Tony Blair’s critique of the
meaning of life —his comment on Thatchers death including words to the effect
of ‘As a Prime Minister who also won three elections’) perhaps it might be
worthwhile if some thought was given to what alternative strategies and
alternative outcomes might have been sought at the end of the 70s other than
Thatcherism for that might put Thatcherism in a rather better context
—-against what many appear to presume was the only alternative of Euro
communism (again nice prose) —-well that is an obvious no brainer but against
other alternatives? well who knows? The Soviet block would have fallen in any
event —- it collapsed from within and political Philosophers predicted it from
its creation and it only lasted as long as it did because of the 2nd World
War—- and the consensus from pro Thatcher commentators on this blog is that
State Socialism would never have lasted starting to collapse as I see it after
the winter of discontent although again political philosophers predicted its
downfall from the outset of the model. Creation of these vacuums was
inevitable because the models weren’t sustainable though please those who
would argue otherwise should attempt to do so. It is what Thatcher did to fill
these voids and what she filled them with that is to my mind questionable It
was that she capitalised on division (or should that be divisiveness) and that
is her legacy for divisivness remains at the heart political life and power is
obtained and retained by saying why the other side is wrong rather than
putting up a cogent policy —-to so do risks criticism and loosing the oh yes
it is/oh no it isn’t punch and Judy show that is political life as we
presently know it. As might reasonably be assumed from blogs on this site
political life has become all about Punch and Judy where every day the media
puts up arguements of Oh yes it is/Oh no it isn’t only to pass on quickly to
another topic with the same objective of temporary entertainment. It’s
populist politics little different than choosing who should be in the big
brother house—-as satisfying to the intellect as a hamburger is to the
stomach. Thatcher had an easy choice of dragons to slay after the winter of
discontent—–they were already dying —-I just doubt the way she went about
slaying them in the way she did hasn’t left the legacy which we now enjoy.

Moor
Larkin April 11, 2013 at 12:47

@fatsteve

You forget that the British didn’t want an alternative. Socialism had to
be crushed.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/There-No-Alternative-Margaret-Thatcher/dp/0465031218

The woolly notion that “all things end” is equivalent to saying all
things die.
Seeing as children are so much the focus of political thought
these days, perhaps we should have tried telling the Rumanian orphans not to
fret, Communism won’t last forever.

rabbitaway
April 11, 2013 at 13:33

Moor/Ho
In order of importance :
Moor – great that you remembered
the Rumanian orphans ! Now why am I seeing some poor old creature in a
care home – ignored – left to rot with that beaker of foul tasting diluted
orange pop, just out of reach ?
Ho Hum – UFO – no, I’m not being rude –
wow those guys look great now – I wouldn’t have cast a sideways glance
back in the day ……BIG SMILEY

Ho Hum April 11, 2013 at 12:48

Yes. It’s alright to take firm action when required, or exchange strong
words when necessary, but creating divisions between peoples isn’t too
clever in the long run really, nor is maintaining those merely to gain some
perceived political advantage, that possibly being even worse than making no
efforts to close or eliminate any such divisions that arise in the first
place. I seem to remember that somebody famous once said ‘Blessed are the
peacemakers’

Moor Larkin April 11, 2013 at 13:14

God preserve us from peacemakers like Tony Blair then. He does
illustrate however, how once the British make their collective mind up,
they will keep voting the same way, regardless of events sometimes. Not so
much Bulldog as just plain bull-headed……..

right_writes
April 11, 2013 at 07:57

That’s a good post Sigillum….

I do not understand why there is such hatred for this woman, if there is
one villain in the destruction of opportunities for the B’s and C’s (working
classes) that seems to be ignored (I wonder why?) it should be that “modest”
man Clement Attlee.

It was he that took all of the struggling (because there had been five
years of world war) heavy industry and turned it into a massive necrotic
bureaucracy… A command economy.

When MT came to power there was a choice, we could descend into the chaos
that was characterised by the events in the old Soviet Union, or some decisive
action could be taken. In an ideal world, i.e. if Britain was a totally
isolated concept like N Korea, you could carry on with Attlee’s plan until
everyone starved to death, or you could just turn the thing around with fair
warning that it wasn’t going to be much fun. Of course, eventually she came up
against the entirely political NUM led by A Scargill (a devout communist and
apologist for the soviet union) who informed her that he was going to bring
the Thatcher government down… I ask, what could she do?

An example of what would eventually happen is witnessed by what has
happened to the NHS (also a command economy), it has been ruthlessly asset
stripped year by year since that crook Bevan twisted the original concept,
which works everywhere else that it is used.

It was Attlee that was evil, but I seem to remember that when he died,
there was deep reverence about this “great” man (who destroyed Britain)… It
seems to me that the Thatcher haters from the industrial north that were
indeed hurt by Thatcher’s actions should cast their “memories” back a further
thirty-five years and uncover the truth.

GildasTheMonk
April 11, 2013 at 14:11

I think there is a great deal of truth in these comments

carol42 April 11, 2013 at 18:52

Very true, germany spent their Marshall Aid rebuilding their industry
while Atlee spent ours nationalising what was left of ours to out lasting
damage. Intentions may have been good, but we are still living with the
consequences.

carol42 April 10, 2013 at 23:07

Congratulations on a well written piece. Those of us who lived through the
70s are glad she changed Britain for the better, I just wish we had someone
like her now, male or female.

binao April 11, 2013 at 09:52

Agree entirely.

Engineer April 11, 2013 at 11:13

I, too, agree entirely. It’s hard to explain to anybody under 45 just how
vile the 1970s were compared to today.

Moor Larkin April 11, 2013 at 11:37

@Engineer

I loved the Seventies. I was young and occasional candles seemed quite
fun, I seem to recall there was said to have been a mini baby-boom at the
time as well …..

Jonathan
Mason April 11, 2013 at 11:59

I agree. It did not seem vile at the time, as I knew nothing else. In
the winter of discontent I was living in a old farmhouse just outside
Chester, that had no furniture and no heating except wood fires, and was
perfectly happy. In spite of earning no more than about 200 pounds per
month by the late 70′s, I could still afford holidays in Greece and a
colour TV. Compared to our parents’ generation–Margaret Thatcher’s
family did not have an indoor toilet or hot water–we lived a life of
luxury.

rabbitaway April
11, 2013 at 12:12

Jonathan and Moor –
Agreed but one word – IZAL …..!

Moor Larkin April 11, 2013 at 12:23

@rabbitaway

I loved IZAL!! It took me some time to become acclimatised to the
new soft stuff that sometimes lingers on the botty after I had left
home.

It also made brilliant Tracing Paper, which was otherwise entirely
out of financial reach.

Ho Hum
April 11, 2013 at 12:25

IZAL had its own theme song in the 1970s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpUsULr_uLw

Mudplugger April
11, 2013 at 13:32

IZAL was for posh folk – what about ‘Bronco’ ?

Michael April 10, 2013 at 22:05

A very well-argued piece.

Orde Solomons
April 10, 2013 at 21:55

I’m astonished to read a piece about Mrs Thatcher which so closely fits
everything I have thought over the last thirty years – it could have been
written by me.

martin April 11, 2013 at 00:19

No, it couldn’t.

Mudplugger April 10, 2013 at 20:49

The reason the feminists, the ‘menstrual militia’, hate Thatcher is because
she wasn’t a feminist – she was an equalist. She proved that a woman can be
every bit as successful as any man, even in the most traditionally macho
environments, by simply being so evidently better than them. No drama, no
special pleading, no quotas – just getting on with it and showing them what
you can do, all the while maintaining her feminine dignity. By doing that so
publicly and at such a high level, she chopped the very hairy legs from under
the feminist factions, and they didn’t like it.

Her success in the 1984 Miners’ Strike was a simple example of learning
from the mistakes of the past, When that useless sailing chorister, Edward
Heath, challenged the miners a decade before, he leapt into their trap
unprepared, resulting in those cyclical power cuts, lay-offs and widespread
public suffering. Thatcher saw that and, from 1979, spent the first few years
getting the ducks lined up – which basically meant quietly amassing huge
coal-stocks at all the key power-stations, so much that they could outlast
almost any length of strike, keeping the lights on and the wheels of industry
turning. And so it proved once the event was triggered. With no public impact
this time, the only support the mines got was from their own limited kind, the
rest of the country just got on with living, working, earning, producing.
Masterful. What a man couldn’t do, she pulled off with aplomb – I was almost
ashamed of my testes.

I too am not, never have been nor ever will be, a party member. If more
could apply objective observation and analysis of politics and politicians we
might stand a chance of getting the leaders we deserve, rather than those the
country currently deserves and gets. Back in 1979 we deserved Thatcher and got
her – whether we have made the most of the reformatted state legacy since then
is open for debate.

Ho Hum April 10, 2013 at 19:51

‘She did things because she believed they were right, not because there was
a good evidence that they would make things better’

Quite right Stuart. All politicians do that. And she was disliked in the
North and in Scotland because they had a heritage that was such that her
ideas, and one tracked pursuit of them regardless of any legitimate concerns
raised by anyone on anything, were anathema to most there, irrespective of
their past political allegiances, in much the same way any politician with
remotely socialist policies is likely to become toast in the South as they try
to impose their versions of communal good.

And as long any ruler of any kind, king, president, democratic or
undemocratic politician, is prepared to blunder about in the mediocrity of a
self satisfied, conceited, certainty in their own infallibility, they will
ultimately fall as a result of the antipathy they generate in the part of
their bailiewick that is disaffected by, and perceives itself to be ignored,
or even worse, oppressed by, the continued one track ignorant application of
any unbalanced policy or doctrine that fails to take into account any large
tract of the the population. Just look at critiques on wise and foolish ruling
in government provided in the Wisdom Literature (Biblical Book of Proverbs for
those who didn’t do Sunday School). That’s been an obvious reality for
thousands of years

It doesn’t matter if they be right, left or centre, Monster Raving Loonies,
or even the Wized Up members of the latter. Raw politics is not about facts
and figures and sterile economic and social policy debates, it’s about look
and feel. You can do everything that’s good, but if you can’t do it in a
manner that takes most people with you, ultimately you will still fail and
fall. It’s not so much what you do to people, it’s how you do it to them

That’s why, in the absence of universal support, to get what they want, the
left legislates like crazy on everything down to the most trivial, and why
they right ignores anything contrary, with its fingers shoved so deep in its
ears they meet in the middle. They are now both seem so hell bent on pursuing
the very edges of their political philosophies, that any compromise that takes
account of the views of anyone who might almost be seen as their ‘enemies’
seems to be out of the question. If they won’t look to find middle ground,
well, neither wonder there is a plague on all their houses

And please don’t bother providing me with another list setting out a
shedload of facts and figures as to the good or bad things Mrs T did. Of
course she did some of each. That’s what everybody does. Only idiots believe
or pretend otherwise…like those in Glasgow and Brixton yesterday, as will be
those who will burn straw effigies in Tunbridge Wells when Tone pops his clogs
– albeit many of them may be leftists too In
the end, the facts and figures are not what matters to most of the people out
there who spend their lives doing something other than ranting with, or at,
each other in blogs about the inanities and iniquities of the world, its wife,
and its politicians. What matters to them is how they felt at the time about
what was being done, and that feeling, complete with its inherent injustices,
its illogical reasoning, its factual errors, its human fallibility, is how
they will judge her, as they might you and me, forever after. And there is
nothing invalid about it. We all do the same, all from within our own little
cosy worlds

So give it a break. Tomorrow it will be somebody else, and exactly the same
will happen, and a whole different load of people will then also get the
vicarious thrill and warm little glow of satisfaction, however horrid and
nasty it really shows them to be, that comes from dancing on someone’s
embers.

m.barnes April 11, 2013 at 14:23

Seconded

Ancient + Tattered
Airman April 10, 2013 at 19:46

We shall see how history regards her and it might take years. Try to find a
true and unbiased account of the Spanish civil war even now. Whatever you read
is slanted against the ‘other’ side.

Tony Hand April 10, 2013 at 19:45

Durandal,

You start off with an insult (one that I guarantee you would not say to my
face) and yet it’s the leftists with all the vitriol. You don’t even address
my comment about Pinochet because…..you can’t!

You want to see some right wing dignity, read the comments. Very charming,
I’m sure.

http://order-order.com/2010/03/03/michael-foot-has-died/

Ho Hum April 10, 2013 at 19:56

Not speaking ill of the dead is old fashioned. After all, they can’t sue
you

Jabba the Cat April 10, 2013 at 23:51

Worzel was part of the loony left, and the verbal send off at Guido’s was
most appropriate…

Snotrocket April 10, 2013 at 19:44

Sigillum, you ask, how could people – people not born in Lady Thatcher’s
time, hate so much. I ask: Who has taught these people so to hate? And how do
they sustain it, without experience? That is not a legacy of ‘Thatcher’; it is
a legacy of the hating Left who, let’s not forget, have had many, many years
to put right what they thought she did that was so wrong.

I commend the speech in the HoC by Gerald Howarth (Con); and condemn the
speech by Glenda Jackson, who I thought would have known better how to speak
of the dead.

Wigner’s Friend
April 11, 2013 at 12:53

Glenda’s mind is as beautiful as her face!

Steve A April 10, 2013 at 19:26

Perhaps the reason so many young people hate her is because they are taught
she was an ‘spiteful vindictive bitch’ at school. Those three words were used
to describe MT by my son’s A level history teacher.

Lucozade April 10, 2013 at 22:06

Steve A,

Their not studying Margarate Thatcher in History now are they?

Steve A April 11, 2013 at 06:00

The new syllabus includes Tiny Blur and the Brown Gorgan. It will be
interesting to see how they are represented

Lucozade
April 11, 2013 at 17:50

Steve A,

So ‘history’ can be as little as 5 years ago then?

Jabba the Cat April 10, 2013 at 23:47

As the Daily Mash put it so well, “THOUSANDS of people under 35 are
rejoicing at the demise of a woman they once read about”…

Tina Willis
April 11, 2013 at 17:40

As NotSoWeakly Tina states even better, “Raving-Right mainstream all
unreported, MILLIONS of under 35s celebrate the life of a CONwoman they
are CONstantly CONned about”..

Tina Willis April 10, 2013 at 18:53

Yet more raving-Right bent media Dumbing Down.

Still makes Tory robots blame Closed-Shop Union power. Though Britain’s
braveheart workers were and are contemptuously mismanaged, but always good
enough to fight and die for their country.

So here’s the TRUE (Tory media concealed) cause of Callaghan’s unavoidable
IMF crisis and discontent. Leading directly to the Market Thatcherite ongoing
total failure to, ‘bring harmony where there is discord’.

” The 1973–1974 bear market lasted for 2 years between January ’73 and
December ’74. Affecting all the major world stock markets, particularly the
United Kingdom. It was one of the worst stock market downturns in modern
history. The crash came after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system over
the previous two years, with associated ‘Nixon Shock’ and U.S. dollar
devaluation under the Smithsonian Agreement. It was compounded by decades of
US/UK Right-wing mismangement of the middle-east, causing the 1973 Arab/OPEC
oil crisis in October of that year, a major event in the 1970s recession.”

Don’t Dumb-Down, check facts, join dots, Wize Up !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%931974_stock_market_crash

Jabba the Cat April 10, 2013 at 23:46

Sigh…return of the Owen Jones bell end school of political
interpretation…

Tina Willis
April 11, 2013 at 10:47

JabbaCatWail (mind yer tail son).

Raving Right or Loony Left, same shit, different, er, dogs !

L o L.

Mina Field April 10, 2013 at 18:50

Nothing clever or intelligent to say, but the whole business makes me feel
very sad. A work colleague today said, ‘what was she doing staying at the
Ritz, why wasn’t she in a home like other old people with dementia?’ and,
‘They should have her funeral in Barnsley’. This colleague is 30, her TV
viewing is limited to Eastenders and TOWIE, and she has never ever bought a
newspaper. She definitely would pass if asked to name the chancellor of the
exchequer.
Its all a bit like the Duggan shooting and the riots – just an
excuse.

Mewsical April
11, 2013 at 01:54

It’s an inevitable fact that there are a lot of young people out there,
otherwise probably quite nice, decent people, who just don’t care about the
big picture, because they are understandably focused on their own issues. In
fact, question one is a good one. I laud her for not buying newspapers,
especially since Murdoch turned newspapers into nothing more than bird-cage
liners. Until such people are personally affected by current events, they
tend to steer clear of outside reality.

Dioclese April 10,
2013 at 18:03

Maggie was like Marmite – you either loved her or hated her.

Street parties to celebrate her death by a load of people who weren’t even
born when she was in power are undignified and make me feel ashamed to be
British.

But what really worries me is the power of the left to brainwash these
people. It reminded me of the winter of discontent and the manipulation of the
working masses by their union masters. We should of course remember that that
took place under a Labour government.

From the sick man of Europe to a credible world power again? I’ll drink to
that. Shame that it took Blair and Brown such a short time to turn the clock
back again…

Tony Hand April 10, 2013 at 17:43

Why was she so hated? Why does this persist?

It couldn’t possibly be that she cosied up to and helped escape from
prosecution a mass murdering dictator, while at the same time denouncing
somebody fighting for freedom from the deeply racist apartheid system of south
Africa. Oh no, definitely not that.

The hare April 10, 2013 at 17:53

Occam’s razor is often a useful principal. Sometimes it really is so
simple.

Durandal April 10, 2013 at 18:17

Tony Hand, more like cock in hand. What’s with the freedom fighter
bullshit? He was a terrorist. Look at his legacy of white farmer murders,
massive HIV infection via rape, awful gun crime etc.
Anyway, great piece
of writing. You hit the nail on the head. The lefties are out in such
numbers that it’s difficult for them to appreciate just how many people are
going to get very angry if they disrupt her funeral by taking the law into
the own hands & giving them the beating they have deserved for a very
long time. They might just learn some manners & show a little respect
after this debacle?

Haste Ye Back
April 10, 2013 at 18:20

Remind me – how many airliners were brought down over Britain or British
policewomen died because him?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/8787074/Tony-Blairs-six-secret-visits-to-Col-Gaddafi.html
And
she was right about Mandela.

GildasTheMonk
April 10, 2013 at 18:32

I suggest a read of Robin Renick’s book new book, A Journey With Margaret
Thatcher, part of which was splashed across the News Review section of the
Sunday Times last weekend. Renwick was a high ranking diplomat and her
personal envoy. He describes how although she was opposed to sanctions
because she thought that was not constructive, she lobboed hard to end
apartheid. bollocked Botha, and lobbied hard and played a key role in the
rhe release of Mandela, with whom she got along rather well.
However, I
see she didnt follow the orthodox Leftist view therefore….heretic?

GildasTheMonk
April 10, 2013 at 18:33

Renwick. Apologies.

Tina Willis April 10, 2013 at 17:42

As ever, in our Mag-backed raving-Right non-Brit Murdochized bent-media,
what’s missing is most telling.

So, additional to a Dumbing Down, no hint of the 4-decades unholy axis
‘Maggie-and-Murdoch’. Now no mention of, “millions not even born when she was
in power – yet now mourn her death!”

Why is this?

Because, as learned Lefty, peerless John Pilger has for 5-decades ‘rightly’
noted about all, sins-of-comission and omission, power crazed regimes
perversely posing as ‘Best’ while often among the worst, “What they don’t want
known, they just leave out.”

Don’t Dumb Down. Check facts, join dots, Wize Up !

Dr Cromarty
April 10, 2013 at 17:51

You are Dave Spart and I claim my £5

Cascadian April 10, 2013 at 18:37

Somebody get Tina her Guardian and lithium.

Tina Willis
April 10, 2013 at 19:52

Mag-backed/Murdoch Dumbed-Down Doc Cromarty, go Forth in Tyne with
Cascadian to : ” Tina Willis April 10, 2013 at 18:53 “.

Don’t Dumb-Down, check facts, join dots, Wize Up !

Snotrocket
April 10, 2013 at 19:52

“4-decades unholy axis ‘Maggie-and-Murdoch”?? FOUR???? WTF! And
you talk about “Don’t Dumb Down. Check facts”! Sheesh.
I suppose
you would rather Murdoch had given in to the unions and that newspapers were
still compiled in hot-lead letterpress.

Tina Willis
April 10, 2013 at 20:02

SnotWotchyaThink.

FOUR Decades ‘Unholy Axis Market Thatcherite & Murdoch’ 80s, 90s,
00s, 10s ongoing unchecked, same shit same dawgs !

Don’t Dumb-Down. Recount, recheck facts, join dots , Wize Up!

Ho Hum
April 10, 2013 at 20:24

A Dumb Dumb, a Dumb Dumb, my Kingdom for a Dum Dum

Tina
Willis April 11, 2013 at 09:02

Non-Brit/Rupe Dumbed Down HiHoHUMdingerOfaTroll.

So Dumbed-Down and sexist, IT now resorts to Tina’s tiny typos to
make IT’s NON-point.

Plus Ce Change – Rupe-for-the-rope !

P.S. We don’t achsully back Wild West hangin’s/capital punishment,
even of criminal capitalists (the caring ones R US). BUT mebbe with
Rupe we cud just stretch him a bit. ‘No’ U say ? OK then, A LOT ! Hang
‘im real high, and then streeeetch him real Looooowwww !! As Clint
Deadwood/Josey Wales said to the bounty hunter’s remark, “Tain’t
nuthin personal Josey, a man’s gotta make a livin’ so ahm a-takin ya
in.”

“Yeah ? Well, DYIN’ ain’t much of a livin Boy !” BLAM !!!

Moor Larkin April 11, 2013 at 09:20

@TinaWillis

You do realise that Rupert is going to die too soon? The past is
the past and he has very little future. Rejoice! Rejoice!

Moor Larkin April 11, 2013 at 10:24

Just noticed the huge difference a comma could have made………..

Snotrocket
April 10, 2013 at 20:27

Ahhhh….I should have realised. It’s been some time since I was on
Anna’s blog. I should have seen the Tiny Willy is a troll. End of
engagement.

Tina
Willis April 10, 2013 at 20:52

Raving-Right/Wrong-un Rupe, Dumbed-Down HoHomSnot Trolls.

In a (Murdoch State Meeja) ‘Free Democracy’ ANY dissent from the
raving-Right Dominant Narrative/Imposed Version is now ‘Trolling’
WTF?!

Misqoute Sexy ’70s beer ad, “Dumbing Down Works Wonders!”

Don’t Dumb-Down, check facts, join dots, Wize Up !!

Edited by Anna: Tina, do not try to spam this site with
your advertisements. I have removed the link. Do it again and you will
find that all your posts go into moderation automatically and will
only be released if they are concise, to the point, and advertisement
free.

Ho Hum
April 10, 2013 at 22:03

HoHUMSnot, if you please

I think a visit to Specsavers might help you see your boobs more
easily. Then they won’t get in front of the keyboard so much

Tina
Willis April 11, 2013 at 09:15

Can’t see any ‘Reply’ here to mine-hostess La Raccoon.

So, via SnotWotchyaThink:

“Profuse apologies Anna. The T-shirt/link was NOT intended as an
advert for beer OR clothing, merely a fun way of making a point.
Additionally, in today’s in-yer-face Fraud Market it might be hard to
find many links NOT infected with, Pop-Ups, Pop-Out, Click-On, Buy A
BIGGUN !”

L ots O f Lurve.

TW.

Stuart Watt April 10, 2013 at 17:41

For me, the biggest “crime” was the poll tax. It was so patently unfair to
charge for local services based on a head count and not on the requirements of
your property, let alone on your ability to contribute. It pushed the value of
fair play beyond what most would accept. But more than that, she refused to
listen to the criticism – and the lack of respect that showed for the
electorate was simply appalling. The union thing – well, I was a union member,
and I felt the unions had abused their power, but that was over relatively
early in her tenure. The result was a more sensible coexistence that was a
positive result. But all in all, for me, I felt she was an ideologue. She did
things because she believed they were right, not because there was a good
evidence that they would make things better. Underneath, that was why she
abandoned the North, and Scotland — because they didn’t fit with her vision of
a financially-based service economy, even when they often informed her values.
Rather than try to persuade or transform the North and Scotland, she asserted
power over them.

GildasTheMonk
April 10, 2013 at 18:13

I think you are right to highlight that oiunt Stuart. For various reasons
it was not high on my personal agenda, and I found the antipathy hard to
fathom, but that is not to dismiss the point, merely to admit my own failing
to deal with the point as well as I should

Snotrocket
April 10, 2013 at 19:59

Stuart: Surely, the ‘requirements of your property’ are directly
proportionate to the ‘headcount’ of the people who live in it. So the costs
involved in supplying services should rightly be shared by those who use
them. No? Or did you always believe that a widow, living alone in the big,
empty family house – family now all flown the nest – should pay the same
rates as the fecund dole-fiddling family of four or five working age adults
in their home?

Stuart Watt
April 10, 2013 at 20:10

@Snotrocket:

“Surely, the ‘requirements of your property’ are directly proportionate
to the ‘headcount’ of the people who live in it.”

Not at all. The size and frequency of planning changes will be directly
proportional to the area of your property. Length of road frontage is
another factor: that road has to be maintained, as does the drainage,
street lighting and traffic signals, rubbish collection, recycling,
cleaning, and so on. Lower density housing requires more public transit,
and makes school bus services harder to run. If one person living in a
house with 100 metres of road frontage pays the same for these services as
one person living on the top floor of an apartment block, that is simply
unfair. Similarly, two people living in the same house costs less than
double the cost of one. These were the factors used in calculating
rateable value before the poll tax was proposed.

Snotrocket
April 10, 2013 at 20:22

@Stuart: I take it that you think a large family produces the same
waste and recycling as a single person living alone. And requires the
same services – based on the house alone and not the people in it. Well,
a house up the road from me has four working-age adults living in it,
and it has the same council tax rating as the same house next door
occupied by a widower living alone (and yes, I know he gets 25%
discount). I would like to think that all who work should pay towards
the local services they use and which support them. But then, I guess we
shall always disagree….

Ho Hum April 10, 2013 at 20:20

Before you two argue yourselves up a cul-de-sac, can I suggest you both
find out more about what local government taxes do cover? I think you’ll
find it’s a wee bit more than being only costs relating to the
‘requirements of your property’, and the measurement of use of what is
provided is nothing as easy as might be envisaged by the unduly simplistic
‘nice old widow/horrible dirty scroungers’ example.

Snotrocket
April 10, 2013 at 20:35

You make a good point, Ho Hum. But I think the key element of your
‘local government taxes’ is that they are ‘local’. It really doesn’t
matter too much what it is they cover (and I am aware of the range they
cover), it is that all local people capable of contributing to the costs
– ie: earning a living, or capable of doing so – should make a
contribution. Is that not fair?

Ho Hum
April 10, 2013 at 21:09

‘Local’ is stretching things a bit far. 26% of my councils total
spend comes from RSG, with a further 16% from Ring Fenced Core Grants
so only 58% is really locally collected. Of that a further 15% is
collected by direct charges so the actual council tax only covers 43%
of total spend.

Sure, you have to try to make collection fair, but as an example,
if 20% of the gross covers Children and Education, with only about 2%
being recovered by direct charges, if we assume, for sake of
simplicity, that we can just pro-rate the offsetting RSG and Core
Grants, some 12/43 (very rough and rounded!) of the locally collected
tax would go on Education. Who should pay for that on your ‘fair’
basis?

And the more you delve, the less easy it gets

Penseivat April 10, 2013 at 22:56

If, together with the couple who live next door, you take your family of
4 to the cinema or theatre, you pay tickets for each one of your family, not
for the household. You can’t complain that your neighbours are only paying
for two tickets while you have to pay for 4. Similarly in a restaurant, on a
bus, a holiday or for shoes. You are paying for the extra service that the 4
of you require. The poll tax worked, or would have worked, in the same way.
The problem was that Thatcher miscalculated in starting it off in Scotland
where, as many people know, there are people who feel angry that they are
finally having to pay for something instead of being subsidised by those
south of Hadrians Wall. Also, being socialist, they obtained the backing of
their political brothers down south who, in turn, switched on the mobs they
controlled. The rest is history as far as the poll tax is concerned. The
fact that Wilson and Benn closed almost twice as many coal mines as Thatcher
did seems to have been forgotten (or conveniently ignored by the Guardian
reading, chianti slurping, socialist intelligentsia ) as has the more than
12,000 miners who were made redundant under Wilson and Viscount
Stansgate.

Stuart Watt
April 10, 2013 at 23:15

@Penseivat

In most restaurants I’ve been to you, you pay for what you eat, not by
headcount. Furthermore expensive restaurants charge more than cheap ones,
and I can choose which to go to. A flat rate makes this a nonsense. Same
with shoes. When we can choose what level of service we want (i.e., have a
market) then there is some validity. That was not the case. This was a
tax.

As to your amusing comments about Scotland, you are reprising a myth.
Scotland has a marginally lower contribution to the UK than average, but
it’s very marginal. Attributing anger to them, and considering what
happened in England as remote controlled “mobs”, is to misrepresent what
happened. I lived in Dorset at the time – not a hotbed of radicalism and
with a sitting Tory MP – but the protests there were forceful and involved
far the majority of the local community. This was grass-roots civic
protest with a good measure of disobedience, well after Scotland had
already faced the poll tax.

Penseivat
April 11, 2013 at 11:21

Stuart,
You are correct that expensive restaurants cost more than
cheaper ones. Similarly, 5 people in a larger house on a more suburban
street would have paid more than 5 people living in a smaller house on,
say, a council estate. Of course, it was a tax, just as the Rates (as it
was then) was a tax based on the rateable value of the property (big
house – more rates; smaller house – less rates). However, the fact was
that it was unfair for 2 adult people living in one house to pay the
same rates as the 5 adult people living in the house next door. No tax
is completely fair. There will always be someone who is worse off
through no fault of their own but it is impossible to find a perfect
solution which pleases everyone. Thatcher tried. Unfortunately, it
didn’t work, but that was due more to action by the left-wing rentamobs
than by political debate, reason and logic.
I will also have to agree
to disagree with you regarding Scotland, which had at the time a higher
per person subsidy than England and still does. I grew up in the North
East, a staunch labour stronghold where Tufty the road safety squirrel
would have been elected if it had worn a red rosette. The grocer’s shop
down the road was attacked and set alight because the owner was a
Conservative Councillor – elected because he was known as a fair minded,
honest, man who fought for everyone in his ward irrespective of plitical
views – and the people who did it were probably customers of his or who
had been helped by him. His car was damaged and his children were
bullied in and out of school. Similar acts were carried out throughout
the North East in the name of a misguided political ideal. There are
people I disagree with politically but I don’t set fire to their
property or attack them. The left wing did. There is a difference
between civic disobedience and criminal riot. Unfortunately, those who
disagreed with Thatcher either wouldn’t or wouldn’t tell the difference.
Meanwhile Labour politicians, both local and central, did nothing to
stop this or even say anything against it. My uncle was a miner who was
made redundant when his pit was closed by the actions of Anthony
Wedgewood-Benn, Viscount Stansgate, who was a Minister in Harold
Wilson’s Government, yet in the Workmen’s Clubs it was always ‘the witch
Thatcher’ who was responsible for the death of the mining industry.

Pud April 11, 2013 at 13:32

I see you’ve picked on the weak analogy of restaurant as community
charge but ignored the better examples of cinema visit and bus journey.
Four adults on a cinema trip buy four tickets, one adult buys one. Four
adults sharing a house should pay four times local services tax than one
adult, regardless of what proportion of local services are actually
funded by local tax.
And I’m totally bemused by your linking of
“Length of road frontage” to rubbish collection – does your “one person
living in a house with 100 metres of road frontage” really throw away
more rubbish than the “one person living on the top floor of an
apartment block” BECAUSE they live in a big house?

Ho Hum April 11, 2013 at 12:05

Where I live, 61% of the Council’s total gross spend goes on children’s
services and adult social care. That included things like schools, and all
the local services that help keep disabled and older people out of more
expensive hospital or residential care. Now how does a flat rate poll tax,
which makes every individual pay the same, result in an equally fair
charge relative to their consumption of services, or volume of services
required? You really are talking bollocks when making comparisons with
restaurant bills.

It almost makes me cry when I watch otherwise apparently intelligent
people consistently fail to be able to work out for themselves that most
taxes and insurance work on the same principle – ie you are paying a
contribution towards the risks that we all face, but hope that you
personally never ever really have to make a claim in respect of. Most will
happily pay, under government mandated compulsion, for insurance for their
car, but bridle if something, which in essence does the same thing, is
called a tax, because they seem to be unable to understand the full
monetary circle, or make any causal link between what goes in and what
comes out. Forget any differences between how they they are run or
administered. There is no real difference in what they achieve. And those
who dodge either are utterly despicable as they put costs up for those
that pay, or restrict payout values to those who qualify for payment under
the ‘policy’. The bottom line is no insurance will ever pay out, or
provide services to, to any individual at a value equivalent to what they
contribute. They are just not meant to.

Once you get that into your head, then you can argue about the policy
content, what it should cover, the value of the quantum that needs to be
set aside to meet qualifying claims, and hence the level of contributions
required and so on. But if you can’t cope with the imbalances that will
exist within it as the incidence of risk falls differently, then you might
as well toddle off to somewhere where you pay solely to look after ‘me my
and mine’, contribute nothing to the common good, and live somewhat
apprehensively in a world where, if it comes crashing down on you
tomorrow, you can have no legitimate expectation that anyone will do any
more for you than you did for them. But don’t expect to live anywhere that
can be even remotely described as a developed civilisation

m.barnes
April 11, 2013 at 14:19

Thatcher started the Poll Tax in Scotland where, as many people know,
there had been a great deal of voter anger at a sudden re-rating of
properties (a re-rating can that had been kicked down the road a few times
by that stage). She thought it would be a vote winner. She didn’t explain
it properly, she didn’t do any PR on it, she didn’t trial it and then
extend it, she mocked those who started to object rather than dealing with
their points so the greater public ‘got it’…… in other words, she just
bolloxed it up. Oh, that’s right, she’s bloody brilliant at everything and
had a cat called pussikins so that proves she was wonderful to animals
too… she couldn’t possibly have just bolloxed something up. Musta been one
of those ministers she was always falling out with.

Whatever the reason, it has bugger all to do with ‘people who feel
angry that they are finally having to pay for something instead of being
subsidised by those south of Hadrians Wall’. That particular comment is
clearly more to do with your own personal prejudices. I may as well say
that those miners strikes were all to do with a bunch of over-priviledged
moles from the North East of England expecting the rest of the country to
pay them homage for digging up a few bits of black brick.

Ho Hum
April 11, 2013 at 14:58

There are other views about how these things came to pass.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2009/05/david-torrance-debunking-the-myths-about-margaret-thatcher-and-scotland.html

My recollection is that, at the time, none of that would have readily
made its way into the popular understanding. Rather more prominent in my
memory was the portrayal of Gerry Malone as being some sort of smug git
who had volunteered Scotland for it. But the extent of real truth in
that is also difficult to discern now

But I do like the phrase ‘over privileged moles’ I am going to do an
Oscar Wilde with that one…

Lucozade
April 11, 2013 at 17:47

m.barnes,

Re: “I may as well say that those miners strikes were all to do with
a bunch of over-priviledged moles from the North East of England
expecting the rest of the country to pay them homage for digging up a
few bits of black brick”

Lol, good one

m.barnes April 11, 2013 at 14:05

Good points SW. I have a vivid memory of Thatcher on one of her very few
trips to Scotland (Rifkind used to dread them) lecturing an impertinent
journo in that slow.measured.fake.low.timbre. that Scots were better under
the Conservatives, they were just too stupid to realise it. A Clinton she
was not! Mrs Thatcher did many necessary things but the mistake a lot of
people nowadays make is assuming that a)these things wouldn’t have happened
anyway and b) that her methodologies were the only ones that would ever
succeed. Because we are looking at history, we assume it could only ever
have happened that way.
Margaret Thatcher reminds me of many business
directors I have encountered. They achieve results but are dictatorial
bullies – people leave their depts, leave with fat compromise agreements,
keep their heads down and don’t make suggestions, nobody with any talent
wants to join their teams and they are constantly being warned to cool it by
HR. No-one sacks them (or suggests they find another job elsewhere) because
they do not believe that the same results can be gained by another type of
Director, one who demands just as much but has the talent to take people
with them. Sooner or later the bully leaves, usually because they’ve been
overlooked for some promotion they believe they deserve, or because the
company finally gets tired of writing cheques to hide constructive
dismissals. These Directors are good not great. Great Directors – like great
PM’s – get the same results without the bullying or bitterness.
I don’t
like Margaret Thatcher because she was a bully and I despise bullies. She
gloried in her rep for plain talking to point were she showed all the
empathy and sensitivity of a brick. She had a tin ear for how different
people express their views and alienated a whole bunch of people that
probably agreed with her actions just not the way she delivered them. And to
leave behind the devastated areas she did, with no serious attempt to
encourage new industries, was a big black mark against her – and the
Governments blue and red after her that also failed to even glance that
way.
I am not a fan – she was a good PM, not a great one. A great one
wouldn’t have left behind the bitterness she did. But then maybe I set the
bar a bit high.
Lets be clear – the Unions did for the the Unions.
Scargill did for the miners. It is a great irony that Margaret Thatcher fell
victim to the the same hubris Scargill did – having won some battles (right
or wrong) they both believed themselves invincible.

Ho Hum April 11, 2013 at 14:40

But her style certainly doesn’t mean she wasn’t needed, nor some of
what she did wasn’t good. It just meant she shouldn’t have been allowed to
stay as long, as the Tories all recognised by the time they got rid of
her. Their problem was they didn’t have the guts to do it earlier

Look at most successful corporate turnrounds. They are those where the
Board hires a hatchet man, gets him to do what’s necessary, and then get
shot of him as fast as possible because they realise that you can’t run
anything on undue continuous change, chaos, and demagoguery, the type of
environment that most hatchet men thrive in. You need someone to then make
the organisation move on in a more sensible manner

It’s part of the general problem that the UK public sector is faced
with. Nothing is left alone long enough to bed down to work properly.
There is always going to be some crisis in some corner of the woods that
‘must be seen to be dealt with’ on a global scale, and the merry-go-round
that is the average Cabinet reshuffle merely dumps in someone else, out to
make a name for themselves, with all the continuity and stability that
that is going to offer.

In Health, you now have a complete corporate restructure almost every
two years and the only thing you could ever be certain of was that the
re-organisation you were making happen today was going to be the one you
were going to have to unpick tomorrow. It’s a miracle anything continues
to work at all, and it’s mainly just the sheer determination of most
involved at local level that keeps the wheels on. People not directly
involved haven’t got a clue.

Chris
Barratt April 10, 2013 at 17:38

It seems to have been mainly Under-25s rioting. Lemmings who’s ability to
think has been bred out of them.
Someone must’ve told em that this Market
Thatcher woman was an evil murderer from the 70s like Hitler & that peado
Jimmy Savile an’ that. So we smash up some charity shops and show that David
Cameron he best stop being a millionaire Tory wanker from Eating or we’ll
smash up some more of em yeah.

Lucozade April 10, 2013 at 18:05

Re: “It seems to have been mainly Under-25s rioting”

Though in Glasgow it looked like mainly older people and I bet it was
organized by older people and the rest just went along for a ‘laugh’,
something to do.

Definitely, my parents are a lot better off now than they were under
Margarate Thatcher, whether thats just a sign of the times or because they
are older now I don’t know.

Daedalus X.
Parrot April 11, 2013 at 17:18

There are two reasons that your parents are better off:

1. They thrived on the prosperity that Maggie’s policies brought to
this country and which benefited us all from the mid 1980s until squatter
Brown finally crushed prosperity in the early 2000s.

2. It is possible that your parents are much richer now because you are
no longer living off, I mean, with them.

Lucozade
April 11, 2013 at 18:12

Daedalus X. Parrott,

Re: “There are two reasons that your parents are better off:

1. They thrived on the prosperity that Maggie’s policies brought to
this country and which benefited us all from the mid 1980s until
squatter Brown finally crushed prosperity in the early 2000s.

2. It is possible that your parents are much richer now because you
are no longer living off, I mean, with them”

The 2nd one will definitely be a reason.

However, they were skint during the late 80′s and early 90′s and
that’s with them both having degrees, and my dad tried applying for
another job for years and the only one he was eventually accepted for
was in a shit little village in the middle of nowhere, and we had to
move, bloody terrible….

Mewsical April
12, 2013 at 19:13

Hey, Luco – not really relevant to this thread, but I thought you would
find it at least amusing that the 70sDuncroft lot think that you and I are
the same person!

Lucozade
April 13, 2013 at 12:18

Mewsical,

“Hey, Luco – not really relevant to this thread, but I thought you
would find it at least amusing that the 70sDuncroft lot think that you
and I are the same person!”

It might be because I quoted an exchange between you and ‘Tracie’ in
‘Past lives and present misgivings part 7′ (I didn’t include your name
though) in a comment I posted on “The great British Whine industry” –
thats probably evidence enough for them, lol

Mewsical April 13, 2013 at 16:21

Stupid is as stupid does.

Lucozade
April 13, 2013 at 18:28

Mewsical,

Sorry, won’t do it again.

I’m sure if they read any of my other posts it would be pretty
obvious we’re not the same people….

Moor
Larkin April 10, 2013 at 16:37

I’m glad you wrote that because I couldn’t have done it half as well.

My only addendum is that Maggie *won* versus the Miners, partly because
Scargill in full flow was scarily reminiscent of Adolf Hitler in the old
news-reels, but it was mostly because she had the will of the broad mass of
the British people behind her. The ones who voted for her, and than sat and
watched what she did, and then who voted for her again. I believe her only
later expressed regret was the THEY never had the chance to actually reject
her.

Jonathan Mason
April 10, 2013 at 17:20

My parents were huge fans of Thatcher. My mother used to say of the
budget, “The country needs to be run like a business” and in her view
Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter was the person to do that. Of course
businesses cannot print their own money, so that economic theory only goes
so far. But I think huge numbers of people who had lived through World War
II, married, raised children, bought homes on mortgages, and become
moderately prosperous, identified very strongly with her as someone making
common cause with them.