Margaret Thatcher 1925-2013

[fred41]

C'mon Stavros... never let the truth get in the way of a good political joke. After all our leaders never bother with the truth.

I'm sorry Prospero. I have a lot of respect for you...but that is not meant to be a political cartoon.If you agree with Stavros's assessment, then its just propaganda.
If you think he is wrong, then show where he is wrong.

[Prospero]

Me and Stavros have a long running nit picking thing. Don't let it concern you.

However i will concede that I can find nothing to verify Thatcher calling him "a grubby little terrorist."

Here are some notes pf things she did do and say...


"The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land' - Margaret Thatcher, 1987 She supported apartheid, and then later came to oppose it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...rtheid-mandela

As education secretary she presided over the axing of free milk in schools – earning herself the nick name “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.”

She did increase VAT and introduced the poll tax – provoking some of the worst riots seen in central London for many decades

She also harboured Pinochet – though Stavros is right that Labour is also culpable in this. It was because of Chile’s support for the UK during the Falkland Island conflict.

She did deplete public housing stock. By allowing the sale of council houses and then refusing to allow local authorities to replace them. Provoking a shortage being felt today.

And he smashed the miner’s strike and used the police as political paramilitaries.

[Jericho]

I'm sorry Prospero. I have a lot of respect for you...but that is not meant to be a political cartoon.If you agree with Stavros's assessment, then its just propaganda.
If you think he is wrong, then show where he is wrong.

They're kinda like HA's version of....

[fred41]

They're kinda like HA's version of....

...okay.

[fred41]

Me and Stavros have a long running nit picking thing. Don't let it concern you.

However i will concede that I can find nothing to verify Thatcher calling him "a grubby little terrorist."

Here are some notes pf things she did do and say...


"The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land' - Margaret Thatcher, 1987 She supported apartheid, and then later came to oppose it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...rtheid-mandela

As education secretary she presided over the axing of free milk in schools – earning herself the nick name “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.”

She did increase VAT and introduced the poll tax – provoking some of the worst riots seen in central London for many decades

She also harboured Pinochet – though Stavros is right that Labour is also culpable in this. It was because of Chile’s support for the UK during the Falkland Island conflict.

She did deplete public housing stock. By allowing the sale of council houses and then refusing to allow local authorities to replace them. Provoking a shortage being felt today.

And he smashed the miner’s strike and used the police as political paramilitaries.

Thanks ...that Guardian article was quite interesting.

[Prospero]

Oh and Fred --- do not rely on anything posted on here for reliable political info about the UK.

[fred41]

Oh and Fred --- do not rely on anything posted on here for reliable political info about the UK.

Believe me, I understand that ...but I hold some of you to a higher standard based on past performance...especially in the political thread.

Don't let me down...lol.

[Ben]

BBC & the Thatcher Hate song Ding Dong the Witch is Dead:

[Stavros]

Me and Stavros have a long running nit picking thing. Don't let it concern you.

However i will concede that I can find nothing to verify Thatcher calling him "a grubby little terrorist."

Here are some notes pf things she did do and say...


"The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land' - Margaret Thatcher, 1987 She supported apartheid, and then later came to oppose it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...rtheid-mandela

As education secretary she presided over the axing of free milk in schools – earning herself the nick name “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.”

She did increase VAT and introduced the poll tax – provoking some of the worst riots seen in central London for many decades

She also harboured Pinochet – though Stavros is right that Labour is also culpable in this. It was because of Chile’s support for the UK during the Falkland Island conflict.

She did deplete public housing stock. By allowing the sale of council houses and then refusing to allow local authorities to replace them. Provoking a shortage being felt today.

And he smashed the miner’s strike and used the police as political paramilitaries.

Prospero, if you read Richard Dowden's article again you will see that it contradicts your claim that She supported apartheid, and then later came to oppose it. She publicly condemned apartheid in the Finchley Times in 1977 and was pretty consistent throughout her tenure of the Tory Party.

Part of the problem with Dowden's article and the historic memory is that Thatcher on more than one occasion condemned apartheid, but owing to the political affiliation of the South African Communist Party and the ANC, and the perception that the ANC was as a consequence a 'Pro-Moscow' party, her opposition to Apartheid did not automatically mean support for the ANC which as Dowden and everyone else who can remember knows was and is not the only political organisation in South Africa. I had an 'energetic' discussion with an American supporter of Ronald Reagan at a famous English university in 1988 precisely on this issue.

In 1977 South Africa began to develop a Total Strategy Doctine in which the primary threat to South Africa was perceived to be Communism -this was a 'natural' evolution of the politics in the southern cone following the collapse of Portuguese colonial rule in 1974 and the civil wars that broke out in Angola and Mozambique (resulting in the contested governments of 'Marxists' in those two countries), added to which the settlement in Zimbabwe was seen by some as a 'triumph' for the 'Marxist' Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF. In South Africa, the either/or Total Strategy Doctrine was thus designed to thwart Moscow's ambitions to run the southern cone, but it meant that if you didn't support PW Botha and the Apartheid regime, it was because you were soft on Communism. The merger of the entire future of South Africa as an anti-communist redoubt with Apartheid as its ideology meant, as I tried to explain to my American friend, that Margaret Thatcher in the context of the Total Strategy Doctine was a Communist, or Communist sympathiser. You can read about the doctrine in chapter one of Martin Meredith's book South Africa: Time of Agony, Time of Destiny (Verso, 1987).

I am not trying to polish Mrs T's reputation, I fought against her long enough! But here is just one of her public comments, from the Lord Mayor of London's banquet in 1985:

My Lord Mayor, I detest apartheid. I couldn't stand being excluded or discriminated against because of the colour of my own skin. And if you can't stand a colour bar against yourself, you can't stand it against anyone else. Apartheid is wrong and it must go. Major changes are taking place in South Africa. We should welcome and encourage them.

In the broader context of her political career, it beggars belief that anyone can suggest ending the provision of school milk was some sort of blow against an inherited freedom. As one other poster has also said, we hated it and I for one was delighted when it was ended. It might have been ok in the winter, but having to drink that stuff in the spring and summer months was virtually a form of punishment. You think they bothered to put it in the school kitchen's fridge? Not even in bourgeois Beckenham! It just stayed outside in the sunlight to curdle and make schoolboys sick!

Again, falling back on the tired old pseudo-left platitudes: what leader of a trade union -the National Union of Mineworkers -whose membership was decimated in the 1960s under a Labour government owing to a steep fall in the demand for its product, decides, in the Spring, with an abundance of coal stocks at power stations, to call a national strike without a ballot of their members? And why would anyone who believes in the importance of climate change and advanced global warming waste a moment of their time supporting a product as dirty and responsible for greenhouse gas emissions as coal? Arthur Scargill was one of the key figures in the defeat of Labour in the 1980s, he learned nothing from the loss of power in 1979 and the failure to win in 1983. Yes, the manner in which the government reacted was extreme, but the Tories planned this before they even got into power; they made an aggressive attack on trade unions part of their weaponry because they knew from public surveys that a majority of the British public wanted the unions tamed. If you choose, look for an article that the late Nicolas Ridley in 1978 wrote for The Economist, called Appomotox or Civil War? It was a declaration, avant le lettre, that the Tories would not be caught out again by the Miners, and that they would rather the country descend into civil war than give into Scargill's demands. It was a catastrophe from the beginning, but underlying it all was a staggeringly simple statistic: 94% of Britain's energy in 1960 was derived from coal, by 1980 coal amounted to 4%; the rest being made up of oil and gas.

And yet again, how popular was the sale of council houses? Wasn't it one of the most popular policies that she introduced? Yes, it did impact on local government, because local councils can't afford to build homes for people to live in, but is the long term effect, the absence of affordable housing solely derived from Mrs T's policies? Labour was in power 11 years Prospero, what happened in that decade? Harold Macmillan's tenure as Prime Minister between 1958 and 1963 witnessed more affordable housing newbuilds than New Labour between 1997 and 2010.

A proper analysis of the legacy of Mrs Thatcher can only be glimpsed from some policy options; she inherited long-term problems that had been building up in the British economy since 1945; she contributed to changes in British society in spite of what she might have believed herself, because there were trends that remain beyond politics, an obvious one being human relations and attitudes to gender and sexuality.

For me what I always found so painful was the failure of the Labour movement I had been part of to mount a coherent challenge; the left fell apart in the 1980s, by the end of which standard forms of socialism were discredited, and even standard forms of social democracy as practised in Sweden and Denmark coming under challenge. From the very beginning, Keith Joseph, the intellectual architect of Thatcherism, had declared that the Conservative Party had to turn the ratchet of British politics to the Right, away from a centre established by Clement Attlee, retained by Hugh Gaitskell and maintained by the Tory Rab Butler. It was crucial to establish that free enterprise and private property mark the centre ground; and Tony Blair and New Labour agreed, and banged in the final nail in the coffin of the party created by Keir Hardie; even Ramsay MacDonald would have been ashamed of some of the things Mandelson said to justify the obliteration of the Labour Party's legacy, and all for votes. The Labour Party today was shaped by Margaret Thatcher; I don't know how many Labour MP's fiddled their expenses and went to prison or were publicly shamed because of it, but by the time these things were exposed, those people had long ago lost the right to represent anyone but themselves.

[fivekatz]

Of all of Thatcher's domestic policies the one that I as a foreigner see as the most regressive was her strong stand on poll tax and VAT. Much of the stuff with state owned industry and the unions was difficult to comprehend an ocean away in nation where the media has such a myopic world view. Poll tax in particular because of how it was used in America is on the surface repugnant.