The day that Thatcher dies

showmet · Jun 10, 2004

...how will you react?

the_river_daughter · Jun 10, 2004

to mangle a Buffy quote -

party in my dole queue and everyone's invited!

not that i'm bitter about her, ahem, reforms of course. but a lot of my family workerd darn t'pit us yorkshire folks!

river xxx

exetaycblues · Jun 10, 2004

Britain will have a brand new public urinal on her grave.

rockchef · Jun 10, 2004

exetaycblues said:

Britain will have a brand new public urinal on her grave.
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and i will be the first to use it mate good riddance to her the sooner the better i say

showmet · Jun 10, 2004

I asked the question because I was sitting outside my tent in the middle of a busy roundabout in Chichester on Sunday morning when I heard the news of Reagan's death on the radio. I let out a cheer.

I then felt slightly bad about it. It's a personal tragedy, but a matter of public hygiene, isn't it?

DoktorAtomik · Jun 10, 2004

I don't feel great about Reagan's death, because that fucker was just stupid. Bush Snr. was pulling his strings during his time in the whitehouse.

Thatcher, on the other hand, was one thoroughly calculatedly evil bitch. The day she dies will be a day of much celebration. Not because I wish her to suffer, but rather because the world will be a slightly better place for her passing.

Paul · Jun 10, 2004

As much as I disliked Margaret Thatcher, I wouldn't celebrate her death. That would make me as low as she was.

However I dread a month of tribute programmes and 12 page newspaper specials.

However I probably won't even realise she's dead until a week later.

Claire · Jun 10, 2004

I would be sad for her family and friends, hope she didnt suffer... and think no more...

She is not the worst person in the world... well not quite

Love Learning and Freedom Clairexxx

Spyder · Jun 10, 2004

thatcher will never die, she's walking immortal surely! if she's not dead now, and she must be over 1000 she'll never die

shes probally got a packed with satan

DoktorAtomik · Jun 10, 2004

shes probally got a packed with satan
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Maybe Chickabean could check for us?

Power_13 · Jun 10, 2004

Mock her all you will, but I think Mrs Thatcher isn't looking too bad for her age.

I'd hit it.

EarthWhirler · Jun 10, 2004

Paul said:

However I dread a month of tribute programmes and 12 page newspaper specials.
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Groan.....and all those people talking about how wonderful she was, all the great things that she did, I think I may have to leave the country!

Maon · Jun 10, 2004

I find it reallys sad to see something like this up here .. wishing anyone dead .. but I have to say that the festering flea ridden boil from a Grantham butcher should have been dragged out of her mothers womb and roasted on a spit over a coal fire in a travellers camp.

Not only did that not happen but we allowed her to reproduce, though that silly twat nearly did us all a favour and cashed his chips in in the desert. Shame his mother wasn't in the car with him.

Alomiakoda · Jun 10, 2004

Maon said:

I find it reallys sad to see something like this up here .. wishing anyone dead .. but I have to say that the festering flea ridden boil from a Grantham butcher should have been dragged out of her mothers womb and roasted on a spit over a coal fire in a travellers camp.

Not only did that not happen but we allowed her to reproduce, though that silly twat nearly did us all a favour and cashed his chips in in the desert. Shame his mother wasn't in the car with him.
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Jeeeesus...even Giles hates her

EarthWhirler · Jun 10, 2004

Maon said:

I find it reallys sad to see something like this up here .. wishing anyone dead .. but I have to say that the festering flea ridden boil from a Grantham butcher should have been dragged out of her mothers womb and roasted on a spit over a coal fire in a travellers camp.
Click to expand...

Oh my God, I think I've just wet myself!!!!

Kabbalist · Jun 11, 2004

During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination.

I think I'm a big fan of mrs. M. She's showed us her courage and the will to go on. She is one of the strongest persons in the UK history!

DoktorAtomik · Jun 11, 2004

Will Hutton
Sunday March 24, 2002
The Observer

How much better a place Britain would have been had Baroness Thatcher never existed. Its politics would be less disfigured, its society less unequal, its public services less run down and its Conservative media less rabid. It would be more at peace with Europe and with itself. She was the high priestess of prejudice, breaking the back of her own political party and the principles of the Labour Party alike.

Her imposed exile from public life is a welcome relief even though she deserves sympathy for her damaged health. The larger truth remains. The country needs a national conversation on Left and Right alike to release us from the alleged political truths that Thatcherism represents - from the prohibition on raising income tax to visceral distrust of all things European and acclamation of all things American. The sooner her long shadow disappears the better.

This is not, I know, the accepted common sense. Love her or hate her, runs the conventional wisdom, but you have to accept that a lot of what she did, although unpopular at the time, has turned out for the best. Even many on the Left reluctantly concede that the British economy seems to have benefited from her attentions, while on the Right she is lionised for her determination, her unbending principles and her clear-sighted, as they would put it, hostility to the European project. For them, she ranks with Churchill as our best twentieth-century Prime Minister.

I beg to differ. Ideas and circumstance, laced with chance, are what drive politics and Lady Thatcher was no more than an abnormally prejudiced middle-order Conservative politician who benefited from all three. I submit that such was the climate of ideas in the 1980s that the Conservative Party under any leader would have introduced those acts of economic liberalisation that have benefited the economy, but under a Patten, Howe, Heseltine or Clarke the reforms would have been introduced more intelligently and with more regard to the party's hard-won, one-nation image, which was central to its popularity. Without her, the Tory party would have been a more live and credible force today, and the centre of gravity of British politics would be much nearer the fundamental dispositions and interests of the British.

Yet she characterised the Tory politicians who understood this truth as 'wets' or not 'one of us', 'us' being the cabal which had seized control of the party in the wake of the Heath government's alleged failings. The cabal would dismiss all the postwar Conservative governments as closet socialists who, in making a compact with the Labour Party to uphold the welfare state, engage with organised labour and invest in great public services, had wandered from the path of true British Conservatism.

The Thatcherites' success was uniquely blessed by circumstance. The inflation and poor growth that plagued all Western economies of the 1970s as a result of the two oil shocks appeared an intractable economic malaise, and Lady Thatcher and her cabal had the luck to be able to align their prejudices with the rising conservative ideology of the time, which argued that all economic problems originated not in a particular international economic conjuncture but in the overweening state.

Her understanding of free-market economics and monetarism was sometimes embarrassingly hazy, but that didn't matter. She had the wit to see she had fallen upon political gold. She disliked trade unions, thought nationalised industries inefficient and saw the job of the Tories to be on the side of the wealthy at home while opposing communism abroad. It was a simple credo and apart from her foreign policy aims - shared between the parties - was difficult to pursue in the context of the postwar settlement. Suddenly, she was presented with a linking philosophy that could bind her prejudices into an over-arching ideological whole - Thatcherism.

Ten years earlier and the moment would not have been propitious; 10 years later and the wilder claims would have been seen to be specious. Nobody now, for example, believes that there is an identity between the growth of money supply and subsequent inflation - one of the Thatcherite mantras - or that a market economy is naturally self-regulating, but between 1976 and 1986 they had the status of new truths. She was lucky.

She was doubly lucky that her economic mistakes did not cost her more politically at the time. The arrival of North Sea oil plugged a gap in both the Government's finances and those of our international accounts at a key moment, while during the 1980s it became obvious that globalisation was working to Britain's advantage; the City prospered, inward investment flooded in and new growth sectors were kicking in to compensate for the pain inflicted on the old.

She was lucky, too, in her enemies; General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill were straight from central casting. Another Conservative Prime Minister could equally have benefited from the dividend of Britain's armed forces in action or the careful planning that made sure that Scargill's strikers were disabled by large coal stockpiles and employment laws that limited secondary picketing. Lady Thatcher was in the right place at the right time.

And while she believed in market disciplines and removal of subsidy for the poor and the workforce, there was to be little or none for members of her own coalition, whether farmers, the nuclear industry, the City or homebuyers. This was the era in which the foundations were laid for the great inequalities that beset today's Britain.

Thatcher deployed Conservative economics to lower taxes breathtakingly on the rich and propertied while cutting back spending and investment in core public services, the legacy the country now faces in the NHS, education and transport and whose magnitude New Labour is only beginning to confront.

For she was the 'conviction' politician prepared to pull what levers she needed to fulfil her mission - and process be damned. The weaknesses of the British constitution were used to centralise political control; well-intentioned politicians should not be obstructed by constitutional niceties, another Thatcherite lesson well-learnt by her successors. The custodianship of ancient liberties can no longer be expected from those in charge of the British executive.

Her premiership was not one of unrelieved mistakes; there is little doubt that some reigning back of trade union power was imperative, while some of the early privatisations have proved effective. Equally, today's marked improvement in state education has its roots in the framework of the national curriculum, testing and inspection launched by successive Tory Education Ministers.

Other Tory leaders, though, could have achieved the same without the huge accompanying costs. And for those who lionise the performance of the economy as tribute to her years, it is Gordon Brown, not Lady Thatcher, who has been Chancellor for the last five years.

The overall balance sheet grows yet more negative if her cultural impact on politics is added to the ledger. In her early years of office, she reluctantly allowed a rational assessment of Britain's national interests to frame her policies, notably signing Britain up for the single European market in 1985, but by the end she had turned the relationship inside out, her prejudices instead determining Britain's national interests, whether over the poll tax or the EU.

So it is that while a pre-Thatcherite Prime Minister such as Harold Wilson would accept the advice of the Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Office that Britain's national interests would not be served by fighting in Vietnam, a post-Thatcherite Prime Minister - Tony Blair - is prepared to override their unanimous advice and contemplate invasion of Iraq. His willingness may never be called upon, but the Thatcherite legacy is evident - instincts and uncritical following of the US triumph over a rational calculation of British national interest. Her voice may be stilled, but her baleful influence continues. The next phase in Britain's growth demands that we forget her - and realistically appraise what she actually achieved.

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Maon · Jun 11, 2004

Kabbalist said:

During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination.

I think I'm a big fan of mrs. M. She's showed us her courage and the will to go on. She is one of the strongest persons in the UK history!
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how uniformed of the big picture you really are !

DoktorAtomik · Jun 11, 2004

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DoktorAtomik · Jun 11, 2004

THAT is THE biggest load of shite I have heard this century
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I was trying to be polite-ish, but yeah, what a load of retarded bullshit.

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The day that Thatcher dies

showmet olen tomppeli

the_river_daughter rebel scum

exetaycblues Member

rockchef Member

showmet olen tomppeli

DoktorAtomik Closed For Business

Paul Cheap and Cheerful

Claire Senior Member

Spyder La dah de dah

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Power_13 insult ninja

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Alomiakoda Boniface McSporran

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The day that Thatcher dies

showmet olen tomppeli

the_river_daughter rebel scum

exetaycblues Member

rockchef Member

showmet olen tomppeli

DoktorAtomik Closed For Business

Paul Cheap and Cheerful

Claire Senior Member

Spyder La dah de dah

DoktorAtomik Closed For Business

Power_13 insult ninja

EarthWhirler Member

Maon Member

Alomiakoda Boniface McSporran

EarthWhirler Member

Kabbalist Member

DoktorAtomik Closed For Business

Maon Member

DoktorAtomik Closed For Business

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