Margaret Thatcher

People in the UK are no longer living the Socialist dream that existed prior to Thatcher.
So many people have become capitalists by owning their own homes because of Thatcher.
One thing I blame her for and I don't know if I'm correct but I think she may have destroyed the public transportation system to a degree. Now a lot of people have had to buy cars to get around.
Although manufacturing has had some problems I think overall the factories are thriving because there are less strikes.
IMO
Cheers

There are many who would say...what manufacturing? The manufacturing sector has been in continual decline in the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years, so hardly anyone left to strike. But wait....now it's the public sector, so what did she solve by 'beating' the unions? I strongly sympathize with the families who ONLY had coal mining...and now are in the 3rd generation of no work.

Buying a council house is a good idea in principle, as long as councils are allowed to build replacement affordable rental housing. Not everyone should own a home for many reasons, and the downside of selling off the council houses was that it lead to increased homelessness. Housing associations didn't fill the gap, and the ultimate social (and financial) cost was far greater than any theoretical savings.

For
The Miners
The Shipbuilders
The Steelworkers
The Old that Froze to Death
The Old that Couldn't Afford Food
For the Thousands Made Homeless

For
The North
The Disenfranchised Black Youth
The Lost Generation of Young
The Hillsborough families
The men dead in a conflict designed to win her an election
The men traumatised from the Falklands War
For Northern Ireland

For
My mam and dad
My Grandparents
My brother
Every LGBT kid who committed suicide due to Section 28 in schools
The teachers
The victims of gaybashing which were never investigated due to pressure from her government
For the gay men stitched up and banged up for being gay

For
The women of Greenham Common who were beaten and had their kids forcibly taken into care for no reason

For the men and women assaulted in the Battle of the Beanfield

For the men and women consigned to the scrapheap

For the services that used to belong to all of us and now are badly run in the hands of the rich

For the country that used to stand for social justice and created the National Health Service

The mentally ill thrown out on the streets

The children abused in care homes and ignored or worse abused by some in her government

I Celebrate the Death of a Woman Who Caused So Much Pain.

1. She supported the retention of capital punishment
2. She destroyed the country's manufacturing industry
3. She voted against the relaxation of divorce laws
4. She abolished free milk for schoolchildren ("Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher")
5. She supported more freedom for business (and look how that turned out)
6. She gained support from the National Front in the 1979 election by pandering to the fears of immigration
7. She gerrymandered local authorities by forcing through council house sales, at the same time preventing councils from spending the money they got for selling houses on building new houses (spending on social housing dropped by 67% in her premiership)
8. She was responsible for 3.6 million unemployed - the highest figure and the highest proportion of the workforce in history and three times the previous government. Massaging of the figures means that the figure was closer to 5 million
9. She ignored intelligence about Argentinian preparations for the invasion of the Falkland Islands and scrapped the only Royal Navy presence in the islands
10. The poll tax
11. She presided over the closure of 150 coal mines; we are now crippled by the cost of energy, having to import expensive coal from abroad
12. She compared her "fight" against the miners to the Falklands War
13. She privatised state monopolies and created the corporate greed culture that we've been railing against for the last 5 years
14. She introduced the gradual privatisation of the NHS
15. She introduced financial deregulation in a way that turned city institutions into avaricious money pits
16. She pioneered the unfailing adoration and unquestioning support of the USA
17. She allowed the US to place nuclear missiles on UK soil, under US control
18. Section 28
19. She opposed anti-apartheid sanctions against South Africa and described Nelson Mandela as "that grubby little terrorist"
20. She support the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and sent the SAS to train their soldiers
21. She allowed the US to bomb Libya in 1986, against the wishes of more than 2/3 of the population
22. She opposed the reunification of Germany
23. She invented Quangos
24. She increased VAT from 8% to 17.5%
25. She had the lowest approval rating of any post-war Prime Minister
26. Her post-PM job? Consultant to Philip Morris tobacco at $250,000 a year, plus $50,000 per speech
27. The Al Yamamah contract
28. She opposed the indictment of Chile's General Pinochet
29. Social unrest under her leadership was higher than at any time since the General Strike
30. She presided over interest rates increasing to 15%
31. BSE
32. She presided over 2 million manufacturing job losses in the 79-81 recession
33. She opposed the inclusion of Eire in the Northern Ireland peace process
34. She supported sanctions-busting arms deals with South Africa
35. Cecil Parkinson, Alan Clark, David Mellor, Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitkin
36. Crime rates doubled under Thatcher
37. Black Wednesday – Britain withdraws from the ERM and the pound is devalued. Cost to Britain - £3.5 billion; profit for George Soros - £1 billion
38. Poverty doubled while she opposed a minimum wage
39. She privatised public services, claiming at the time it would increase public ownership. Most are now owned either by foreign governments (EDF) or major investment houses. The profits don’t now accrue to the taxpayer, but to foreign or institutional shareholders.
40. She cut 75% of funding to museums, galleries and other sources of education
41. In the Thatcher years the top 10% of earners received almost 50% of the tax remissions
42. 21.9% inflation


There is more... None of it was good...

Thatcher was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990.
During those years, racism in this country was totally out of control.
Increased Racism in the UK is also a big part of her legacy.

I’m sure some of you remember this song –

Sinéad O'Connor - Black Boys On Mopeds

“Margaret Thatcher on TV… Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing…
It seems strange that she should be offended… The same orders are given by her…” – This refers to the murder of the students in Tiananmen Square, and the fact that Thatcher gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone—and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.

The ship was LEAVING. It was leaving.

“England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses… It's the home of police who kill blacks boys on mopeds… “

I grabbed this bit of a web page...

'The lyrics refer to an incident in England on 17 May 1989 where the police were pursuing a youth called Nicholas Bramble, who was riding a moped, in the mistaken belief that he had stolen the moped. Bramble lost control of the moped (which it turns out was his) in the chase, and crashed it, killing himself. His death was ruled accidental, but O’Connor felt that the police, a “representative of state authority”, caused his death, and the incident (re)sparked accusations of racism in the police force, on the grounds that the police would not have assumed that the youth had stolen the bike, or pursued him so aggressively, had he been white.'

I was living in the UK, in London, in Camden Town when this happened.

Trickle down theory: Thatcher was quite supportive of racism in the police force. I believe it was because she believed that ‘Black Boys’ caused a lot of the problems in British society. Why do I believe this? There were no sanctions for police who innocent killed black boys in Thatchers UK. And it happened more than once.

I have to admit that I'm quite surprised by the negative reaction to Thatcher here - I guess I didn't really expect it. I'm too young to fully understand the affect she had on our society in the 80s, so I can't really judge her actions in the same way that a lot of you guys can - I was born in 1983 and was 7 when she left office, so the only things she did that really affected me personally were the abolishment of free milk and the introduction of the National Curriculum... and back then, I was too young to get what was going on anyway.

I just grew up with the impression that she was considered to be a pretty good prime minister. Obviously though, that impression was borne out of my own family life growing up. My parents vote Conservative, and so presumably voted for Thatcher back then (I've never actually asked them though, but I'm assuming they did). Plus, as far as I am aware my family wasn't particularly affected by the changes she made (I don't know all the details of my parents' life when I was that age though) - we lived in the south west (not really any mines close by), my dad worked in an office job and my mum was a computer programmer/stay-at-home-mum (and I don't think they belonged to any unions), they owned their own house (didn't live in a council house) etc. - so they weren't affected personally by those issues.

In terms of the Falklands War, I'm under the impression/opinion that it was a good thing. There are 3,000-odd Falklanders there who can still call themselves British because of Thatcher's decisions back then. I work with men who fought in the Falklands and they don't seem all that traumatised by the war, in fact most of them are jovial and cheerful and eager to do their jobs (many of them have been deployed in Afghanistan, Libya, Africa and Syria in the last few months). In 10 weeks' time I will be moving to the Falklands myself for 5 months, to work with the military there and to provide public services to the Islanders. So, if it wasn't for Thatcher, the next few months of my life would not be possible.

Obviously, I am not in a position to make an informed statement over how good or bad she was as Prime Minister, since I wasn't aware of much of what was going on in the 80s (my main impression of Thatcher from that time comes from the TV show Spitting Image!), so I'm not trying to counter what's been said here - had I been directly affected by more of her policies when I was a child, then I would probably have a completely different opinion of her.

One thought that has come to me a couple of times this week is: What would have happened to the country if Thatcher had not become Prime Minister and had not implemented all the changes that she did? I wonder how the last 30-odd years would have played out under a different Prime Minister in the 80s (I don't know the answer to this at all - I'm just curious).

But do you have to be directly and personally affected by something/someone to understand how actions might have affected others?

I ask myself...what would have happened in the USA had there not been 'hanging chads' in Florida in 2000. I suspect the USA and the world would have been a far better place.

One of the many bad things about Thatcher was her stubbornness and refusal to admit that she could be wrong. While "the lady is not for turning" on the surface seems the mantra of a strong leader, it can also be the mantra of someone not big enough to admit mistakes. I'll take a 'flip-flopper' over that any day. When you know better, presumably you do better; she moved with blinders well and truly in place.

But do you have to be directly and personally affected by something/someone to understand how actions might have affected others?

No, you don't - but I've been mostly unaware of a lot of her actions and their impacts for the majority of my life. It's only been in the last week that I've really learned how a lot of people feel about her and the extent of what decisions she made and how much they affected people while she was in power - so now I will be able to make my own, more informed opinions of her leadership.

One thing I will say is that blaming Thatcher for the decline of British Manufacturing is utter nonsense - it had been in decline relative to the rest of the world since before the first world war. Hearing about working practices pre-Thatcher is utterly shocking: at the site I work on, for instance, it was completely normal to have nothing but a gallon of beer for lunch then go back to work operating an experimental nuclear reactor in the afternoon. At my previous job, much the same thing happened with the machine shop (the bar there only closed in 1990). Quality (as we now understand the word) was very poor - British engineering works were capable of producing some very high quality one-off items, but ask them to make 10,000 identical items to exactly the same quality and you were stuffed. Japan, Germany and the US had put in the investment in machinery, process control and training and could do that. A handful in the UK had too - but the rest were coasting, and getting further behind as a result.

This old way of doing things was indeed destroyed by a politician who came to power at the end of the 1970s and completely upended our existing economic model in engineering. Unfortunately for some preconceived ideas, his name was Deng Xiaoping - not Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher knocked the props from under industries that were probably already beyond saving - and we actually have a rather good engineering industry in the UK as a result. Deng Xiaoping was the one who really sounded the death knell for those industries - with China in the game, British industry has to be innovative and extremely high quality to survive. If you want low quality, derivative products then China will always be able to do it cheaper than we can.

I hear a lot of people in the media saying 'she did what needed to be done' etc.

Perhaps national industry and the trade unions did need some kind of reform.  I'm a strong supporter of unions myself, but the situation in the '70s had gotten out of control.  And as far as the industrial economy, well...the fact is that the world was changing.  Most of those types of industries in the U.S. declined and closed down as well, because changes in technology and transport made it cheaper to have the work done by robots and/or sweatshop laborers. 

So maybe these things were necessary,  BUT the way she went about them was just horrific.  She did the same thing that Conservatives/Republicans still want to do, which was to knock over everything supporting the economy, without replacing it with anything.

It's like the deal with council housing.  Yes, it's a fine idea, on many levels, to let people buy their council properties.  But maybe the money should be re-invested in building new ones?!

And that's the problem.  Instead of facing the reality that the world was changing, and that the economy would have to change with it, and investing in people and infrastructure to help manage that change, to make it as painless as possible, she made sure that she and her cronies could make as much money as possible, and to hell with everyone else.

Instead of facing the reality that the world was changing, and that the economy would have to change with it, and investing in people and infrastructure to help manage that change, to make it as painless as possible, she made sure that she and her cronies could make as much money as possible, and to hell with everyone else.

Apologies for being too lazy to write my own post, but this.


Some articles about Thatcher that resonated with me:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/536e095c-a23e-11e2-8971-00144feabdc0.html (Simon Schama's obit, in case that link goes bad)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-death-etiquette

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand-margaret-thatcher

Mother Teresa was a monster as well, so Reagan still doesn't come off great in that comparison

 

I didn't realize what a vile woman she was until I moved here!


I wasn't born until 1988, but I've always heard Margaret Thatcher being compared to Ronald Reagan while I was growing up. Since I pretty much think Reagan was evil, this does not bode well for Thatcher. Now I've come to find out she was much, much worse. Also, I live in Shropshire and I've not heard anything positive about her since her death was announced.

And that's the problem.  Instead of facing the reality that the world was changing, and that the economy would have to change with it, and investing in people and infrastructure to help manage that change, to make it as painless as possible, she made sure that she and her cronies could make as much money as possible, and to hell with everyone else.

I think part of the reason she's so well liked in some quarters (while being despised in others) is that unlike her predecessors she actually faced up to the reality that the world was changing. Heath, Callaghan, etc. seem to have reacted by buying their heads in the sand and pretending that nothing was going on - with results that in retrospect were probably even worse than the sort of slash and burn reforms Thatcher implemented.
I also suspect that this very ostrich-like attitude prior to her accession to power is part of the reason her reforms were so painful. Take shipbuilding as an example - it had been starved of investment for generations, to the stage where building a set of modern shipyards in the UK would essentially have to be done from the ground up. This was, eventually, done - but only for naval shipyards, with the end of the Cold War meaning that these needed only relatively limited capacity and so the modernisation could be (barely) afforded. If, say, a major modernisation programme of the shipyards had been carried out in the 1930s to for instance adopt welded rather than riveted ships then subsequent modernisations would have been more practical and less painful. In industrial terms a large fraction of the problems had been festering for 50 years or so and it was only when Thatcher stopped propping up zombie industries that it became clear how deep-seated the problems were.

Having said that I don't disagree about there being deep-seated flaws with her policies. Selling off council houses and not building more is as mentioned a substantial part of our current housing problems, and will have cost the government an enormous amount of money over the years. I personally think that right to buy is an excellent policy in principle - it seems to result in mixed estates which are much better for social cohesion, crime and the like than single-type estates - but selling off housing stock without replacement has caused numerous other problems.

Not sure I can add to the point by point made by Lara, one of the few people I've seen mention what I say about the Falklands and the withdrawal of the only patrolling navy vessel in the region - something that I recall the decision being made at the time because there had been a TV documentary about life onboard HMS Endevour and shortly after I watched it the announcement was made that it was being decomissioned.
I still think she should have been tried for war crimes, she gave Argentina the impression we weren't bothered about the islands when intelligence suggested an invasion, her poll ratings were low and she would have lost the next election. I am of the belief that she put British lives at risk for her own political gain.

I'm 50 and grew up in a mining village, my dad was a miner, although as a deputy (shift supervisor and safety officer) his union didn't actually go out on strike, but due to events that happened in the 1975 strike they refused to cross picket lines. Every day during the 84-85 strike he would go to the pit, get to the picket line, sign a book to say he'd turned up for work and come back again. He still got his basic pay of which he donated about half of it to the miners strike fund. He could afford to do that as my mum also worked, but I just recall them both doing so much to help our neighbours, particularly that Christmas. What said it all to me was at his funeral, the turnout for him and so many people coming up to me and my siblings to tell us what a nice man he was and how he would do anything to help anyone.

Thatcher was an ideologue, she wasn't interested in the future of the mines, she had one goal and that was to destroy the union because they brought down the Heath government, for having the gall to want a living wage. She was driven by pure ideology and didn't care for anyone who got in her way. Yes, I will accept that union reform was required but she went completely too far, it wasn't reform she wanted, it was extinction.

For a PM to turn the army out onto the people, what does that say? Army dressed up as police at that. There were "police officers" on picket line duty with no id number on them, there were striking miners on the picket lines who recognised their own sons and relatives, who were in the army, dressed as police.

I can go on at length about what happened during that strike, what I saw and witnessed.

My mum actually voted Conservative in 1979, probably the only time either of my parents actually told me how they voted, because, as she said "let's give a woman a go, she can't do any worse", but just a few years later I recall my mum's very words - "She [Thatcher] has put back the cause of womens lib by 20 years"