Thatcher dead

[chesterbells]

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


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 will not celebrate the death of a woman who caused so much pain but i will protest loudly against her being given such a funeral paid for by the society she so despised.

So apart from that then

IMHO, not sure the privatisation of the energy, rail industry has been particularly good either.

Great post Rascal

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Operation True Blue

I fucking hope that this travesty is fucking disrupted as its a disgrace that in a time of austerity the state pays for a funeral for a person who fucked the state over big time.

If her family had any thoughts for the nation they would have said no, instead the Queen is attending.

Fucking disgusting

I imagine the state will be enjoying a significant ongoing saving with the need to provide round the clock security to her no longer on the agenda.

Look at this funeral as a parting gift for her helping reduce the deficit ;-)

Why didnt you answer my reply on page 97 ish BTW?

Jesus, I'm getting fucking requests now. Not everyone sits around all day doing fuck all at the taxpayer's expense, you know ;-)

I'll have a look and get back to you :-)

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

As Skashion has correctly pointed out the votes of the left were split between the SDP and Labour and it is difficult for me to imagine, in the privacy of the ballot box, sufficient numbers of the British Electorate entrusting Michael Foot with the stewardship of the nation, especially given some of Labour's insane manifesto commitments. It was labelled "the longest suicide note in history" from within its own ranks for good reason.
.

Much of Labours 83 manifesto was emminently sensible for the times. It followed Keynesian principles to promote growth like cutting VAT and borrowing. It pointed out that mass unemployment was the tool being used to bring down inflation. It pointed out that North Sea oil was worth 8p in the pound to the UK and that could be used to ensure full employment rather than having Millions idle with all the social consequences that brings. It had a commitent to balance the trade deficit through a withdrawl from the then EEC and a use of trade quotas which ironically that would probably have resulted in a huge Labour majority today. It proposed a national investment bank and a good old socialist 5 year plan to rebuild industry. It proposed equal rights and pay at work for women and extend safeguards for women on maternity leave. It proposed increase in personal tax allowances, increases in child benefit and increases in ivnalidity care and promised to protect pensioners from inflation.It proposed a new council housing building scheme, introduce a Freedom of information Act. It was comitted to devolution and wanted to strengthen local democracy. Labour wanted to limit the power of press barons to give wider ownership of newspapers.

Quite a lot of what was supposedly a loony left manifesto as you can now see has become mainstream thought.

The major downsides of the manifesto i believe was the commitment to scrap our nuclear detterent at a time when the Cold War dominated and the commitment to leave the EEC, which back then was not the bogeyman the right see it as now.

So i would suggest the biggest factor in Thatchers rise was the inability of the Left to have any cohesion or cooperation. The lefts vote held up but was split. It galled me today to read Baroness Williams writing on Thatcher in the Indy. Without Williams and her other traitors Thatcher may have been a one term PM despite the Falklands war.

I agree that a lot of those policies were ahead of their time, and positive, and I guess it's fair to say that a radical agenda can throw up a few gems.

Your post conspicuously ignores other proposals in that manifesto. Those included, from memory, giving the unions back all their powers from before 1979, nationalising the 200 largest companies in the country and their proposals for income tax rates were punitive to say the least.

Put simply, I do not believe that they country would have been generating enough tax revenue to even begin to pay for those proposals. They would have stifled the entrepreneurial frisson that, in actual fact, has funded the significant increases in public spending since that point. Moreover their proposals for income tax were completely anachronistic in what was becoming an increasingly mobile world.

This is a truth that the left often ignore. Without businesses feeling taking risks will give them a decent prospect of making money, then the fuel in the tank of tax revenue runs out very quickly. It is an uncomfortable fact that the significant increases in public spending throughout the Blair/Brown years were funded to a significant extent by the Financial Services industry which they despise.

I guess in summary I would say that some of the ideas, especially for industry would have had some merit but they never would have seen the light of day. The baby would have been thrown out with the bathwater before you could have said "run on the pound".

Like so often before and since, the left would have engaged heart before head and then blamed everyone else when it all went to pot.

 

[daveduke67]

 

[Swales lives]

Superb post Rascal. Superb.

 

[Rascal]

Much of Labours 83 manifesto was emminently sensible for the times. It followed Keynesian principles to promote growth like cutting VAT and borrowing. It pointed out that mass unemployment was the tool being used to bring down inflation. It pointed out that North Sea oil was worth 8p in the pound to the UK and that could be used to ensure full employment rather than having Millions idle with all the social consequences that brings. It had a commitent to balance the trade deficit through a withdrawl from the then EEC and a use of trade quotas which ironically that would probably have resulted in a huge Labour majority today. It proposed a national investment bank and a good old socialist 5 year plan to rebuild industry. It proposed equal rights and pay at work for women and extend safeguards for women on maternity leave. It proposed increase in personal tax allowances, increases in child benefit and increases in ivnalidity care and promised to protect pensioners from inflation.It proposed a new council housing building scheme, introduce a Freedom of information Act. It was comitted to devolution and wanted to strengthen local democracy. Labour wanted to limit the power of press barons to give wider ownership of newspapers.

Quite a lot of what was supposedly a loony left manifesto as you can now see has become mainstream thought.

The major downsides of the manifesto i believe was the commitment to scrap our nuclear detterent at a time when the Cold War dominated and the commitment to leave the EEC, which back then was not the bogeyman the right see it as now.

So i would suggest the biggest factor in Thatchers rise was the inability of the Left to have any cohesion or cooperation. The lefts vote held up but was split. It galled me today to read Baroness Williams writing on Thatcher in the Indy. Without Williams and her other traitors Thatcher may have been a one term PM despite the Falklands war.

I agree that a lot of those policies were ahead of their time, and positive, and I guess it's fair to say that a radical agenda can throw up a few gems.

Your post conspicuously ignores other proposals in that manifesto. Those included, from memory, giving the unions back all their powers from before 1979, nationalising the 200 largest companies in the country and their proposals for income tax rates were punitive to say the least.

Put simply, I do not believe that they country would have been generating enough tax revenue to even begin to pay for those proposals. They would have stifled the entrepreneurial frisson that, in actual fact, has funded the significant increases in public spending since that point. Moreover their proposals for income tax were completely anachronistic in what was becoming an increasingly mobile world.

This is a truth that the left often ignore. Without businesses feeling taking risks will give them a decent prospect of making money, then the fuel in the tank of tax revenue runs out very quickly. It is an uncomfortable fact that the significant increases in public spending throughout the Blair/Brown years were funded to a significant extent by the Financial Services industry which they despise.

I guess in summary I would say that some of the ideas, especially for industry would have had some merit but they never would have seen the light of day. The baby would have been thrown out with the bathwater before you could have said "run on the pound".

Like so often before and since, the left would have engaged heart before head and then blamed everyone else when it all went to pot.[/quote]

Nowhere in the 83 manifesto was there a call for the 200 biggest companies being taken into public ownership nor was there any refeence to punitive tax rises, in fact they wanted to do Keynesian stuff like cut taxes whilst raising borrowing.

What the right always ignore is the thousands of small business sent to the wall under Thatcher as her VAT hikes hit demand. Supply side reforms she allowed under the now discredited Moneterist madness now revisited by the clown Osborne were a disaster. Without demand there is no need for supply.

Thatcher favoured big business, huge corporations who she trusted to supply the UK with the tax revenues she needed to justify her radical approach but it failed as it does now as the huge corporations register an office in the Cayman Islands and dont pay tax here.

Micheal Foot has been a much derided political figure in our history yet lots of his manifesto are now accepted and dare i say it revered by people who have no idea who thought of them in the first place. Foot was a great political thinker and his intellect far outweighed his contempories of the time perhaps Benn and Joesph excepted. He suffered because of a rabid right wing press (nothng new) and as the age of TV became mainstream he looked like a wierd old man in a donkey jacket.

Its a shame that a man like Foot will be looked upon in a bad way despite all he fought for in his life whilst his adversary who he always treated with utmost respect gets a state paid for funeral.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Nowhere in the 83 manifesto was there a call for the 200 biggest companies being taken into public ownership

Regarding North Sea oil itself, Labour pledged to set up a new "powerful national oil company" in pursuance of its objective of bringing the North Sea oil industry into public ownership. The Tories' programme of privatisation would be halted – and a new programme of public ownership initiated. In addition to re-nationalising the industries already sold off, "significant public stakes would be taken in electronics, pharmaceuticals, health equipment and building materials; and also in other important sectors, as required in the national interest".

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/10/labour.margaretthatcher" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... etthatcher</a>



Maybe not 200, possibly more according to that.

 

[pirate]

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


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 will not celebrate the death of a woman who caused so much pain but i will protest loudly against her being given such a funeral paid for by the society she so despised.

So apart from that then

very monty python

 

[pominoz]

I can not stand Russel Brand, but have to admit that he writes well.
His take on Thatcher..

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-brand/margaret-thatcher-our-unm_b_3046390.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-b ... 46390.html</a>

 

[Skashion]

I can not stand Russel Brand, but have to admit that he writes well.
His take on Thatcher..

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-brand/margaret-thatcher-our-unm_b_3046390.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-b ... 46390.html</a>

Thanks for that. I've never actually read anything written by him before. He is very good.