Thatcher dead

[foxy]

Sky News last night were reporting that the funeral is going to cost the taxpayer an estimated £8 million. Is that anywhere near the truth or were they just shit-stirring?

Because if that is indeed true, it's a scandal that a country in the economic state that Britain currently finds itself in would blow that much public money on the death of a multimillionaire who half the country detests, who saw her days out in the opulence of the Ritz and who didn't even want any of this fuss to be made over her death.

Whatever your views of her as a person or a politician, I can't believe anyone would be able to legitimately defend that.

Security in Parliament has stepped up next week, whilst her coffin is in the Crypt Chapel. That will be a hefty some paying for armed guards and PCs.

Whichever Regiment is providing a Gun salute will also be charging a hefty sum. Police charges for road closures, marking the route etc. MI5 have been brought in to provide services as well.

Wouldn't be surprised if Sky weren't to far off the actual figure.

 

[Josh Blue]

Sky News last night were reporting that the funeral is going to cost the taxpayer an estimated £8 million. Is that anywhere near the truth or were they just shit-stirring?

Because if that is indeed true, it's a scandal that a country in the economic state that Britain currently finds itself in would blow that much public money on the death of a multimillionaire who half the country detests, who saw her days out in the opulence of the Ritz and who didn't even want any of this fuss to be made over her death.

Whatever your views of her as a person or a politician, I can't believe anyone would be able to legitimately defend that.

What are you complaining about we have some spare money after cutting people benefits and forcing disabled people into work. We just need to drop the minimum wage, abolish the NHS, steal some natural resources from a third world country and we will have more than enough to spunk on the Funeral.

I heard 3 million but 8 million sounds spiffing.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

Sky News last night were reporting that the funeral is going to cost the taxpayer an estimated £8 million. Is that anywhere near the truth or were they just shit-stirring?

Because if that is indeed true, it's a scandal that a country in the economic state that Britain currently finds itself in would blow that much public money on the death of a multimillionaire who half the country detests, who saw her days out in the opulence of the Ritz and who didn't even want any of this fuss to be made over her death.

Whatever your views of her as a person or a politician, I can't believe anyone would be able to legitimately defend that.

It is stupid & unnecessary and I'm one of the people who can see both sides of what she did.

 

[yerwot?]

I know its popular to blame Thatcher for the death of industry in the UK but wasn't it in reality down to the fact that what we built was shit, overpriced and uncompetitive?

when japanese products started to appear,cheaper and better, motorbikes and cameras being the most obvious, the press informed us it was because their workers were being paid a bowl of rice a day. Jingoistic bullshit. The fact that our stuff was basically pre-war and the
imported stuff was made on state-of-the-art machine tools, was one factor, the other
was predatory pricing, selling at a loss until the native industry is destroyed.
Labour relations were a disaster in this country, the board-room's victorian attitudes and military-modelled diktats could never compete with the worker inclusion model of japan and germany. When Chrysler built a government funded factory in scotland, it was mothballed before a car was built. Eventually it was offered to Toyota, who were only interested in the skills of the workforce.
The fifties boom as the world recovered from ww2 was a chance to keep abreast of competition, instead the profits went straight into shareholders pockets, short-termism
at it's most destructive. Nothing's changed, except their is only foreign owned manufacturing left, british workers making excellent products at a profit

 

[BoyBlue_1985]

I know its popular to blame Thatcher for the death of industry in the UK but wasn't it in reality down to the fact that what we built was shit, overpriced and uncompetitive?

when japanese products started to appear,cheaper and better, motorbikes and cameras being the most obvious, the press informed us it was because their workers were being paid a bowl of rice a day. Jingoistic bullshit. The fact that our stuff was basically pre-war and the
imported stuff was made on state-of-the-art machine tools, was one factor, the other
was predatory pricing, selling at a loss until the native industry is destroyed.
Labour relations were a disaster in this country, the board-room's victorian attitudes and military-modelled diktats could never compete with the worker inclusion model of japan and germany. When Chrysler built a government funded factory in scotland, it was mothballed before a car was built. Eventually it was offered to Toyota, who were only interested in the skills of the workforce.
The fifties boom as the world recovered from ww2 was a chance to keep abreast of competition, instead the profits went straight into shareholders pockets, short-termism
at it's most destructive. Nothing's changed, except their is only foreign owned manufacturing left, british workers making excellent products at a profit

I never meant the British workers were not up to it as we clearly do have the same talent as anywhere else just the companies were making them produce turgid shit. The difference in german/jap cars to British in the 70's and 80's was like taking a Spitfire to a Jet Fight

 

[Hamann Pineapple]

I see Reading want a minutes silence at home to Liverpool. Lol.

If that happens I reckon we'll get to see he North/South divide in action.

Is John Madejski so naive to think the Liverpool fans want to 'pay their respects' in any way other than booing right the way through it? The woman who they think destroyed their city. The woman who was complicit in the police's Hillsborough cover-up.

Whelan is similarly mental. He wants a silence at Wigan vs Millwall. A mining town vs a heavily industrial, working class part of East London? What could possibly go wrong.

Madejski and Whelan are both Tory party contributors. If they try this bullshit they will see the wrath of thousands that hasn't been seen for 30 years. I have no doubt her funeral will be disrupted. The security cost included will make this procession cost in excess of £10M. All so she can she the police batter the public one last time.

 

[pominoz]

I remember my YTS year, 23.50 a week for emptying semi-trailers by hand at a warehouse in Cheetham Hill.
The most memorable was emptying a 40 foot container (with other poor young bastards), that was full of frying pans, individually packed, thousands of the bastards. Took us all day.

 

[BimboBob]

There is going to be a minutes silence due to it being the anniversary of Hillsborough.

 

[metalblue]

Why do people insist on implying that we lived in some sort of utopia before 1979, where we all had great jobs and life was just rosy? The truth is that we were completely skint as a country and unemployment was at then record levels. British Leyland had gone bust and been bailed out in 1975 and British Steel was already planning to reduce capacity. They had too many people producing too little steel at too high a cost in too many under-utilised plants. If anyone is to blame for the decline of the British Steel industry it's probably Churchill, who tore up plans to invest in and reform the industry during his tenure. Places like Corby & Consett are quick to blame Thatcher for their problems but the plans to close those steelworks were already in place before she came to power.

The only reason unemployment wasn't much higher was that public money (money we didn't have as the IMF were bailing us out at the time) was being pumped into loss-making and dying industries just to keep people in work. You can argue about the rights and wrongs of that but you can't argue that it couldn't have continued for very much longer. And one of the factors that required action to be taken sooner rather than later was the 1979 oil crisis following the Iranian revolution when production plummeted and prices more than doubled. I notice Labour apologists are quick to blame the global liquidity crisis for our current economic woes but blame Thatcher for those of the early 1980's, forgetting the constraints she was under.

The coal industry was also in decline and had been for 15 years by the time Thatcher came to power. Pits were being closed on a regular basis as demand declined. But even after the Miners' strike, we still produced 100m tons of coal a year. Whatever happened, that would have declined significantly as we moved away from dirty fuels like coal.

I'd certainly agree that the YTS scheme was a scandal and as a union rep in an engineering environment I railed against it as short-sighted. It offered false hope to people but was that much worse than the false hope offered by the previous government, which used public money to keep people in jobs that had no future?

These problems would have to have been faced and tackled sooner or later and it's certainly legitimate to question whether there was a better way to manage this process but you simply cannot question the need to take some action.

Our product was sub-standard and people forget that the unions were unable to control their members, we had the unofficial wildcat strikes by a handful of workers being made "official" to give the impression of control. Violence wasn't unheard of when the workforce didn't get their way, even against their own union officials. We had a decade of workers controlling the economy, double digit (often significant pay awards) were commonplace, nothing wrong with that per-se as it has been a perennial battle between workforce and capital since day one, but these pay awards both fuelled inflation and were required to counter the effect of inflation. The high point for the workers was the winter of discontent and we looked like an ungovernable country. 3 successive governments had tried through consensus to control the situation but were defeated by the union members and Thatcher took the only other approach possible in politics when consent fails and that is to force your will on the people, taking the workers on at their own game and her will prevailed, the vanquished are rarely happy.

 

[Chev Chelios]

Estimated £ 10 mill plus for her funeral