Margaret Thatcher dies

[Barbirollians]

A remarkable piece from Russell Brand (yes, that Russell Brand)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...garet-thatcher

An excellent piece .

[John Wright]

Originally Posted by Mr Pee

I should have thought it is.....

Give it a rest troll boy

I can't be bothered to check the forum rules, but I'm not pleased that that message stays - surely a member cannot brand another member a troll, particularly when it is aimed at one who is always polite and on-topic.

[Beef Oven]

I can't be bothered to check the forum rules, but I'm not pleased that that message stays - surely a member cannot brand another member a troll, particularly when it is aimed at one who is always polite and on-topic.

I think MrGG doesn't know what a troll-boy is, or he watches too much porn.

[Flosshilde]

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

And it came to pass.

You do like your little joke.

[Sydney Grew]

Ah yes, that old chestnut again. Under the electoral system we have in this country, Lady Thatcher was victorious in three consecutive general elections, each time with a very healthy majority, the like of which today's political leaders can only dream.

And I seem to recall that in a recent referendum on abandoning the first past the post system in favour of proportional representation, that alternative was overwhelmingly rejected.

I suppose all those voters were misguided as well. Or, as you might put it- (CAPS LOCK ON):- ALL WRONG.

I didn't say "misguided" - I said "greedy and covetous bourgeois."

[eighthobstruction]

Sleep well....x

[pilamenon]

It's interesting to read the evidence that Thatcher was a very lucky prime minister, and I had forgotten how low her standing was prior to the Falklands war. Another issue raised here and there is whether or not the unions and industry would have been crushed in quite the same way without Thatcher. Although an economic backlash against the corporate state was probably inevitable, one wonders how and when it would have happened without an individual of Thatcher's determination. Seeing some of the clips of her again in the last day has reminded me how divisive a figure she was - and I don't think many people in the more affluent South East can ever appreciate the loathing felt then and now in the old industrial heartlands.

Incidentally, ff, wouldn't it make more sense on threads like this to offer one serious and one diversionary? Anyone trying to engage in serious debate has to wade through a Japanese knotweed of dubious wit, smileys, jibes at other posters, youtube clips and other irrelevancies. I accept that this would probably make the hosts' job too labour-intensive, but it is one reason why I spend less time than I used to on this forum.

[John Wright]

Excepting the fact that the 3.6 + million unemployed...

Not much been said here about one of the main causes of the high 1980s unemployment (and its rise started with Labour) and that was cheap imports. I mentioned in an earlier post that that's what killed my first employer Courtaulds. Cheap imports flooded into Britain in the 1980s thanks to greedy importers who were not controlled. If the government had installed some strict border product quality checks could that not have slowed down the imports?

Today go into a pound shop, for example, all those work tools, shampoos and cleaning products, toothpastes, home utensils, stationery etc etc before 1970 all those products were MADE IN BRITAIN, but look at the labels in the pound shop and you'll see the vast majority are made overseas. Most of the British factories who made these types of products went bust in the 1980s and 1990s.

I said look at the labels, but also look at the prices - yes most of the items ARE £1. How can Britain compete when a decent wage here has to be at least £10 an hour?

And of course not just in the pound shops, all those imported day-to-day goods are also on sale in Tesco, Asda etc - priced at more than a pound!

[teamsaint]

Because you, I and about 50 million other people would probably been out of a job. Plus riots on the streets..which probably might appeal to some quarters.

well so we are told.
Like we were told the mines HAD to be closed. (and there WERE riots on the streets, and lots of them WERE out of a job, not probably).
Only we did (and still are) bailing out the banks, and the closure of the mines, loss making though they may have been, turned out to be a folly. (Though I accept there was probably a need for some change in the industry).
Its funny how moral hazard, so beloved of the Neo Cons, is applied selectively.....

[Richard Barrett]

just because you haven't lived

I would just like to know from Beef Oven how he has come to know so much about my employment history during the 1980s as to make such an assertion.

Any answer? Thought not.

As eighthobstruction correctly surmises, my mention of Nazarbayev was not intended completely seriously. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned Thatcher again in the same breath, but as Julien and others have shown she did have quite some form in cosying up to murderous dictators, not to mention her appalling attitude towards Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, saying in 1987: "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." (Mind you, some of her minions went much further, like Teddy Taylor's "Nelson Mandela should be shot", from about the same time.) In Pakistan she is remembered without fondness as enjoying friendly relations with the military dictator Zia ul-Haq. Her boneheaded policy on Northern Ireland resulted in a great escalation of violence there. And so it goes on.

[Beef Oven]

Any answer? Thought not.

As eighthobstruction correctly surmises, my mention of Nazarbayev was not intended completely seriously. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned Thatcher again in the same breath, but as Julien and others have shown she did have quite some form in cosying up to murderous dictators, not to mention her appalling attitude towards Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, saying in 1987: "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." (Mind you, some of her minions went much further, like Teddy Taylor's "Nelson Mandela should be shot", from about the same time.) In Pakistan she is remembered without fondness as enjoying friendly relations with the military dictator Zia ul-Haq. Her boneheaded policy on Northern Ireland resulted in a great escalation of violence there. And so it goes on.

Answer is obvious. You give the game away. You don't mean to of course. You haven't lived.

[Richard Barrett]

Answer is obvious. You give the game away. You don't mean to of course. You haven't lived.

I see, you're the expert obviously. I have to say that it has seemed remarkably like a life to me so far. What does one need to do to qualify as "living" in your estimation? At least I haven't given way to middle-aged rancour as you seem to have done.

[Stillhomewardbound]

Right. That's it. I'm breaking cover. I have only negative comments to make about my former member of parliament, but had held back because little by way of sensible discussion happens in a heated environment.

However, I have read too much praising Margaret Thatcher and, in particular this article celebrating her introduction of the right for council tenants to purchase their council homes (see link at bottom).

Firstly, I've never understood why those who had lived in housing, built and provided by the taxpayer and then let to them at greatly reduced and controlled rents then, somehow, became shareholders in the property. In much of Europe all class of people rent their family apartments commercially for their lifetimes, but never does anyone say they should then be allowed to purchase the property for a hugely reduced sum.

Secondly, while there may have been a valid idealogical principle behind the scheme, ie. enabling the less well off to become property owners, rather than reliant on the state, which clown could not have made provision for some degree of claw-back for the times when ex-council properties were sold on. It was one thing to transform tenants into home owners, but surely the intention never was that these same people were then selling their properties on at 30, 40 and 50% gains. That was rather as to award them guaranteed winning lottery tickets.

Thirdly, while they were extending this scheme in one direction, in the other they were reducing their council house building programmes. Put simply, and not hysterically, it can be said that herein lay the genesis of the whole programme: slash the council housing pool and transfer those in need of housing over to the private sector. Oh, and not forgetting the gerrymandering of Shirley Porter and her colleagues at the City of Westminster. Yes, using the sale of council properties to alter the political complexion of local wards. A con that Dame ShirleyPorter, even now, still has properly answer for in an English court.

So, tell me now what was so great and intrinsically fair about the right-to-buy scheme. Tell those in subsequent need of public housing who were farmed out to single room B&Bs (infants and all) because the provision for council house was so reduced; and speak to today's would be buyers who haven't a chance in hell of owning their own houses or flats because of the decades of property inflation which the buy-to-right scheme, undoubtedly helped fuel.

What on earth was the sense of so enabling one generation, only to subject the next generation to live in conditions of squalor and depravity, and then to allow the generation after that to be screwed silly with out-of-control commercial rents, and, finally, to be denied any chance of ever being property owners themselves. As the lady herself said, sourly, at her final cabinet meeting, 'It's a funny old world'.

Isn't it just, Margaret? But so convinced were you throughout your career that they way you saw things was the right and only way. So much so that you never , ever factored in for the times (and there was no shortage of them) when you may have got it wrong, or at least, have recognised that your chosen policies strategy would have an effect only up to a certain point.

The right-to-buy scheme was one way to go but it was utterly wrong to give away public housing for paltry sums and then to have no means to recoup a part of the gift that had been lavished on those early buyers when that public stock was sold on. It was wrong, wrong, wrong.

In the short term you enriched those who had enjoyed no small amount of public subsidy already, only to impoverish so many others in the long term.

Regrettably, but with sincerity, this, amongst other similar reasons, is why I shall stand on the route of your funeral procession next Wednesday and as the gun carriage bearing your coffin passes, I shall turn my back.

I suspect I shall not be alone.

SHB

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9983113/Margaret-Thatcher-History-of-one-of-the-first-Right-To-Buy-council-houses.html

[Stillhomewardbound]

There are one or two interesting and thoughtful posts in this thread from both ends of the argument but they are swamped by the most tasteless bigoted bile from those not concerned about debate it has ever been my misfortune to have read on the Forum. Indeed, had this thread been about anyone else it would have been closed down long ago.

It brings the entire Radio 3 Forum into disrepute.

I'd have to agree, Petrushka. My original comments were on about page 3 or 4, so when I finally broke cover this evening to add my perspective on a particular issue, I thought I better catch up on the debate so far.

Well, I reversed for about four pages worth, but all I saw were rebuttals, and counter rebuttals. I mean, where on earth does that get us. It's as productive and intelligent as a dog taking a sofa apart.

How about this. You make a statement and maybe you come back once or twice in reply, but you have to acknowledge that point at which, regardless of your strongest held feelings, that to continue will be to descend into a squabble, a fracas.

Oh well. Back under the duvet. Maybe in the morning the 'all clear' will sound!

[MrGongGong]

Regrettably, but with sincerity, this, amongst other similar reasons, is why I shall stand on the route of your funeral procession next Wednesday and as the gun carriage bearing your coffin passes, I shall turn my back.

I suspect I shall not be alone.

You certainly wont be i'm sure
(though given the way that our public space has been privatised then you might be committing an "offence" .....)