Margaret Thatcher dies

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

And I don't think anyone's mentioned it yet, but she really did say "There is no such thing as society."

I'm normally the last person to defend the Iron Lady, but I've always felt she wasn't quite so bad on this one.
When people blame their ills on "society", they are avoiding taking responsibility upon themselves. If by saying "There is no such thing as society" she meant that you cannot blame everything on others, then I agree with her. That said, I disagreed with just about everything else she said.

But I doubt whether she'd have put up with Michael G***.

[Julien Sorel]

They don't know the meaning of compassion. They wring their hands and mumble platitudes....whinge about anything and everything......but compassion doesn't come into it. But you know and I know that you can't reason with bigots like them.

So you don't have a reply to #251?

You accept that Margaret Thatcher praised Suharto and Pinochet to the skies? So where does compassion come in there? She made a great point of the depth of her personal friendship with Pinochet.

Pinochet was also quoted in the Chilean press as jokingly saying that mass graves were an "efficient" form of burial after one had been discovered containing what were believed to be victims of his government's actions.

What kind of person can blank out or simply not care about mass murder and torture simply because the people being murdered and tortured are in her eyes on the other side - communists, trade unionists, anti-imperialists? Or just got in the way of 'our' interests?

(And please don't start a distraction about the left and the USSR: I never supported the USSR).

[MrGongGong]

You accept that Margaret Thatcher praised Suharto and Pinochet to the skies? So where does compassion come in there? She made a great point of the depth of her personal friendship with Pinochet.

hummm

We are all supposed to be "civilised" and show "compassion" for someone who systematically showed none and spawned much of the dysfunctional behaviour that we see todays politicians doing today ?

Suharto wasn't that bad really, after all he bought lots of our lovely weapons which helped make this country "great" again
She also had some interesting things to say about Nelson Mandella ...... but hey , lets not spoil it for the weeping sheep

[scottycelt]

You needed to Google Hari?! I doubt Frenchie had need of such recourse. You clearly lead a very sheltered, not to say ostrich-like, existence. You're not a High Court Judge by any chance, are you?

Ah, you didn't even had to Googe Hari. How jolly impressive. 'Frenchie' did ask the question but I'm sure she really did know, as you say, so I was being gently "ironic". As for 'sheltered lives' I can certainly never claim to have reached the dizzy heights of a Marxist bookworm, preaching revolution to the Great Unwashed. I've never met any ostriches so I don't know how they lead their lives, but I'm sure they know what's best for themselves without any recourse to repeated readings of Das Kapital.

No, sadly, I'm not a High Court Judge. Are you a coal miner?

[Alison]

Plenty of needy folk out there - perhaps we should be getting out and doing stuff ourselves with the same human warmth and compassion we demanded of Mrs Thatcher.

[Julien Sorel]

Plenty of needy folk out there - perhaps we should be getting out and doing stuff ourselves with the same human warmth and compassion we demanded of Mrs Thatcher.

People die, lonely and poor and disregarded every day in this country. People died over the winter because they couldn't afford to heat their homes. People die, lonely and poor and disregarded: Margaret Thatcher spent her last years surrounded by retainers, people catering to her every need, in luxury. People die lonely and poor and disregarded every day in this country against a background of an attack on their human decency by Margaret Thatcher's political progeny. Of course people have always died poor. Of course it shouldn't happen. It really shouldn't happen. To Margaret Thatcher and to Thatcherism the poor were a disgrace, not poverty was a disgrace in a country where extravagant demonstrations are wealth are constantly evident: they'd failed. Hound them and forget they ever existed. Because they shouldn't have existed. They were uneconomic a-human units. Delete from memory.

What I'm sad about is that for a while the deceptions of George Osborne and Grant Shapps over welfare and benefits were creeping into the general media: there was a level of revulsion at the exploitation of Mick Philpott and his crimes to attack the Welfare State. Now the people perpetrating those deceits will wrap themselves in some phoney 'national mourning' and get on their amoral high horses denouncing the callousness of the Left.

And I'd still like to know what compassion has to do with Margaret Thatcher's personal endorsements and enthusiasm for Pinochet and Suharto.

[MrGongGong]

A Classic Steve Bell today ......

[Alison]

The beginnings of compassion are our own attitudes and behaviours.

[Julien Sorel]

The beginnings of compassion are our own attitudes and behaviours.

Sure. But individual actions are only going to have individual effects, and individual actions patchily combined will only have individual effects patchily combined. There were philanthropists in the C19 who were honestly appalled by poverty: their concern didn't change the fact of widespread poverty.

(Of course, many with little money or status try to help others. In terms of what they have to give the have nots are overwhelmingly more generous than the haves).

Nothing will genuinely change until society changes. That certainly involves attitudes, and it involves breaking the attitudes Thatcher did so much to promote.

(On the issue of compassion: remember Thatcher and her supporters' fury at Robert Runcie praying for the Argentinian dead at St Paul's, at the Falklands Memorial Service? Consistently she hadn't a thought for anyone other than her own. Or herself. The only time I can recall her showing compassion was for herself, when she was ousted by her own party in 1990 and left Downing Street in tears. Later she demanded compassion for her friend Augusto Pinochet, a retired mass murdering military dictator).

[Bryn]

... No, sadly, I'm not a High Court Judge. Are you a coal miner?

No. That was my maternal grandfather. Have to admit I never made it through volumes 2 an 3 of Capital. Wages Price and Profit was more my level.

[anotherbob]

Bob

Great wartime leader but rubbish in peacetime. His pre-war record was dreadul (Taff Valley Railway, Dardenelles, etc, etc.)

That's rather patronising. I'm well aware of Churchill's failures as a peacetime politician. However I cannot accept the term "ridiculous", not even in respect of Margaret Thatcher in comparison with whose failures those of Churchill pale into insignificance.

[Beef Oven]

They don't know the meaning of compassion. They wring their hands and mumble platitudes....whinge about anything and everything......but compassion doesn't come into it. But you know and I know that you can't reason with bigots like them.

True. Just look at the most recent posts.

[gurnemanz]

The beginnings of compassion are our own attitudes and behaviours.

The fundamental issue here is what concerned the now unfashionable Brecht in many of his works. Can you be good and moral and yet survive? ("Gut zu sein und doch zu leben" - The Good Woman of Szechuan). Mr and Mrs Peachum sing a song about this in the Dreigroschenoper: "Wir wären gut - anstatt so roh, Doch die Verhältnisse, sie sind nicht so." - We would be good instead of brutish, but the circumstances are not like that. Many people argue that it is the job of rulers to provide citizens with circumstances which encourage them to behave well not badly. (......Blair's crime and the causes of crime).

As I mentioned in my other contribution above: Margaret Thatcher tends to bring out the worst in people, both supporters and opponents.

[Julien Sorel]

They don't know the meaning of compassion. They wring their hands and mumble platitudes....whinge about anything and everything......but compassion doesn't come into it. But you know and I know that you can't reason with bigots like them.

True. Just look at the most recent posts.

"One of our very best and most valuable friends." Margaret Thatcher on Suharto.

Make no mistake: revenge by the Left, not justice for the victim, is what the Pinochet case is all about. Senator Pinochet is in truth on trial, not for anything contained in Judge Garzon's indictment, but for defeating communism. What the Left can't forgive is that Pinochet undoubtedly saved Chile and helped save South America.

Margaret Thatcher on Pinochet.

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108383

[amateur51]

Strikingly Baroness Thatcher always would not allow the Treasury to attack child benefit ! Says a lot about this current shower. I suspect she would never have countenanced the attacks on the rule of law either .

She wasn't above abolishing democratically-elected institutions like the GLC when it suited her