Margaret Thatcher dies

[Resurrection Man]

I believe Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan won his last presidential election with 91.15% of the popular vote. I'm sure he would have met with Thatcher's approval.

What ? A bit like Chavez then....that well-known supporter of the Syrian regime and so adding to the misery over there.

[teamsaint]

What ? A bit like Chavez then....that well-known supporter of the Syrian regime and so adding to the misery over there.

Well its not like he was the only one involved in dirty stuff over there..

[Resurrection Man]

.....
We now have the strange situation of spiralling energy costs while hundreds of years worth of coal lies underground unable to be extracted......

Oh for God sake... do some research first. Just how economical were those pits? How much money had Governments been ploughing into those uneconomical pits?

[teamsaint]

Oh for God sake... do some research first. Just how economical were those pits? How much money had Governments been ploughing into those uneconomical pits?

whatever, its going to be VERY uneconomical when we are short of generating capacity in the very near future.
Not clever.

[Julien Sorel]

Margaret Thatcher and Pol Pot

Until 1989, the British role in Cambodia remained secret. The first reports appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, written by Simon O'Dwyer-Russell, a diplomatic and defence correspondent with close professional and family contacts with the SAS. He revealed that the SAS was training the Pol Pot-led force. Soon afterwards, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that the British training for the "non-communist" members of the "coalition" had been going on "at secret bases in Thailand for more than four years". The instructors were from the SAS, "all serving military personnel, all veterans of the Falklands conflict, led by a captain".

The Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation after the "Irangate" arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986. "If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine training in Indo-China, let alone with Pol Pot," a Ministry of Defence source told O'Dwyer-Russell, "the balloon would have gone right up. It was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements." Moreover, Margaret Thatcher had let slip, to the consternation of the Foreign Office, that "the more reasonable ones in the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in a future government". In 1991, I interviewed a member of "R" (reserve) Squadron of the SAS, who had served on the border. "We trained the KR in a lot of technical stuff - a lot about mines," he said. "We used mines that came originally from Royal Ordnance in Britain, which we got by way of Egypt with marking changed . . . We even gave them psychological training. At first, they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them how to go easy . . ."

The Foreign Office response was to lie. "Britain does not give military aid in any form to the Cambodian factions," stated a parliamentary reply. The then prime minister, Thatcher, wrote to Neil Kinnock: "I confirm that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them." On 25 June 1991, after two years of denials, the government finally admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the "resistance" since 1983. A report by Asia Watch filled in the detail: the SAS had taught "the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the manufacture and use of time-delay devices". The author of the report, Rae McGrath (who shared a joint Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign on landmines), wrote in the Guardian that "the SAS training was a criminally irresponsible and cynical policy".

http://www.newstatesman.com/node/137397

[Resurrection Man]

While I would agree that Scargill (not even liked by all his family) was a menace....was it right that 104,000 people were affected just in that small snapshot of South Yorks....Just because of one man and shall we say One womans venom towards each other....

.....

And on the other hand

Closures in all coalfields began in the 1980s as demand for British coal was weakened by large subsidies that other European governments gave to their coal industries (West Germany subsidised coal by four times as much and France by three times as much in 1984) and the availability of lower cost, often open-cast, coal mined in Australia, Colombia, Poland and the United States.

[Resurrection Man]

And your posts have added precisely what?

Quite a lot of balance, actually

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

And funded by ? Bankrupt the country....underperforming pits...not economically viable. Tough.

Are you talking about miners or bankers?

[Resurrection Man]

So why wasn't that logic applied to the banks, if its such a great policy?

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.

[Resurrection Man]

Well its not like he was the only one involved in dirty stuff over there..

No but he is awarded 'Saint' status by many on this forum

[Beef Oven]

Oh for God sake... do some research first. Just how economical were those pits? How much money had Governments been ploughing into those uneconomical pits?

[Resurrection Man]

whatever, its going to be VERY uneconomical when we are short of generating capacity in the very near future.
Not clever.

Nuclear. Under-investment.

[Resurrection Man]

Are you talking about miners or bankers?

You know that I am referring to the mines.

[Flosshilde]

Oh for God sake... do some research first. Just how economical were those pits? How much money had Governments been ploughing into those uneconomical pits?

Was it more, or less, than they subsequently ploughed into unemployment benefit, attempts to regenerate the desolated areas, etc etc since the pits were closed?

[Beef Oven]

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.