Petition for Thatcher's state funeral to be privatised

[Norfolk Born]

Well, this thread has opened my eyes to some truly nasty vicious posters, without an ounce of charity flowing in their embittered and twisted veins.

It really is about time that Platform 3 was closed so the disgusting bile that so many of you seem to wish on another frail and ill human being is kept hidden in your own perverted souls.

I don't understand why this thread has been allowed to continue, given the remarkably rapid closure of an earlier thread devoted to the same person.

[Flosshilde]

On this occasion I can sympathise with at least some of what Mr Pee writes ....

Too much in your post to answer point by point, except to say that it is almost wholly wrong. To pick up a few things -

"she [Mrs Thatcher] was elected only by rthe majority of voters in her own constituency": I don't know what the actual results of her elections were, but I very much doubt this. Under our present system an MP is elected if they are the candidate with the largest number of votes, which generally means that are voted for by a minority of those voting. I don't know of anyone (apart from Mr Bell & the sitting Speaker) who has been elected by a majority of voters.

"You don't mention anything bad that happened during the 1970s (the decade in which MT became Tory party leader), confining your list instead to wht you perceive to be the negative legacy of MT during the 80s." Can you give any examples of anything the Tories did that was good?

"As to tax rates, I do not see how reducing these when it's possible to do so is necessarily a harmful thing to do; "the greatest good of the greatest number" simply cannot be afforded out of local and national taxes because that "greatest number" simply can't afford to pay enough of them to allow it to be broughtg about." Local taxes (ie Council Tax), in combination with grants from central government, were manipulated by Thatcher (short-hand for Thatcher's government), by capping and other measures, to reduce local councils' powers, & therefore the ability of elected councils to act according to the wishes of their electors. National taxes were reduced on ideological grounds. Mrs T's starting point was to reduce government expenditure, not what needed to be spent to achieve, in Jayne's words, "the greatest good of the greatest number".

"Social housing stocks have depleted because local authorities just cannot afford to purchase and maintain them adequately and, as landlords, local authorities have legal obligations towards their tenants which they also find increasingly difficult to afford." Social housing stock were depleted becuase councils wsere forced to sell houses at grotesque discounts, far below their market value, & were not allowed to invest the proceeds in building more housing.

"As to "marketising" the NHS, it should be remembered that NHS needs to be run like a well-oiled business just like every other business if it is to succeed and, whatever one might say against it, it has succeeded pretty well over the years,
The NHS is not a business; far from being 'successful', the Tory-led marketisatikon has brought about fragmentation and a loss of focus on key principles.

"NHS has as shareholders the entire British population " No it doesn't - we are users, or clients, or even (god forbid) 'customers', not shareholders.

"How would government regulation of financial services have been a better thing than allowing this sector to deregulate? You can't regulate successfully against greed, " Well, you can at least try, & in so doing indicate that greed is unnacceptable. If the sector had been properly regulated some prosecutions or reigning-in would have been possible. As it is the sector has been allowed to run rampant, become 'too big to fail', with the result that the UK is failing. It was Thatcher's policies that started it & encouraged it.

"As to what you call "monetaristically-inspired mass unemployment", I have no evidence to suggest that governments led by MT regarded this or indeed any other "inspired" mass unemployment as a worth goal;" "Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying." Norman Lamont, 1991

"Anyway, to return to the topic, the petition is about how MT's funeral should be funded and why - and it is a patently ridiculous idea because not only is MT still alive, no one involved in it has appeared to question in advance the extent to which her family and her Estate would expect to fund it and, furthermore, since the notion of a "state funeral" presumes state funding, the very premise of the petition is contradictory, since one cannot have a "state funeral" funded by private industry. The question of a state funeral for MT has been in the public domain for at least 3 years, as this quote shows - "Margaret Thatcher will have a £3million state funeral - the first Prime Minister since Churchill to be given this honour - according to plans backed by the Queen and Gordon Brown. Hundreds of you see this as an insult to struggling taxpayers..." (Daily Mirror, 16/7/08, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-sto...5875-20645518/). The 'State' aspect of a state funeral has less to do with the source of funding than the fact that it is a recognition by 'the state', which clearly in this case means recognition by the Queen. The funding could still be private even if ceremony involved the use of the armed forces and the police.

[Mr Pee]

Well, Flosshilde,

Too much in your post to answer point by point, except to say that it is almost wholly wrong.

Where to start? You gladly admit that you don't know the result of her election; neither do I. So we'll move on.

I think your second sentence sums up the problem- you refuse to accept that ANYTHING Mrs.T's government did was good; such a blinkered and narrow outlook will never lead to worthwhile debate.

Local taxes (ie Council Tax), in combination with grants from central government, were manipulated by Thatcher (short-hand for Thatcher's government), by capping and other measures, to reduce local councils' powers, & therefore the ability of elected councils to act according to the wishes of their electors. National taxes were reduced on ideological grounds. Mrs T's starting point was to reduce government expenditure, not what needed to be spent to achieve, in Jayne's words, "the greatest good of the greatest number".

Well if you honestly believe that local councils were acting according to the wishes of their electors, then once again you are living in fantasy land. And if National Taxes were reduced on ideological grounds- tax cuts that were part of Government policy, clearly trailed in the manifestos, and therefore voted for- then that ideology was simply to allow tax payers to keep more of their hard-earned money. I don't see what's wrong with that. There was a huge amount of money being wasted by government back then, as there is now.

"Social housing stocks have depleted because local authorities just cannot afford to purchase and maintain them adequately and, as landlords, local authorities have legal obligations towards their tenants which they also find increasingly difficult to afford." Social housing stock were depleted becuase councils wsere forced to sell houses at grotesque discounts, far below their market value, & were not allowed to invest the proceeds in building more housing.

Ahinton is absolutely right there, I don't think there's anything to add, except that the "grotesque discounts" you mention probably didn't feel grotesque to those who were finally able to own their own home as a result of the policy.

The NHS is not a business; far from being 'successful', the Tory-led marketisatikon has brought about fragmentation and a loss of focus on key principles.

The NHS may not be a business in the sense that McDonalds is a business, but it still has to operate to the same principles. Otherwise it would simply become a monetary black hole, suppliers would be able to charge what they like, and it would become a liability to the nation rather than an asset. Just because it is publicly funded does not mean it can operate in a vacuum. And we are shareholders- we are all affected by the performance of the NHS-the difference is that if it is inefficient, rather than our shares falling, our taxes will increase.

It was Thatcher's policies that started it & encouraged it.

Blaming Mrs. Thatcher for the current state of the financial sector is like blaming Napoleon for the current state of the EU- it's ridiculous, and conveniently ignores 20 years of mismanagement by the City and Government of all political hues.

Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying." Norman Lamont, 1991

The alternative was to allow inflation to spiral completely out of control, thus rendering the British economy hopelessly uncompetitive and throwing many millions more out of work. There was no quck or easy fix.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-562178/Margaret-Thatcher-The-debt-owe-her.html

[MrGongGong]

Something for MrP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsq3H_6XuFA

[amateur51]

I formally propose that this thread has outlived its purpose and should be closed

[MrGongGong]

I formally propose that this thread has outlived its purpose and should be closed

[Pilchardman]

I don't understand why this thread has been allowed to continue, given the remarkably rapid closure of an earlier thread devoted to the same person.

Can the person not be discussed? Or her funeral arrangements, given that they were in the news at the time?

[Flosshilde]

& have been for nearly 4 years?

I shall be forwarding the link to the petition to all my friends, & I'm sure they will forward it on to theirs. So, thank you Pilchardman for alerting me to it.

[Pilchardman]

You're welcome. :)

[ahinton]

"she [Mrs Thatcher] was elected only by rthe majority of voters in her own constituency": I don't know what the actual results of her elections were, but I very much doubt this. Under our present system an MP is elected if they are the candidate with the largest number of votes, which generally means that are voted for by a minority of those voting. I don't know of anyone (apart from Mr Bell & the sitting Speaker) who has been elected by a majority of voters.

Either of us could look up that results of the General Elections in her constituency when she was the successful candidate and I don't have time to do that right now; in any case, what you write makes no sense. Of coruse very few MPs are ever elected with an overall majority - i.e. by polling more votes than all the other candidates in total - but the point that I made was and remains that the only people who voted for Mrs Thatcher were those in her constituency, not the electorate at large.

"You don't mention anything bad that happened during the 1970s (the decade in which MT became Tory party leader), confining your list instead to what you perceive to be the negative legacy of MT during the 80s." Can you give any examples of anything the Tories did that was good?

Yes; cutting all manner of red tape, reining in the powers of the unions, making it easier for people to invest in shares and to start up new businesses for starters. Was it all roses? - no, of course not! - but a reasonable and balanced viewpoint requires its holder to compare and contrast what happened during her terms with what happened during the 11 or so years immediately preceding them, which was hardly a bed of rosese either.

"As to tax rates, I do not see how reducing these when it's possible to do so is necessarily a harmful thing to do; "the greatest good of the greatest number" simply cannot be afforded out of local and national taxes because that "greatest number" simply can't afford to pay enough of them to allow it to be brought about." Local taxes (ie Council Tax), in combination with grants from central government, were manipulated by Thatcher (short-hand for Thatcher's government), by capping and other measures, to reduce local councils' powers, & therefore the ability of elected councils to act according to the wishes of their electors. National taxes were reduced on ideological grounds. Mrs T's starting point was to reduce government expenditure, not what needed to be spent to achieve, in Jayne's words, "the greatest good of the greatest number".

Indeed - but then if councils' powers to levy taxes were not kept in check, far more council taxpayers would find themslves in default because they couldn't afford to pay them along with all the other national taxes - and look what a mess that would create! That said, if one looks at the past 11 years, the amounts wasted on defence spending - Iraq, Afghanistan and an enormous litany of other mismanagement of funds especially in terms of procurement bungles - we'd not need to have borrowed quite so much and might even have been able to manage with less tax rises. As I mentioned before, funding on "the greatest good of the greatest number" basis is a pipe-dream and an impossibility because there could never be enough funds or ability to pay them in order to achieve this; indeed, the success of NHS alone in increasing longevity has ironically been a self-defeating factor, in that far more people now need and are entitled to receiv e state retirement benefit for longer periods of time.

"Social housing stocks have depleted because local authorities just cannot afford to purchase and maintain them adequately and, as landlords, local authorities have legal obligations towards their tenants which they also find increasingly difficult to afford." Social housing stock were depleted becuase councils wsere forced to sell houses at grotesque discounts, far below their market value, & were not allowed to invest the proceeds in building more housing.

I do agree that it could be argued that some of the discounts at which they had to sell off stock were unreasonably large, but don't forget that the market value of the properties once sold increased to some extent because they were now in private hands, so selling at "below market value" would have had to be a self-fulfilling prophecy if the properties were to be sold at all. What you avoid response to is that councils have to be able to fund maintenance of their properties as well as administration and legal costs and this presents a burden that is increasingly becoming harder for them to bear; local authority housing in the poorest areas where it's arguably needed the most will present the greatest burden because more people will have to pay their rents with housing benefit and there would have to be considerably more properties for them to let and maintain.

"As to "marketising" the NHS, it should be remembered that NHS needs to be run like a well-oiled business just like every other business if it is to succeed and, whatever one might say against it, it has succeeded pretty well over the years,The NHS is not a business; far from being 'successful', the Tory-led marketisatikon has brought about fragmentation and a loss of focus on key principles.

It IS a business in the sense that it has to be run like one rather than treated as though a bottomless money pit with guaranteed taxpayer bailouts. NHS has never been perfect but its achievements have been considerable over the years and, far from "Tory-led marketisation" bringing about "fragmentation and a loss of focus on key principles", matters became far worse for it during the Blair/Brown years as a result of undue target focusing, over-reliance on top-heavily expensive management and poor procurement handling.

"NHS has as shareholders the entire British population " No it doesn't - we are users, or clients, or even (god forbid) 'customers', not shareholders.

Not true; not everyone uses it and some use it infrequently but every taxpayer pays for it so has a stake in it; one cannot be a user, client or customer of NHS unless and until one actually goes to visit an NHS GP or hospital but governments don't exempt non-users/clients/customers from funding obligations. "Free at the point of sale", runs the cliché - but, no sale, no freebie.

"How would government regulation of financial services have been a better thing than allowing this sector to deregulate? You can't regulate successfully against greed, " Well, you can at least try, & in so doing indicate that greed is unnacceptable. If the sector had been properly regulated some prosecutions or reigning-in would have been possible. As it is the sector has been allowed to run rampant, become 'too big to fail', with the result that the UK is failing. It was Thatcher's policies that started it & encouraged it.

I do agree that financial services regulation has much for which to answer, but you're hardly going to achieve salvation in this merely by having civil servants running the regulatory show instead of those who now do so and by "indicating that greed is unacceptable"! Prosecutions can only occur when there have been demonstrable breaches of the law by financial institutions; "reining[sp.] in" is possible already with the current regulator which has powers to fine organisations and has indeed used that power, although FSA (set into being by Brown) has nevertheless fallen far short of reasonable expectations and would almost certainly still have done so had it been a government deprtment rather than a private limited company as is the case.

"As to what you call "monetaristically-inspired mass unemployment", I have no evidence to suggest that governments led by MT regarded this or indeed any other "inspired" mass unemployment as a worth goal;" "Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying." Norman Lamont, 1991

Had inflation had been allowed to rise unchecked, you'd still have had that rise in unemployment because employers would as a consequence have found themselves increasingly less able to afford to employ staff in such an economic climate; 1991 is also post-Thatcher. Do you really believe that Thatcher herself actually wanted a recession or the risk of repetition of the rampant inflation that beleaguered the 70s?

[ahinton]

"Anyway, to return to the topic, the petition is about how MT's funeral should be funded and why - and it is a patently ridiculous idea because not only is MT still alive, no one involved in it has appeared to question in advance the extent to which her family and her Estate would expect to fund it and, furthermore, since the notion of a "state funeral" presumes state funding, the very premise of the petition is contradictory, since one cannot have a "state funeral" funded by private industry. The question of a state funeral for MT has been in the public domain for at least 3 years, as this quote shows - "Margaret Thatcher will have a £3million state funeral - the first Prime Minister since Churchill to be given this honour - according to plans backed by the Queen and Gordon Brown. Hundreds of you see this as an insult to struggling taxpayers..." (Daily Mirror, 16/7/08, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-sto...5875-20645518/). The 'State' aspect of a state funeral has less to do with the source of funding than the fact that it is a recognition by 'the state', which clearly in this case means recognition by the Queen. The funding could still be private even if ceremony involved the use of the armed forces and the police.

I take your point in principle, but it would create a very interesting potential precedent were the private sector to be allowed, let alone invited, still less ordered, to fund the use of the police and armed forces rather than the taxpayers who usually fund these organisations, even if only for just this one occasion for the time being. Whoever did end up funding it would expect to get a return from it just like any other investment that they make - and this is where the entire idea could go very pear-shaped; just imagine the competition between firms jostling for a piece of the action, advertising and marketing opportunities, international media rights and the rest! And who should be charged with deciding who gets the funding gig anyway - and on what grounds? Furthermore, wouldn't MT's executors and heirs be entitled to mount legal challenges to anything of this over which it could not reach unanimous agreement? If so, who pays the lawyers' bills?

[Pilchardman]

Yes; cutting all manner of red tape

This is another myth. "Rolling back the state" only applied to certain functions of the state. In fact, the state grew under Thatcher. It's just that the bias was in favour of the integrity of the financial system and the solvency of financial institutions over the well-being of the population.

[ahinton]

This is another myth. "Rolling back the state" only applied to certain functions of the state. In fact, the state grew under Thatcher. It's just that the bias was in favour of the integrity of the financial system and the solvency of financial institutions over the well-being of the population.

In this you certainly have a point. Much red tape was indeed cut and there was rolling back of the state but, as (Conservative) MP Jesse Norman points out critically in his book The Big Society, what remained untouched by this became all the more centralised so, in that sense, MT's rolling back of the state, whilst not quite a myth, was undoubtedly an exaggeration.

[Pilchardman]

I have many points; you just disagree with most of them. ;)

[Flosshilde]

The difficulties that you put forward are inherent in any private involvement in public services, & are fundamental to objections to that involvement. Sponsorship (a slightly different thing) of public events is well established, and I believe that organisations like football clubs have to pay for police used for crowd control etc. during matches.

(reply to ahinton, #161)