Margaret Thatcher

[Curt 1]

It seems that the old lady is in increasingly poor health and perhaps with not much time left.

I can only imagine the response to the news of her death when that comes.

She seems to have been either loved or hated, to the extremes.

Whatever most people seem to have firmly made up their mind about whether she was good or bad way way long ago, and so there will likely to be no debate and just lots of shouting going on.

 

I honestly don't know much but keen to know more.

For those who hated, was she really that bad?

Was the alternative, old Michael Foot guy etc, someone who would have really guided the UK in better hands?

 

Honest questions.

[Tubby Beaver 209]

She was an old witch and I for one won't be shedding any tears when finally eats it. A disaster for the working classes and hung on to power due to the success Falklands campaign

[Chriselle 158]

Maybe I'll crack that sake and have a toast.....but then again...maybe not.

[big-will 7]

The idea of Michael Foot was perhaps even more alarming.

[NoFakie 45]

Michael Foot was a good bloke. The papers destroyed him for his image, but that reflects more on them than him. You'd have to be pretty stupid to think that papers run by c words like Murdoch, Maxwell, Conrad Black, that tw word who had the Express for years, etc. have the best interests of Britain at heart.

 

The net result is that we now have extremely dim identikit politicians with no principals and no personalities, but who look quite nice in photos and never wear the wrong coat. Michael Foot wrote the introduction to a well-known Penguin reprint of Gulliver's Travels. I doubt any publisher would want to put any modern British politician within ten feet of any serious piece of literature. They're all too thick and no-one respects what they say anyway.

[NoFakie 45]

It seems that the old lady is in increasingly poor health and perhaps with not much time left.

I can only imagine the response to the news of her death when that comes.

She seems to have been either loved or hated, to the extremes.

Whatever most people seem to have firmly made up their mind about whether she was good or bad way way long ago, and so there will likely to be no debate and just lots of shouting going on.

 

I honestly don't know much but keen to know more.

For those who hated, was she really that bad?

Was the alternative, old Michael Foot guy etc, someone who would have really guided the UK in better hands?

 

Honest questions.

 

I expect when Thatcher does die, some good obituaries will be printed. They will already have been written. Don't automatically expect "shouting" unless that's what you choose to read.

 

I think the most sensible thing to do is to compare how Britain has done to a combination of Norway (fellow North Sea Oil owner) and say France or Germany (mixed economy). What standard of living do British people have compared to those countries, how much personal debt, what kind of academic and vocational training, what level of general health, how are pensioners treated, how about equality and equality of opportunity,.... On more than one of those levels, I think Britain has failed, in a similar manner to the way the US is failing all but its more successful members of society. Thirteen of the years since were under Labour, but Thatcher moved the whole political agenda and consensus so far over to the benefit of mainly financial interests that even the opposition felt it had to be Thatcherism-lite to have any hope of election. Its the same with Obama in the US. He is still a Wall Street candidate and even Clinton was ostensibly Reagan-lite. Under Obama, the Fed is still run by Republicans.

 

In case anyone thinks this is some big inevitable wave of history, Thatcher would have been dumped as economically incompetent in the following year's election. It was the random act of the Falkland's War that saved her.

[ippy 66]

Ill not be sad to see the back of her. I cant imagine therell be much mourning in scotland (aside maybe malcolm rifkind crying into his porridge).

[Tubby Beaver 209]

Now, if there was anybody who needed their Tartan bunnet, shortbread and whisky 'fisshul Scorland card yanked.....it's Malcolm effin Rifkind!!