You are asking people to live and let live, to forget the past, forget what this woman done - uh uh, the damage is irreversable. No can do.

This is exactly the hyperbole I was expecting. I've studied Nazi war criminals for many years. I won't go into the gruesome details, but you know they did horrific things to people (not just jews, mentally disabled people, gypsies), injecting them with bleach, drilling into their heads etc.

Why did you bring up that analogy when talking about Margaret Thatcher

I don't doth protest to much I'm trying to bring bit of moderation to people who now apparently see Maggie as a war criminal on par with Mengeles.

Get a sense of proportion. You didn't like her. Tough. The majority did. I didn't. No need to spit the dummy.

JTL

Not me spitting the dummy...

I was just referring to the fact that just because someone is old doesn't necessarily mean that they are no longer accountable..

Em x

And thats your justification...

No example, no reason, just you hate her,

Oh thats fine then, no jury in the land could argue with that.

JTL

I hate her yes, but obviously for good reason

Well try and keep it in context. I don't know your problem with Maggie, but i can tell you for a fact she did not cut people up and inject animal semen into them.

She was a Prime Minister, and part of the job is ordering the armed forces into conflict areas, be it Bosnia, Somalia, Falklands, Iraq, Northern Ireland.

You can agree or disagree with any of those decisions, she had to make them. Tough call.

None of them deserves you wishing her dead. She did what she thought was right.

JTL

Well, thats obviously in your own mind, and you can choose to keep it there.

But ranting about wanting someone dead, and not justifying it is kind of lame. It would probably have been better if you'd just kept quiet.

JTL

OK... so... where the hell did I write I was wishing her dead?? Nowhere.. re-read my text before you mouth off a load of crap.. infact I wrote the opposite..

I don't have a problem with Maggie... re-read my text before you mouth off a load of crap..

I was just saying that spinning a line that "she is an old lady" doesn't cut the chase .. never has and never will.. she was a headstrong policitian that ruled England (the UK) with an iron fist.. seriously doubt she would actually want anyone suggesting "old lady" in the context that you and others were referring to her as... as in "vunerable"... she was an old boot and incredibly able... in one sense, kudos to her abilities.. in another sense... god help those who got in her way or in the way of her policies..

You are seriously just picking holes in anything I say.. fair enough.. I am thick skinned enough not to give a shit, but if you think I am going to sit back and let you manipulate what I am saying, then no way...

Oh.. and I am a WW2 freak.. literally... so no need to attempt to educate me in that way.. I was just referring to an old man reference when he was hated/judged for his past... did he get imprisioned? I don't know as I can't remember his name as I was only a young un... therefore I wrote allegedly.. get over it..

Em x

No it's not lame - everyone knows who she is, sadly as Scotland was the worst affected, only the Scots and anyone else who cared to take an interest know the full horror of it.

Why would it have been better for me to keep quiet?

This has been going on all day.

I was getting a complex! (not really, but you know what I mean.. unless you kinda stick up for yourself, you risk looking like you actually *are* what JTL is saying that you are! )

Em x

Because you refuse to justify why you wish another human being dead!

Its all very well to say you hate her (a la child tantrum). Why? What exactly did she do to you to make you wish she was dead?

I left Uni with a 10,000 pound debt because of her. I don't wish her dead.

If you can't explain why you want her dead, then thats why you should have just stayed quiet.

JTL

You wanted reasons why people HATE HER, This nearly says it all, cant talk about the miners strike as it’s still too painful!!!

20 REASONS WHY I HATE THATCHER

1. As Education secretary under Edward Heath in a foretaste of what is to come, stops free milk for school children. No chance of the widely praised 'free fruit' scheme ever being Tory policy! She later deregulates school meals so all they have on the menu is burger and chips! The health of the nation was not something Thatcher thought any of her concern.

2. Shamelessly uses the 'race card' to get elected PM in 1979! (Though I won’t claim her to be the first Tory leader to use this and certainly not the last!) "We are being flooded!" she asserts despite figures showing emigration higher than immigration and immigration at its lowest post-war level. Her idols are Keith Joseph (who ruined his own chance of being leader with a demon eyed rant on TV about sterilising the poor (I jest not!!)) and Enoch Powell (the 'intellectual' racist). She promotes Keith 'Eugenics' Joseph to Education Minister!

3. Monetarism! Disastrous policy of trying to control money supply. In the first of her two recessions (the worst since the 1930's), one fifth of our industrial base is wiped out and unemployment is more than doubled, there are summer riots in every inner-city in the country. Not bad for her first 2 years in office! In the first of many U-turns (see point on 'myth of strong leader'), she abandons monetarism. Polls predict Labour landslide and despite the resolute support of the press, she is the most unpopular PM on record. How could she possibly get out of this one?

4. The Falklands! In a gross piece of incompetence (or was it deliberate?) fails to avert the Falklands crisis by ignoring intelligence on the Argentine preparation for invasion in early 1982. Indeed she seems to positively encourage it by proposing scrapping the only warship we have there and having her defence secretary Nicholas Ridley openly say we didn't want the Falklands, thereby giving the impression we are not bothered about the islands! In 1978 when faced with the same intelligence, the Labour government quietly averts a war through diplomatic channels by threatening to send a taskforce. It's the classic tale, to divert attention from disastrous economic policies at home a crooked leader engages in a foreign war (except I'm not talking about Galtieri!). Perhaps Thatcher was getting advise from some of the brutal dictatorships she helped prop up in South America, "Would you like some more tea Mr Pinochet?". Number of British soldiers killed, 278, Argentines, 3000+. Blood on her hands anyone?

5. Destruction of local democracy. The beauty of not having a written constitution, having the backing of the press, having a massive majority in parliament (despite only getting 42% of the vote, less than 1 in 3 of the electorate) and having a permanent inbuilt Tory hereditary second chamber is that Tory PMs can do whatever they like. If you don’t like local democracy because they vote for someone else, just abolish it like Thatcher did and centralise everything from Whitehall and unelected Quangos who you carefully select. (Yes, Thatcher invented Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations.) The popular GLC was scrapped despite over 80% of Londoners being opposed. Londoners have to wait over 13 years before getting an assembly back and electing Livingstone as its leader once again.

6. Politicising the civil service. See point about QUANGOs above. Also if you don’t like what statistics the statistics office is publishing, make sure you stop them collecting the statistics and stop them publishing them. The figures that were published on individual wealth and earnings each year were abolished in this way. The Office for National Statistics like the Bank of England was made independent by this Labour government and yes they have started publishing the wealth and earnings figures again.

7. Regressive Taxation. Under Thatcher VAT increased from 8% to 17.5% and was also levied on utility bills for the first time as well. What she gave the rich in income tax cuts she took from the poor in indirect taxation. The proportion of GDP spent by the government under Thatcher stayed fairly static at around 40%. The difference was that rather than spend it on the NHS, housing or education she spent the money on defence, a massive expansion of the civil service (see point 6), paying the huge unemployment bill, and rising police salaries to keep them loyal in the face of massive civil unrest. The best part of all was that she shifted the burden of payment for all this onto the poor from the rich.

8. The widening gap between rich and poor. This might not be such a bad thing if the gap had not been so massive in the first place. How can the richest 50% owning 97% of the wealth be fair? This was her starting position she moved wealth almost exclusively to the richest 10% at the expense of the poorest 50%.


9. Spend, spend, spend! Abolishing credit controls seemed such a good idea, the economy booms on a consumer spending bubble....cue second crippling recession. Thanks Margaret! Not to mention the misery caused to millions of people suckered into debts and negative equity! Spend, spend, spend also applied to government borrowing which despite claims of financial prudence increased massively under Thatcher to fund income tax cuts for the rich.


10. Homelessness for the young. Why should homelessness be the preserve of ageing tramps who remember the 1930’s? No! Thatcher thought the opportunities should be open to all. Young beggars on the streets were Thatcher's invention. The legacy of massive youth unemployment and crime no-go areas for the police are still being fought today. There is a whole generation of people where crime and welfare culture was their only way of surviving and it became their mindset.

11. The Poll Tax! Regardless of how you view this in theory, apart from its regressive nature, it quite plainly was unworkable. They knew that it was going to be ridiculously expensive to collect, that there was overwhelming opposition to it (it ruined the 1991 census) and was going to mean massive non-payment and it was responsible for some of the worst rioting ever seen in central London but they pressed ahead anyway. Another U-turn inevitably came!

12. The myth of the strong leader. This was a total invention of the press. Thatcher's only strength (if you could call it that) was that she had no principles at all! She was an anti-smoking campaigner who ended up on the payroll of British American Tobacco. She had to do a U-turn on her 'flagship' economic policy after 2 years because she had wrecked the economy (see point 3) (This was just one year after her famous speech in 1980 where she assured the party faithful she was going to stick to monetarist policies-"You turn if you want to...the lady's not for turning"-yeah right!!). The Poll Tax was a disaster which she had to U-turn on (but too late to save her from being stabbed in the back!). She went to Europe saying she was against federalism but signed its most federalist law (the Single European Act in 1986). She later claimed she was tricked on this. Did she even know what she was doing? Some strong leader that is! And to top it all off, even in departure she was weak. "I fight on, I fight to win" she said in her pompous way before quietly resigning hours later when confronted by Ministers like Geoffrey Howe!!! It was the final U-turn from a weak puppet leader whose only qualities (as far as the Tories were concerned) were she did what she was told.

13. Degradation of the social professions. Social workers were virtually denounced as criminals! Teachers were so derided and there pay so eroded it barely survived as a profession and things like mental health, just loose them out on the streets, Thatcher's government didn’t care what they did!

14. Victorian Values. Yes before its Back to Basics successor under Major, Thatcher promised to take us back to Victorian morality and she nearly succeeded. We were not far away from child labour and seething slums of humanity and disease. I reckon Thatcher needed one more term for that!! She also took care to defend to the hilt her countless Ministers who were caught with their trousers down or hands in the till or both in some cases! Cecil Parkinson, Alan Clark, David Mellor, Jeffrey Archer (3 times), Jonathon Aitkin (twice)... etc. etc. the list goes on.

15. "There is no such thing as society". Did Thatcher foresee the 'playstation' generation? Selfishness as a virtue seemed to sum up her warped sense of morality to me.

16. Over-privatisation and overt corruption. Oh the beauty of it, a totally dominant monopoly privatised at a discount price to big business (lots of it foreign owned) so they can cream off profits to their hearts content. Who can do without Water, Gas, and Electricity? We can charge what we like! Plus we get the bonus of nice jobs on more Quangos OfWat, OfGas, of-with taxpayers cash we go. With Ministers interchanging between the boardrooms of the newly privatised companies and the regulating boards on massive salaries. Even husband and wife teams, remember Mr and Mrs Howe, one a consultant with a privatised firm, his wife the regulator. Anyone for insider dealing calls out Mrs Archer! Oh jolly good show! Even industries that plainly weren’t feasible for privatisation like bus and rail, go for it, it won’t hurt. And what shall we do with the money my dear? Well my son Mark has shares in a nice defence firm! Rather, still some left over for a nice reduction in the top rate of income tax as well.

17. Even public service broadcasting couldn’t escape. Relentless bullying of the BBC was started by Thatcher, she took this to a new level with Tebbit and various other ministers calling it the Bolshevic Broadcasting Company because it failed to replicate Sun editorial lines in its news broadcasts. In one of her last acts she even managed to wreck Channel 4’s public service commitment by changing its funding situation from one of subscription from ITV who sold its advertising space to total dependence on advertising.

18. The divisiveness of the North-South divide in wealth. Look at the political map and you can still see where the Conservatives win most of their seats in the South East because of this.

19. Regular winter crises in the NHS became the norm. The Tories argued these were inevitable because we couldn’t afford to fund the NHS properly. There are no winter crises anymore!

20. Crime rates doubled under Thatcher. This is probably the most surprising statistic of the lot when you consider the Tories so called strong standing on law and order. It just goes to demonstrate why we need a history lesson about Thatcher and not the lies printed in the right wing owned press.

Not really. I think we have just been saying that we find it highly distasteful to wish death on somebody because you don't agree with their politics.

Many people think the same as you, that she damaged the country. Many others think she saved the country and put it back on its feet after the last Labour government. That is down to different political view points. Margaret Thatcher was a controversial leader but she was not an evil dictator and history won't remember her as one. To wish death on somebody because of a different political view point is just wrong, surely you see that?

I suspect you don't really mean it and it is a rather juvenile rant. If you do really mean it ... well I think you are a dangerous person.

Because i've seen what she has done to my family you idiot - why should I have to divulge personal tradegy to you...

Stop repeating what the earlier numpties thrashed upon me. Think for yourself.