Re: Thatcher dies
 

There was actually a slight fall in votes for the conservatives at the 83 election, followed by increases in 87 and 92. I could have voted in 87 and 92 but I don't remember voting.

There were definately a number of conservative seats in Scotland in the early 90s when I lived there. I remember Perth & Kinross going to the SNP during that period.

All parties try to play the boundary changes game to their advantage. It's generally considered that the present situation is to the disadvantage of the conservatives.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

How much rope do you really need? :blink:

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I quite liked Michael Foot. He always seemed like a friendly eccentric uncle who meant well despite being a bit out of touch. Not that I was old enough to vote at the time mind.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

The Falklands helped but the emergence of the SDP and the state of labour in 1983 handed the election on a plate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lon...ote_in_history

Didn't Michael Foot support military action in the Falklands?

It seems he did...........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/b...rgentina-white

Re: Thatcher dies
 

It has always surprised me that once a party is in power in the UK, they are usually in at least 2 or 3 terms before being kicked out of office, regardless of what they do.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

OK. The electorate still needs to vote though. Newspapers can't do that for them.

I choose to believe that the electorate are more intelligent than you appear to give credit for. Perhaps they aren't which begs the question: should they be permitted to vote?

How do you explain Kinnock's loss in 1992? Newspapers again?

Was it newspapers that swept Blair to victory in 1997?

Re: Thatcher dies
 

This suggests otherwise:

UK Elections

I thought that Blair was considered the messiah for obtaining back to back full terms. I could be wrong though

Re: Thatcher dies
 

My opinion based on my time served behind a bar (in North Notts) during the Thatcher years is that a lot of the working class had some bizarre approaches to their reasons for voting

Time served military blokes seem to think labour and anything socialist was a slippery slope to all out communism, this seemed to hold some sway with the police but not to the same degree, the miners in the pub voted labour and didn’t even bother to give the time to think why, they just did because that’s what unionized labour should do, a good portion of the self employed voted for who would give them a better tax break even though half of them clearly never made enough money to hit the amount needed to make up for the other shortfalls, but the vast majority voted on who they liked based on the leaders personality and if asked about policy would be unable to quote more than two if you were lucky..
Way too many IMHO wouldn’t vote for Kinnock because he was Welsh

Re: Thatcher dies
 

seems as good a reason as any :p

[ducks and runs for cover]

Re: Thatcher dies
 

****!

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Interesting to read the full quote. However was it not the case that her bark was worse than her bite. Welfare entitlements were no less in Thatcher's day than they are now. She was an ideologue and made her far-right views known very forcefully, but she wasn't a dictator (thankfully) and parliament was able to steer through the rhetoric. The benefit of the hard talk was that British industry and foreign investors sat up and listened.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I can't disagree with any of that.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

As I said, I was far too young to be able to recall her rhetoric with any accuracy but, as with most of the media's interpretation of what was said, the reality is usually very different from the soundbite.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Most of us agree with the sentiment of 'don't sit on your backside with your hand out'.

The complaint in Thatcher was that she ultimately threw people into the welfare system by selling/closing down British infrastructure. (Which provided jobs to keep people from sitting there with their hands out).

Whilst I don't argue that some of these decisions were positive (especially knocking back the unions considerably), we now have the benefit of hindsight and can easily point to the decisions that were perhaps not in the best interest of the country (long term).

She was basically screaming at the top of her lungs for everyone to get a job whilst cutting 1000's of jobs nationally, without producing a strategy/incentives to perhaps get privatised companies to set up shop first.

I've said it before in this thread I would rather pay someone to produce something the country uses at a loss than pay someone to sit at home on their backside.

You could argue (as some people have suggested) that she was a cause to the social problems we have today, which was the very thing she was so happy to try and remove!

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I wasn't "far" too young to recall it, but was young enough to have far more exciting things on my mind than listening to Mrs. T !! Thanks for digging up the full quote though. :thumbup:

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I recall Alastair Campbell speaking of Labour's election campaign in 97. He said the party's platform must be no more than five policies and all five policies must be capable of being written on the back of a business card. Any more was beyond the grasp and attention span of the average voter.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Regardless, I used the present tense in my post. She is hated in general.

A surprisingly good article by Russell Brand here - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russel...?utm_hp_ref=tw

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Yes it's really a tough one. I was listening to some of the interviews/opinions from the mining community done yesterday, and you do wonder what the right way of doing it could have been. On one hand it doesn't make sense for the country to continue funding a loss making industry (it's not sustainable) on the other, those communities needed alternative industry. There have been some interesting sociological studies on the difficulty of getting (say) miners to work in what they consider soft employment.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Policy Number 1: spend like there's no tomorrow! ;)

Re: Thatcher dies
 

It wasn't just miners though was it. ;)

A lot of the souths troubles today are more due to off-shoring I am not pinning the souths troubles on Thatcher. But you can't tell me that the north even remotely recovered from Thatcher.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

From The Telegraph:

Frugal to the last, Baroness Thatcher insisted she did not want a state funeral and said there should be no military fly-past over the service on the grounds that it would be a “waste of money”.

Credit where credit is due!

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Irrelevant.

You made great play on her taking available advice. I simply gave the example of how she also ignored it to cause the problem in the first place.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I'm getting a bit bored of ex coal miners harping on about what happened 20 years ago - they obviously don't care about our environment, or the pollution coal causes.

They remind me of out-of-work ivory hunters, or redundant workhouse managers - a relic of the past.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Most western countries economic conditions are down to politicians who approved this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz...e_gdata_player.

Our economic life is controlled by trans-National corporations?

Kudos to Sir James Goldsmith who described this in 1994.
If you can find it, his book "The Trap" is an excellent read

Re: Thatcher dies
 

"KEN LOACH: The film director said: ‘How should we honour her? Let’s privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It’s what she would have wanted.’" :rofl:

Re: Thatcher dies
 

This is from an obituary written by Hugo Young in 2003, 2 weeks before he died....

"Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state. The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. But the sense of community evaporated. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with. This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn't care if it happened or not. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse."

Sums it up rather nicely.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

He obviously didn't think much of people being able to think for themselves...
Or perhaps a**holes are just a**holes...hardly the fault of one leader?

Re: Thatcher dies
 

As much as I don't agree with all of his sentiments, a very eloquently written piece. He has surprised me!

Re: Thatcher dies
 

So, again, what would you have done?

I suspect you will say that you would not have removed the single ship in the first place. Accepting that, assuming Argentina had still invaded what would you have done?

She didn't cause the problem. Argentina's invasion caused the problem. She may have made their decision to invade easier but I cannot see how that justifies the invasion.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I accept that the politicians approved it, but do you not accept that it is consumers that feed it? How many of us are prepared to pay more than the market rate simply to keep our neighbours in employment. A quick search through many of the threads on this post demonstrates that, rather than actually paying for goods or services, many of us what such things for free!

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Again, irrelevant. You made a silly comment about her following advice, either ignorant or disregarding of the other advice that she went against. Your diversionary tactic doesn't work with me.

Did someone here say the invasion was justified? I must have missed that.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I referred to advice relevant to the sinking of the Belgrano. Is is your position that she was advised not to give the executive order that she did?

I have made no comments about her ignoring advice prior to the invasion. If you wish to allege diversionary tactics, you need to direct them at yourself.

What political gain did she obtain from permitting the sinking of the Belgrano on that particular day? I ask this as it appears that you believe it could have been shot at at will previously.

So if it wasn't justified, what difference did it make that she withdrew the one ship in the region?

Re: Thatcher dies
 

No. My position is that you place great emphasis on how she acted upon advice yet seem oblivious to the fact that she went completely against an earlier piece of advice.


At will? No. Merely that its position had been known for a couple of days, due to it being tracked, and that it's position in sailing away - however temporary and being able to turn back if necessary - was less of a threat than heading towards and closer, perhaps even in the exclusion zone.

Remember the "it was a danger to our shipping" was justification. Is it really feasible that it became more dangerous when moving away?

Just doesn't seem right does it?

Hence the speculation that it was fired upon to sabotage the peaceful solution that had been worked out.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

The Falklands war is almost 30 years ago. Had the Argentinians not invaded then there wouldnt have been a war.
So easy to look back and say What If this or what if that.
She made a decision right in some eyes wrong in others you cant turn back the clock.
Its since transpired that Iraq did not have WMDs but it was invaded.
Leaders make decisions that can have a great impact.
Should troops have been sent to Northern Ireland in 1969 as that wasnt a war?

Re: Thatcher dies
 

That rhetoric inadvertently typifies the attitudes engendered by Thatcherism. If by "us" you mean people who were brought up or became adult in the UK during the 1980's then very few.

If you mean by "us", people of a similar generation from e.g. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scandanavia and most other places, or Brits who were thinking adults before 1979, then the answer would be quite different.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

31 years ago, April 30th the task force arrived in the total exclusion zone.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I am not going to disagree with this at all. However, I do know that my mum likes a bargain and has voted liberal all her life;)

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Quoting one paragraph of the article can be somewhat misleading..........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...her-hugo-young

"I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. She wanted to win, but did not put much faith in the quick smile. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. The machinery of modern political management – polls, consulting, focus groups – is deployed mainly to discover what will make a party and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren't about getting the leader liked. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident.

This is a style whose absence is much missed. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. For the most part, it has not been undone. Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Each now seems banal. In the prime Thatcher years they required a severity of will to carry through that would now, if called on, be wrapped in so many cycles of deluding spin as to persuade us it hadn't really happened.

These developments set a benchmark. They married the personality and belief to action. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across a wide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. This is what we mean by the Thatcher revolution, imposing on Britain, for better or for worse, some of the liberalisation that the major continental economies know, 20 years later, they still need. I think on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide it cannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history."

Interesting that he makes no mention of the Falklands at all in the article.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinio...cle3735339.ece

"The politics of the Thatcher years were divisive but they couldn’t be anything else. The Left wanted policies that were simply impractical and unacceptable. They could not be conceded, no matter how angry it made the unions that their demands were denied.

I was a member of the centrist Social Democratic Party during the miners’ strike and argued then, as I do now, that the Government might have done more to help those in pit villages find alternative work. But this was not what the fight was about, nor what the miners asked for. They argued that there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit and that we should use deep-mined British coal, however difficult or expensive to extract.

Such a demand was impossible to yield to. Margaret Thatcher was not being divisive by refusing to yield to it. Yesterday Dave Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that the former Prime Minister’s death on his birthday made it “one of the best birthdays I have ever had”.

What sort of human being says something like that? The sort she was right to resist and we should be pleased was defeated. And the sort who takes all the blame for the brave miners he took down with him."

I noticed Neil Kinnock on Newsnight the other night laid the blame for the
catastrophic defeat of the miners fully on Arther Scargill. Kinnock recognised that Mrs T. was pragmatic enough to have accepted a compromise during the strike but for Scargill it was to be total victory or nothing.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

Not misleading at all. Of course I read the full obituary and a very well written one it was with the balance and insight you expected from Hugo Young.

The paragraph I quoted seemed to be the kernel of his insight.

Perhaps I should have included the same link that you did. Thanks.

Re: Thatcher dies
 

I'd consider that paragraph probably the weakest of the article. Interesting that he used the word "soccer" instead of "football" indicating clearly that he was a poorly informed outsider on that subject.