I said “attack,” not “insult,” and my admonition stands. The comment I quoted serves no purpose in this thread except to mock another poster and could easily have derailed the thread.
[ /Modding ]
It wasn’t an attack either. The OP claims to be unknowledgeable of British history. He has demonstrated he is not. I fail to see how an admittedly snarky remark about that is a personal attack.
I will now let the subject drop, or take it to ATMB. I will preemptively agree that continuing this discussion is inappropriate here.
Worst: Eden. Best: MacMillan. Quite surprised to see so much love for Churchill; he was as bad at everything else as he was good at prosecuting the war.
Interesting. Outside war time, he was the Home Secretary, President of the Board of Trade, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Must have been good at writing too, since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.He was not a saint and did have his faults but there is a reason that TIME magazine held him (and Gandhi) as runners up to Einstein as Man of the (20th) century.
That he was Home Secretary doesn’t mean he was a good Home Secretary, any more than Thatcher’s spell as Education Minister negates her role as an enemy of British education.
I didn’t like milk much anyway.
Come to America! We still have ketchup, a vegetable.
How much of your dislike of Churchill (and Thatcher) just comes from the fact that you tend to be pro-Labour and not a big fan of the Conservatives, generally?
That’s what I’ve been saying! Hitler was Man of the Year 1938 and Stalin won it twice in '39 and '42!
Alanbrooke wrote that if Churchill’s schemes were ever adopted that would be the end of Britain.
I have never bought the theory that Britain would have accepted terms without Churchill. England/Great Britain/United Kingdom have had a policy of preventing a hegemonic power in Europe. Even if there was an armistice it would be temporary to allow Britain to prepare not unlike many of the treaties, peaces and truces during the Napoleonic Wars.
Britain would have come back in before a year, in the Balkans or in N Africa.
Churchill as a Prime Minister was great for the time. As a politician and effective member of Cabinet he was appalling. He had a hell of a lot of baggage, well deserved, and the people of the UK threw him out.
Best? I doubt it very much- I think Asquith has a greater claim than Churchill.
Worst (IMHO) would have to be that lying, devious arsehole Lloyd George.
Milk?
I was responding to a post about Margaret Thatcher’s time as Education Secretary. The thing she was most well known for was removing free milk for schoolchildren. She acquired the name “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”.
I’m going to go with William Pitt the Younger for the best (although technically not called “Prime Minister”). A great reformer of Parliament and one who helped get the country’s finances in better shape after the disastrous War of American Independence. Sadly he died shortly before the abolition of the slave trade, one of his long-term goals. Admittedly my views are probably colored somewhat by the various dramatic representations of him (Blackadder not included).
I’ll have to think about “worst”; most of the ones I might consider have strong positives as well (Churchill, Thatcher, Lloyd George) that mitigate their negatives to some degree. I do think Brown was a mistake but he was a mistake of mediocrity, not so much an incompetent as the wrong man for the job. In a different governmental role he may well have thrived.
TIME awards its Man (now Person) of the Time Period based on historical significance, not on beneficial influence (as Sitnam alludes to). Stalin really ought to have placed second.
I was around at the time, and I may even have bought some of the shares. A lot of people thought that the shares were cheap, but it was not a “guaranteed winner”. It turned out that those people were right, but they didn’t know that beforehand, they merely turned out to be correct. Everything is obvious in hindsight.
The privatisations had to be successful for political reasons, so there was probably a tendency to pitch the prices at the low end of reasonable estimates. But it was not an attempt to sell shares cheap to insiders. Why make it public at all, if that were the case?
I agree. Churchill was like the proverbial hedgehog - he was right about one big thing.
Once the first privatisations happened, everyone had the benefit of hindsight - it became obvious to one and all that these privatisations were on the cheap.
I even remember some time before any of this happened that it had been in the Tory manifesto, folk around me were speculating which companies would be privatised as the list had not been made clear at that time, and if it were to be the utilities then it would be a no brainer to buy shares - although the term ‘no brainer’ had not been coined then.
Every year the gas, electric, water and GPO (telecom & mail) posted huge profits and were highly desirable acquisitions, the greatest concern was that since these companies were monopolies that private owenrs could ramp up prices with impunity, and that’s why the various regulatory bodies were set up, along with the governemtn retaining a ‘golden’ share, one share that gave it 51% control.
There was a reason why a law was passed to make it illegal to apply to buy more than one tranche of shares - because it was an obvious easy way to make money and rationing of shares was done to placate the public who saw that the richest had the potential to gain most buy obtaining more shares, whilst the less well off would not have had the opportunity to do the same, or at least to the saem extent.IMHO it was a pretty odious scramble to easy money, with a number of Tory MPs and hangers on being conivcted of trying to obtain exra tranches of shares by trying to apply through the use of other family members.
Legitimate question, and I am not certain the two can be separated. I am pro-Labour and anti-Conservative because I believe historically (and fortunately I missed the betrayal of the Labour movement that Blair represented) Labour has been better for the people of the UK than the Conservatives. But not every Tory PM has been as bad as some - Thatcher jumps out at me as the worst not just because of her policies, but because she relished it. She broke the unions not just because she felt it was an economically good thing, but because of a vociferous hatred of working class communal organizations. She despised the concept of community in general, and also was the first of the breed (that I experienced) of leaders who mistrusted education and saw it as a negative rather than a positive in people.
Churchill - well my dislike there comes partly from the overstatement of his role in WWII - kind of a general dislike for top down history on may part. His contempt for those who weren’t English is also high on the list, as well as his hatred of the working class.
But it doesn’t make any sense. There are so many things wrong with this scenario. First, the public companies were not actually making gangbusters profits. They were horribly inefficient, in fact, if you look past the creative, subsidised accounting that they published. They had assets, sure, which made them attractive, but they were not profitable businesses, not without a lot of work.
Second, the anti-monopoly quangos were pre-conceived, not some reaction to public concern - it was obvious that natural monopolies would need regulation. The names and nature of the regulatory organisations may have have changed over the years, but they were always there.
Third, it’s a horribly complicated way for rich people to screw the working classes. Rich people only have one vote, like the rest of us.