I understand she is scheduled for the first state (not Royal) funeral since Churchill. Should be quite a show.
hey, baby you look like you could use a stiff one.
What? A *State *funeral? The government paying people to dig a hole and fill it in again? She’ll be spinning in her hearse.
I find that hard to believe. Not that she would forget every day but that they would be so cruel as to tell her he was dead. If she can’t remember from day to day then a simple excuse why he wasn’t there would do.
She was the unfortunate PM who rode the tide of anti-collectivist sentiment that swept through Britain, in the 1980’s, and has payed for it ever since by being the subject of demonization by a crazed left wing.
Jesus, it seems half the country loses its head when discussing Thatcher. She was a decent PM who brought in much needed economic reform yet had her faults like all other PM’s.
Current Google ads:
**“Book Carol Thatcher as a dinner speaker”
“Margaret Thatcher Nutcrackers”
“1979 Conservative Victory: Join Conservative Way Forward Now”**
Comedy gold.
I wasn’t in the UK in the '80’s but my impression of Mrs Thatcher was that she was a ruthless woman. Whether or not you consider that a good thing depends entirely on where you were standing at the time. The unions needed breaking, but she broke a lot of people too in the process (and not always necessarily).
I think you all should track down the song “The Day That Thatcher Dies” by a band called Hefner.
"We will laugh the day that Thatcher dies,
Even though we know it’s not right,
We will dance and sing all night. "
In a way, I’m dreading it. The Usual Suspects are going to be disgusting about it.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m old enough to remember Ms. Thatcher but was not interested in politics - ours or yours - at the time. So her passing for me will be no more remarkable than any other famous person, which is to say, not really. It doesn’t seem to me she was evil, so I wish her a gentle and peaceful passing.
I wonder who is more cruel - the people who allow unproductive state supported industries to lumber along for years solely as a jobs and votes program or the people who end that patronage. Why is Thatcher demonized but the Labour governments that stifled British private industry and kept the mining and manufacturing towns as single industry economies - why are they not faulted?
Even Thatcher supporters will allow that she made mistakes - but to lay the systematic destruction of entire regions on her - that’s nuts. Whatever happened those coal pits would have had to close in the 1980s - they were only open to employ miners, not actually provide coal at fair market prices. British Leyland wouldn’t magically have made better cars had Kinnock gotten in.
I lived through this myself - the American steel industry contracted massively in the late 1970s and early 1980s - and frankly no Republican or Democratic president could have modernized the plants, won concessions from the unions, or staved off foreign competition. Issues are bigger than politicians sometimes - this was very much so in that era.
And while I remain a Reagan fan I recognize that Pittsburgh didn’t emerge from this era particularly well off, and suffers from these effects still today. A similar observation can be made of Thatcher, I’m sure.
You guys are ruining this for me.
Yeah, I gotta say, I think most folks would be well pleased to have EC’s career. His TV show is excellent too.
Oh! A feel-good movie!
From Billy Elliott (the musical):
"Can you hear it in the distance?
Can you sense it far away?
Is it old Rudolph the reindeer?
Is it Santa on his sleigh?
It’s heading up to Easington,
It’s coming down the Tyne.
Oh, it’s bloody Maggie Thatcher
And Michael Heseltine.
So merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher.
May God’s love be with you.
We all sing together in one breath,
Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher.
We all celebrate today
'Cause it’s one day closer to your death."
On the front page of this forum, the link to this thread looks kind of like, “When Margaret Thatcher dies, will you… Gyrate?”
That is all.
My grandmother died with Alzheimer’s (not of it, her heart did her in before her brain could completely disintegrate) and I also find it hard to believe. When Grandma would ask why her husband wasn’t there to visit her, the nurses once or twice made the mistake of telling her he had died years ago. But very quickly the whole nursing home staff was told to lie to her when she asked the question. The truth was no kindness.
As for me, I am no fan of her politics, but at this point when I hear of her death I suspect I will just be relieved for her family. Alzheimer’s sucks. What was Maggie Thatcher is long gone, the body that she used to inhabit just happens to still be breathing.
I will mourn, I suppose, but just a little.
She was a towering figure of the late 20th century, both in Britain and abroad. She was stalwart in the face of Argentine aggression and won back the Falklands, whose people only wished to continue to live under British rule. She built up the military after decades of relative neglect. She stood resolutely against terrorism in Ireland and communist tyranny in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. She was always a dependable ally of my country.* She forced her country to face and deal with some very serious economic problems, even though the process was unpleasant. She left the United Kingdom, all in all, a better place than she found it.
That said, I think she was needlessly abrasive and divisive. For all the difficulties she had throughout her career as a woman in male-dominated Whitehall, she appointed no other woman to any position of consequence in any Cabinet of hers. NHS, transportation and infrastructure further decayed under her rule. Race relations deteriorated. My outsider’s perspective is that British culture is, as a whole, more selfish and coarsened as a result of the Thatcher years.
*A favorite true story: She was on the phone with Reagan once, chewing him out for this or that pragmatic retreat from The One True Conservatism. Reagan covered the receiver of the phone and, grinning, said to a nearby aide, “Isn’t she wonderful?”
I think the story that nails Maggie for me (in a relatively nice way) was one told by her and Bush Snr. in a documentary about the Gulf War. Bush had just been given possible troop loses by Powell if all their worst fears came true. Bush was shocked by such a high figure. He said this to Maggie on a call and her reply was “Don’t go wobbly on me now George”.
Maggie was Maggie, there’ll never be another one. Thankfully 
You mean the Gas Industry, the Electrical generation and distribution industry, maybe British Airways, or perhaps the telecoms industry, and many others. Those industries which were owned by the taxpayer, were built from taxpayers money, made huge profits for the state, and were sold off to her cronies who made multiple applications for shares when this was specifically outlawed as a criminal act? You’ll note that these share issues were oversubscribed many times over, due to these state owned companies being sold off for a fraction of their true worth - this does not seem to be free market economics to me, many newly invested shareholders immediately sold off their holdings to make an instant profit - which is proof enough of the serious undervaluation of these state assets.
I recall several of her ministers did this, I also recall Lord King leaving his post as energy minister and taking up the CEO position in Powergen just after he had finished selling it off to his friends in the money markets, and so far, among all the expenses scandal, none has matched the conviction and imprisonment of at least three of her ministers for corruption, at the very least it calls into question her judgement - strange how her inept son seemed to become a millionaire overnight, his wealth was never explained, nor that of her husband Dennis.
Cash for questions was another Thatcher legacy as her acolytes sold their influence to companies to raise matters in parliament.
You mean those industries? Maybe you mean coal mining, the only coal industry in the developed world that was not state subsidised?
Or perhaps you mean the UK car industry, which again was never as subsidised as most of the European car industry, and gues who still has a car industry to call their own? Clue - Peugeot, Renault, Fiat, Citroen, or the bike industry clue - Aprilia Ducatis Piaggio
Maybe we could look at shipbuilding and notice that we no longer do this, years of chronic underinvestement as Thatcher decided we should have a ‘knowledge’ based economy - which translates to share trading and financial services - wonder how that is panning out these days?
What she did was inherit the benefits of oil taxation as North Sea oil came on strong, this was no economic miracle at all, in some ways it could be argued that there was a huge social attitude change which she can be credited with inspiring, but in terms of economy, pump those hundreds of billions of oil revenue into any economy and watch it boom.
She really wasn’t all that, she deepened and widened the north-south social divide, her meddlings have led directly to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh assembly and may well lead up to the break up of the union - such was the divisive nature of her politics which favoured one region, the South East at the complete expense of everwhere else.
On top of that, I will never forgive her for her inaction when she knew months in advance of Argentine intentions on the Falklands, but then, it was always a populist theme for an upopular leader, start a war. Maybe that’s what Blair was thinking almost a generation later
The last paragraph might appear to be a rant, not true, that war could have been readily prevented, I was there, I know what happened. I have explained this on this board before, some posters here will remember, and those who checked out the details would have been able to verify them.
Good riddance, no celebration, how do you celebrate the death of industrial Britain? not with the death of it’s architect thats for sure.
Hitler. Stalin. Pol Pot.
I refute it thus.