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Thatcher...  

167 members have voted

  1. 1. Thatcher...

    • is a heroine who lifted this country from its knees; one of our greatest ever PMs.
    • was a necessary evil; someone had to do what she did.
    • makes me shudder with rage with every breath she takes; she destroyed our country.
    • personal feeling aside, it's too soon to see her true legacy.


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It's not yet the twenty five years that most historians say is the minimum amount of time to assess the impact of something, but I was reading her speech from the 1980 Tory conference (in The Guardian's excellent series of the 14 greatest speeches of the Twentieth Century) and it made think about her legacy. I still think she was a spiteful, callous bitch, but I now think many things she did were right: reducing the power of the unions, encouraging home ownership, tackling inflation, privatising some of the national industries.

 

However, I also think she may have fucked us in the process. Her extreme policies made us expect low taxation and she nearly destroyed health and education with her chronic spending cuts. She also pushed us towards our debt obsessed economy and is arguable responsible for the political apathy that pervades our country now as Blair felt he couldn't go so radically in the other direction after her, and so just fannied around blandly making people think he was neither one thing nor another and failing to really address the issues people wanted addressing.

 

So, where do you stand on her?

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I don't think she has destroyed the country but I do think the way she thought people should think of each other was a shinning beacon of all that is wrong in the world.

 

She will die and people will celebrate nationally. The news that day will be some seriously funny, karmic shit.

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On her throat, given a chance.

 

Tick tock bitch!

 

http://www.maggiethatcher.com/

 

[

So, where do you stand on her?[/QUOTE]

 

 

Her throat preferably

 

The one thing I will give her is that she looked after her own - apart from that

It'll be "Ding dong the witch is dead" when she snuffs it as far as I am concerned

 

Pure evil, and I find it impossible to see through that.

 

If Stu's standing on her throat I'll stand on her nose.

 

Care to elaborate, fellas? Why do you feel that way? Do you not see the benefits of some of her policies? If not, why not - but if you do, how could she have effected change in a more palatable way?

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Care to elaborate, fellas? Why do you feel that way? Do you not see the benefits of some of her policies? If not, why not - but if you do, how could she have effected change in a more palatable way?

 

Ill elaborate Paul.

 

I think her doctrine of the individual being more important than society as a whole (particularly the most vulnerable was and still is abhorrent). I'm no communist, slightly pink socialist if I'm honest, but I honestly think the "couldn't give a fuck about anyone else" society that we now have is directly traceable back to Thatcherism.

 

*To be fair though I did have the hots for her for a very brief period in 1982 I think it was .............Schoolmistressdisciplinetastic

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I would simply start by looking at the sale of social housing stock and sale of national industry.

 

The right to buy has left a huge burden. There is a severe social housing stock shortage, the policy did not allow Local Authorities to rebuild housing stock. It has led to an extermely unheathly balance in owner occupation/renting (now 80/20%). It has left a dependency on private landlords, which has increased payments out of the public purse, slowed house building, impacted upon the quality of social housing stock... i could go on.

 

Looking at the sale of nationalised industries I regconise then need to modernise there, but all these industries where sold on the cheap without adequate regulation.

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I think her legacy is already upon us, think only of yourself, fuck everyone else and everything will okay because you and your own are all sorted.

 

Well that may be the case for those at the top of the tree but for the rest of us the country is a mess, and its traceable back to her goverment.

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Find it almost impossible to be objective.

 

I found / find her the embodiment of sheer evil , with a vindictiveness aimed against anybody who was not of her ilk that still takes the breath away.

 

I always felt that as she was a woman & not of the usual top tory social strata , she always felt she did not really belong & as such this led her to be much more vicious than necessary to 'belong'.

 

My feelings are summed up by Elvis Costello's track 'Tramp The Dirt Down'

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She was an utterly awful, spiteful woman. She claimed that there was 'no such thing as society', and argued that high unemployment was a necessary evil in return for a strong economy. The sale of council houses may have put people on the property ladder, but it coincided with her government stopping the building of affordable housing for others. Yes, the unions may have exerted too much influence (and there are two sides to this story - the novel GB 84 by David Peace is a fascinating insight), but the legacy of that move is that the unions are now so impotent that many workers do not have adequate help and representation against genuine work related grievances. And the bitch took my milk.

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There are two sides to what she did, as there are with most things, but I think she was a ruthless bitch who is responsible for much of the overt capitalism (at the expense of all else) that has eaten away at our country.

 

In her defence the left was too powerfull, particularly in Liverpool. My family couldn't get work down the docks or in Ford because we had 'no relations' there and 'weren't union', also the reputation of local industry was mud, lines of cars littered the front of the Ford factory which couldn't be sold because they were so shit (Friday afternoon cars I believe they were called, and if someone wanted to knock off early, and the vending machine was broke, call a strike and jobs a good'un).

 

However some of the shit she spouted: 'A man who is 26 and finds himself on a bus can consider himself a failure' was just pathetic, devalueing people en mass, and making you feel that 'if you don't own a house and a car - your shit'

 

Even now in mainland Europe and the states its quite reasonable to rent a property, not over here, people are ownership obsessed - no matter the cost.

 

HP destroyed many working class areas, the theory seems to be that if you could give them a taste of what was up the ladder they'd try and climb up, but on the whole they didn't, they just found new ways to steal and theive to buy what they were told they should be buying, at the expense of the only thing they ever had - each other. I saw this transition growing up in Speke with a family that came from the Dingle.

 

All in all the Unions needed taming, but she went too far and made her target the working man, she was an iron fist withing an iron glove, someone who used the stick and stick approach, telling you you were shit and should be doing 'this or that' with your life but didn't provide the means to get there unless you were already born there, social darwinism at its most ludicrous.

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It amazes me who she is, somewhat paradoxically, both the most reviled and most loved PM of all time by certain sections of the public.

 

Can't stand the bitch anyway. My grandad has promised to take us all out for a drink when she snuffs it so I look forward to it.

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The good things she did for the economy are outweighed by the pure class hatred she embodied. And that simpering smirking faux-sympathetic voice she had makes me fucking sick. The old cunt.

 

Y'all should hate her for fucking over English football at the very least.

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One of the most heinous things she did was to undermine the central ethos of democracy; where the strong look after the weak. She temporarily enriched those willing to work, but at the same time lulled the country into a false sense of prosperity by cutting taxes to ultimately damaging levels. Then she high-tailed it when the inevitable recession took hold.

 

Only now are we seeing decades of chronic underfunding of state institutions such as health and education under the tories being redressed by a Labour government - A goverment the Tories now have the fucking brassneck to admonish for raising taxes to pay for their fuck-ups of twenty years ago.

 

As a more astute observer than I once noted: Party poilitics is entirely about two oppsite sides mopping up after each other's mistakes. Thatcher's mistakes have divided the country and it's society and will live with us far longer than those of her predecessors. What truly grieves me is I don't think she even gives a monkey's fuck. The fucking bitch.

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Is anyone going to defend her record or address the criticisms above? I expected TokyoJoe (not that he's a party politics, man - just that his views are right wing) or Hermes to wade in with a robust defence.

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None of the above options. The people who hate her though are mostly the layabouts, those who want something for nothing and the dregs of society.

 

Her policies were copied in almost every western nation, together with Reagan she destroyed communism and so freed hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe from the stranglehold of the Soviet system.

 

The reason Blair never reversed most of her policies was that he knew they were right.

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None of the above options. The people who hate her though are mostly the layabouts, those who want something for nothing and the dregs of society.

 

Her policies were copied in almost every western nation, together with Reagan she destroyed communism and so freed hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe from the stranglehold of the Soviet system.

 

The reason Blair never reversed most of her policies was that he knew they were right.

 

That's a staggeringly lazy riposte, and one which generalises to a ridiculous degree. You'd describe the mining industry as containing mostly 'layabouts'? And the working class as a whole?

And to defend her by saying others aped her policies makes no sense - it makes every political thinker who has influenced others above criticism.

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None of the above options. The people who hate her though are mostly the layabouts, those who want something for nothing and the dregs of society.

 

Her policies were copied in almost every western nation, together with Reagan she destroyed communism and so freed hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe from the stranglehold of the Soviet system.

 

The reason Blair never reversed most of her policies was that he knew they were right.

 

The reason Blair didn't reverse her policies is because he is a twat.

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Is anyone going to defend her record or address the criticisms above? I expected TokyoJoe (not that he's a party politics, man - just that his views are right wing) or Hermes to wade in with a robust defence.

 

Here we go then. I started work in 1974 and remember the price of everything going through the roof, strikes all the time, the economy was an utter fucking shambles.

 

She came in sorted out the unions, tightened the economy, and Britain went from being 14th largest economy in the world, to fourth. The unemployment (which was inevitable) put the mockers on it and the Falklands bust up was no small part in getting her back in.

 

Most of the nationalised industries would probably have collapsed if left as was, but the privatisation method left a lot to be desired. The housing sell off was not a bad idea, but not perhaps at the discounts given. The general principal of reducing government involvement in everything though, is something I fully support. Also, direct taxation was reduced (good) but not abolished (bad).

 

Her overall effect was very badly needed, but sooner or later it goes full cycle, the socialists are back, and guess what, the price of everything is going through the roof, strikes all the time, the economy is an utter fucking shambles. To blame current problems on Maggie is ridiculous. The government is now about 40% of GNP (official), the reality is it's much higher. That's a guaranteed recipe for economic disater. Another IMF rescue package on the way.

 

Easilly the best PM in my lifetime though, despite her faults

 

Anyway, back to work, it's 8am now.

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It's not yet the twenty five years that most historians say is the minimum amount of time to assess the impact of something, but I was reading her speech from the 1980 Tory conference (in The Guardian's excellent series of the 14 greatest speeches of the Twentieth Century) and it made think about her legacy. I still think she was a spiteful, callous bitch, but I now think many things she did were right: reducing the power of the unions, encouraging home ownership, tackling inflation, privatising some of the national industries.

 

However, I also think she may have fucked us in the process. Her extreme policies made us expect low taxation and she nearly destroyed health and education with her chronic spending cuts. She also pushed us towards our debt obsessed economy and is arguable responsible for the political apathy that pervades our country now as Blair felt he couldn't go so radically in the other direction after her, and so just fannied around blandly making people think he was neither one thing nor another and failing to really address the issues people wanted addressing.

 

So, where do you stand on her?

 

Hmm. Where do I stand on her??

 

All over her fucknig face, preferably.

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