thatcher in hospital, doesnt look good

[TillieTrotter]

Could do with a shower actually, turn on that hose Mr Lush!

[Jah Lush]

"What an absolute shower." Terry Thomas.

[TillieTrotter]

Just thinking that she could suffer from bed sores.....as that Lady is not for turning!!>:D

[SeanMacGabhann]

That's pretty much what I was getting at in my post Keef. Thanks to huncamunca for digging up the words, and they did take me back, but now the moment is closer and she is clearly a frail old bird - I just don't have the hate any more

Many countries have gone through monumental changes since the 70s but many of them didn't require the same levels of masochism the English seem to have enjoyed with the grocer's daughter. However at the moment I'm not really keen on re-fighting the old wars

[Jah Lush]

Really Sean. How f*cking blase is that then. Shall we forgive Stalin? Shall we forgive Hitler, Pol Pot, I could go on....Oh! I just can't be arsed anymore. "I just don't have the hate anymore." Pah! I blow my nose at you.

[SeanMacGabhann]

as I take a hankie to my face...

Seriously Jah... Y'all are better than to be comparing her to those named

[spadetownboy]

good riddance to the twisted old bag, i didnt live here when she was in power, but i have witnessed the consequences of her actions in good old norn iron, and there wont be too many shedding a tear over there when she pops.

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

I think Northerners and NI residents look on her differently than the ones from the South, because many in the South did well under her tyranical reign.

I will always hate her for bringing the working class of Liverpool and the rest of the North to their knees and Blair too for continuing her work, destroying the working class countrywide.

[dulwichmum]

Was she simply an iconic working mummy? Just like me perhaps??? (but with a substantially smaller budget - clearly...)

[LizzygotDizzy]

Erm...many in the South did well under her reign.... erm I think not! the abolishment of ILEA affected us all, and still has repurcussions today along with many other of her "wonderful" schemes, didn't give a flying feck about the working class, we could all go to the workhouse as far as she was concerned, Thatcher and her draconian ideas will not be missed, though I do have to admit she had bigger balls than most, unfortunately to our detriment

[Peckhamgatecrasher]

I rather liked having every Wednesday off due to the train strikes. Wasn't so keen about the uncollected bins. On balance, I think it was beneficial to break the unions' stronghold.

[Maximay]

Unfortunately Labour, Conservative all of the parties out there are all as bad as eachother, and flawed, not one of them decent enough to be able to run this country properly and get it back on its feet, a serious downward spiral is all I can see now, God help our kids and grandkids is all I can say, because if you think its bad now, just wait til they get older, what the hell do they have to look forward to!

[spadetownboy]

and thats another one i,ll be glad to see the back of,that bastard paisley. hes decided to call it a day and all of a sudden the sun shines out of his ass. people seem to forget that he and his ilk were the main catalyst that sent northern ireland into almost 40 years of war and led to 3000+ deaths. may he rot in hell.

[????]

Fuck me it's like the Student Union in 1982 all over again on here.....quite pathetic

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

Lizzy & Maximay - yes she hated all the working classes, North and South, but the economy of the South was protected to a certain degree and her destructive policies took longer to make an impact down here than they did up North because of the North's bigger dependence on manurfacturing.

PGC - she only broke the unions to enable her friends in business to outsource all their low/unskilled jobs to cheaper countries, The devastation this caused was purely about big business's bottom line and maximising their profits. So now all the working class kids have to look forward to is 'would you like fries with that' as the only industry left for them is the service industry. No wonder many would prefer sidestepping legitimate work and moving into the more dodgy areas of employment.

[Marmora Man]

Rational debate would be a good idea on this subject - but I'm not sure it's possible.

I'll ignore Jah's outburst and comparisons with Pol Pot etc as being from another planet, likewise Spadetownboy's equally unbalanced rant.

Somehow Mrs Thatcher has become a totemic hate figure, based upon a caricature of her and her policies that is closer to the Spitting Image version of life. She was an outstanding politician who, by hard work and force of personality made it to the top of British politics and wrought change - change that was sorely needed.

Asset - the half a sentence that you quoted came from the full sentence "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families" - this came from a speech where she argued that providing solutions for "society" was not the way to go - society was an insufficiently defined term / concept on which to base policy.

There's a very interesting discussion to be had elsewhere about this subject - society is just a construct, one that reflects the prejudices, desires and concerns of the speaker using the term. Your view of society is not mine, nor the next person's. Therefore political policies should be shaped to allow individual men, women and families to make their on way in their lives, or to support men, women and families when help is needed.

As for the alleged destruction of Liverpool, "the North", mining, Northern Ireland and so on - check out Derek Hatton and his Trotskyite ideologues in Liverpool who felt that the first duty of public employees was to destroy the fabric of the community they were working in to engender political change. Or Red Robbo of British Leyland who held that the, nationalised, car industry existed to provide its workforce with high wages not its customers with reliable cars. Arthur Scargill - another ideologue who wanted to create political, revolutionary, change by the use of "workers power" - but who only succeeded in pricing miners out of work. Those that were there may recall that it was pre-Thatcher that the British Army was deployed in Northern Ireland to protect the minority Catholic population. The IRA, another left wing orientated grouping, managed (with the help of inept politicians of all stripes) to turn this positive act into a political cause - with subsequent 40 years of death and destruction.

The 60's, 70's and 80's were interesting, complicated, controversial times - despair was in the air, the brain drain and flight from Britain was evident. In comparison to today it was grey, a new car would rust within 18 months, a new telephone took weeks to be installed, rail travel was lengthy, costly and boring, air flights were prohibitively expensive, industries were dying on their feet in the face of overseas competition. Major change was needed.

The simplistic bashing of Mrs Thatcher as the creator of all ills, who single handedly led a crusade against the working class and destroyed communities, industries and a way of life is just that - simplistic.

Give the woman a fair hearing - look at all sides of events she was involved in, check out the context of the times. She did her best in difficult times and succeeded in delivering change. I do not support, uncritically, all the changes that have occurred since her election in 1979 - but taken in the round Mrs Thatcher was a force for the good of Britain in difficult times. Not many politicians have been that in the last 100 years.

Remember - as Osgood said to Jack Lemmon's character in the great last line of "Some LIke It Hot" - "Well, nobody's perfect"

[????]

Yup...we're not going to get a rational debate on this. Unprofitable, dangerous, inneeficient heavy industry should have been kept afloat by the very few british bits of the economy that were functioning properly in 1979, that'd made sense...we'd all be flipping burgers now instead of having the 4th biggest economy in the world.

Sentiment over the facts from someone from Liverpool...surely not?

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

Ok MM - So you can't blame the children born of the Thatcher era for having no regard for the society that spawned them then, if you think what she did in the name of competition and big business was justified. They are the collatoral damage that she figured was unimportant in the wake of her 'revolution', but who are now no longer children and scaring the crap out of all the comfortable middle-classes who can't understand why they are full of hate and resentment.

So instead of looking at the valid reasons the spawn of Thatcher hate the comfotably off, the comfortably off scream about ASBO's and locking up kids and youths in massive numbers and think Thatcher was OK cos they weren't affected. Think again, you are affected. Every time you feel scared to walk home at night or get your money out of a hole-in-the-wall, or when you lower your eyes when you have to walk past an angry youth in a hoodie with his/her scary dog, you are affected by the legacy of Thatcher.

[Keef]

Chav, that's all a bit dramatic isn't it? Some people are just sh!ts because they're sh!ts to be fair, you can't blame every little git on the street on a Prime Minister 20 years ago.

[*Bob*]

An anecdotal point:

One of my friends is an ex-miner from a town decimated by the demise of the industry (one of those so quaintly described as "in The North" - a mythical area which for half of Londoners seems to mean anything above Watford.. or in Cornwall, or Wales)

His thoughts on the matter were "what do you expect when some bright spark decides to build a whole town around an industry with a limited lifespan and allow it to be managed by idealogues who absolutely refuse to face the facts?" To this, he added "I get so f***ing sick of hearing people who've never had to do it spouting off about the nobility of heavy industry. If you think I'd still prefer to be down a dangerous mine, breathing in coal dust for the rest of my life rather than a nice clean office, you must be mad".

[Marmora Man]

ChavWivaLawDegree Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Ok MM - So you can't blame the children born of

> the Thatcher era for having no regard for the

> society that spawned them then, if you think what

> she did in the name of competition and big

> business was justified. They are the collatoral

> damage that she figured was unimportant in the

> wake of her 'revolution', but who are now no

> longer children and scaring the crap out of all

> the comfortable middle-classes who can't

> understand why they are full of hate and

> resentment.

>

> So instead of looking at the valid reasons the

> spawn of Thatcher hate the comfotably off, the

> comfortably off scream about ASBO's and locking up

> kids and youths in massive numbers and think

> Thatcher was OK cos they weren't affected. Think

> again, you are affected. Every time you feel

> scared to walk home at night or get your money out

> of a hole-in-the-wall, or when you lower your eyes

> when you have to walk past an angry youth in a

> hoodie with his/her scary dog, you are affected by

> the legacy of Thatcher.

Chav, you have children and I have children - all spawned (I believe) in the Thatcher era. That mine or yours aren't hoodies, spitting in the streets, wielding knives to solve disputes threatening others is down more to parenting than to any Prime Minister.

Blaming the past doesn't work - tackling the now and future does. I don't lower my eyes when walking past a hoodie, I don't feel threatened at a hole-in-the-wall. I talk to youths, I have run a cub scout troop, helped out at church camps (despite being a total Dawkinite atheist) and would do more if time allowed.

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

My kids were more scared of me than they were of their mates, so while their friends were selling drugs, robbing people and getting banged up, mine as far as I know, weren't (or never got caught).

The friends of theirs that did do all these things mainly came from parents who had succumbed to depression, drugs and alcohol or just working so fucking hard they never had any time for their kids, during the hight of Thatcher's glory days.

[mockney piers]

Wise head on your "northern" friend's shoulders there *Bob*.

[????]

The other point about us giving up on our antiquated and increasingly inefficient (through a mixture of unworkable labour relations (eg crap management and communist unions) and impracticality - docks in relatively shallow river basins not being suitable for comntainer shipping...which cost 60,000+ dockers jobs in London btw chippy northeners; was that it allowed (and is allowing) 3rd world countries to develop as, say, coal is cheaper to get from open cast mines in Indonesia than 2 miles under the Pennines. This has led to a gradual sharing of global wealth...globalisation works. China and India, although still rife with poverty, have massively expanding economies and millions of people in burgeoning middle classes...ironoic for the lefties that it's market, global capitalism that's doing this not patronising hand outs or the 'central ownership of the means of production' that made China and India such basket cases 20 years ago. Tough for lefties liberal and the media to admit but even they are beginning to understand....(except the gormless Mark Steel obviously)

[atila the gooner]

Mamora Man said - Somehow Mrs Thatcher has become a totemic hate figure, based upon a caricature of her and her policies that is closer to the Spitting Image version of life. She was an outstanding politician who, by hard work and force of personality made it to the top of British politics and wrought change - change that was sorely needed.

Is this because she was responsible for sending the police in to South Yorkshire to break up the miners strike and used brute force to do so? Or the fact that she used the Falklands conflict to boost her flagging popularity and get herslef re-elected. The woman was poison, and I have no sympathy for her or her current plight. She was the closest to an unfeeling despot we've had in this country. I wish her nothing but ill feeling.