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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: The legacy of Thatcherism?
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Saul the Apostle
Shipmate
# 13808
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Posted
Mrs M. Thatcher, the first British woman Prime Minister has died.
Monday 9 April Mrs Thatcher passed away from a stroke.
What is her legacy?
She was hugely controversial via her time as PM - the war with Argentina and the liberation of the Falkland Islands, the miner's strike to name but two areas.
Some people still revile her. Some people still hold her up as an icon.
Saul the Apostle.
[ 24. July 2013, 06:54: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
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"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
Posts: 1772 | From: unsure | Registered: Jun 2008
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Saul the Apostle:
What is her legacy?
She brought in 'Market Forces' to our finances and politics- i.e. fear and greed. I won't be dancing on her grave (as I always thought I might) but I certainly won't be shedding any tears either.
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Saul the Apostle
Shipmate
# 13808
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Posted
Sorry Monday 8 April 2013 - Margaret Thatcher died of a stroke on this Monday morning
Saul
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"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
Posts: 1772 | From: unsure | Registered: Jun 2008
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
Shipmate
# 11274
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Posted
Might it be argued that she - indirectly but inevitably - changed the Labour Party far more than she did anything to the nature of her own party, and that her long-term effects on the British social contract have been manifest more in the vicissitudes of Labour Party policy than in what the Tories have managed to do in the years since her premiership was brought to an end?
Posts: 7328 | From: Delaware | Registered: Apr 2006
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
In 1979 the country was virtually destitute, held to ransom by the unions, in hock to the IMF. She fixed all that - and all credit to her, it needed doing. But she replaced it with a "greed is good" economy, a financial services bubble that only finally burst in 2008. And great was the fall of that house that she built on sand.
You could say she was popularist, the darling of the tabloids, and that in following her, every political leader since has contibuted to the decline of politics in this country. But their following her was their fault, not hers. And peoples' falling for it was their fault, not hers.
You could say she destroyed community and neighbourliness and respect, but she didn't: all that was just waiting to happen, and she just allowed it. She allowed the British people to become what they'd always wanted to be, for good or ill.
She certainly wasn't a saint, but she wasn't a demon either: she was a politician. And every democracy ultimately gets the leaders it deserves.
RIP ![[Votive]](graemlins/votive.gif)
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
She did what had to be done to get the country out of the mess that it was in when she came to power.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
I suppose the funeral will be a huge affair ![[Disappointed]](graemlins/disappointed.gif)
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
Before Thatcher all Prime Ministers, and most other ministers of all parties, understood that many people were not like them and had different priorities and aspirations. Even Old Etonians did (eg, MacMillan, Eden and even Douglas-Home), albeit in a paternalistic way.
She didn't understand. Margaret Thatcher was from a small-town and didn't, IMNSHO, understand anyone who wasn't like her. That accounted for her confrontational attitude and since then it has been possible for politicians to be elected and serve as ministers without understanding "other folks", hence the divisions in society and growing disparity between the richer and poorer in society.
Well, you did ask.
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Thereby creating a different type of mess, Marvin ...
A "mess" that kept the country healthy and prosperous for over twenty years. A "mess" that enabled hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people to improve their lot in life. A "mess" that, even after the collapse of 2008, looks a DAMN sight better than what it replaced.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Thereby creating a different type of mess, Marvin ...
A "mess" that kept the country healthy and prosperous for over twenty years. A "mess" that enabled hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people to improve their lot in life. A "mess" that, even after the collapse of 2008, looks a DAMN sight better than what it replaced.
Marvin, you were but months old when Margaret Thatcher became PM. Any mess you would be aware of would have been in your play-pen. You can't blame the unions for that!
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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hatless
Shipmate
# 3365
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Posted
I wonder if she ever cared about her legacy. She struck me as being a fighter who wanted only to be a successful fighter. I never found out about any good things she believed in, only things she opposed. It's as if she was forever in opposition. When she was in power her enemy became those aspects of the country which she despised.
It was a horrible era.
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My crazy theology in novel form
Posts: 4531 | From: Stinkers | Registered: Sep 2002
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
It was a horrible era.
Horrible, and far too long. The crash of 2008 was its culmination (Blair and Brown being mini thatchers). I just hope and pray lessons have been learned.
[ 08. April 2013, 12:32: Message edited by: Boogie ]
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
It was a horrible era.
We were bloody miserable, but at least under Thatcher we knew what we were bloody miserable about.
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
Marvin, you were but months old when Margaret Thatcher became PM.
I read, and I have plenty of friends and relatives who were old enough at the time to appreciate the change.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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Ronald Binge
Shipmate
# 9002
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Posted
Thatcher's legacy?
The British underclass
Prolonging the conflict in Northern Ireland
That's just for starters. No tears here for the monster.
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Older, bearded (but no wiser)
Posts: 477 | From: Brexit's frontline | Registered: Jan 2005
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ronald Binge:
Prolonging the conflict in Northern Ireland
You're right: that's one of the worst bits of her legacy. Major and Blair relatively quickly achieved what she could have had years earlier. It seemed that in any kind of conflict, she had to win. It cost many, many lives and caused much misery.
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
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L'organist
Shipmate
# 17338
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Posted
The legacy of Thatcherism is that at least some of the unaccountable power-blocks in the country were challenged and some imploded (NUM, SOGAT, etc, remember them?).
That she didn't go for other monopolies - the BMA, RCN, Bar, Law Society - can perhaps be explained by the preponderance of lawyers in Parliament and the fact that she was booted out before getting round to it. The most disastrous failure was to allow the continuance of LEAs which eat up money for very little benefit.
She did her best to stop the rot of unions and the like bullying workers and the country.
More importantly, having come from very humble beginnings and got where she did by hard work (yes, judicious marriage as well) and setting targets and goals she wished everyone to feel that they too could set personal targets and goals and feel they were achievable.
The one great blot on her record is that her government closed more grammar schools than any other. What was needed was not to close them but rather to ensure that the 1944 and 1948 Educations Acts were fully implemented with its 3 tiers of secondary schools - grammars, technical high schools and secondary moderns - and exchange of pupils between the different institutions as a pupil's strengths and weaknesses became more apparent with maturity.
If you doubt the above, look at the thousands of youngsters were are churning out with completely worthless grade E (and lower) GCSEs who are functionally illiterate and innumerate; had these children had the chance to try a more vocationally based education they might well have come out at the end of it with practical skills, with literacy gained because they realised they NEEDED to be literate (likewise with acquired practical arithmetic skills) and with the ability to enter an apprenticeship or employment because they had the skill set that the job required and the attitude of hard work and genuine achievement.
As for Blair and Brown being mini-Thatchers - utter b***s: Brown was a student agit-prop type who never lost the chip on his shoulder and Blair was (is) an attention-seeking failed lawyer.
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Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet
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Anglican't
Shipmate
# 15292
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Posted
How did Mrs Thatcher prolong the Ulster conflict? Up until 1990 it seems to me that the IRA weren't in the mood to negotiate anything (in the way they were by the mid-1990s).
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Baptist Trainfan
Shipmate
# 15128
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Posted
Strangely enough I was living in Portugal (studying the language) when Thatcher was elected in 1979. I was not best pleased at the news (which the local press carried in surprising detail).
On my course we had some "Religious Right" American Christians who simply couldn't believe that I wasn't delighted - as far as they were concerned, anyone from the Right had to be better than anyone from the Left, QED. In vain did I try to explain the fact that many British Christians in the past had been Socialist or Liberal as well as Tory. That was simply off their radar.
But I digress ...
Posts: 9750 | From: The other side of the Severn | Registered: Sep 2009
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Felafool
Shipmate
# 270
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Posted
Love her or hate her, she was strong and determined. She clipped the wings of the Trade Union movement, brought it back to some sort of sensible partnership in industry. As a result of her time in power, the luny left was discharged to "care in the community" and the Labour Party went through significant reformation which brought it nearer to the centre. Now we could do with someone as strong and determined as her to sort out the banking fiasco.
I write as someone who has never voted for the Tories.
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I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty - I ordered a cheeseburger.
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by George Spigot
She and her party did massive damage to the British people. Her legacy is an evil one.
So you would have preferred dictatorship by the trades unions?
If it's a choice between two 'evils' (Thatcher versus Scargill & Co.) I know which I prefer!
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Justinian
Shipmate
# 5357
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Posted
My considered opinion: Had she lost in 1982 (as she probably would have without the Argentinian Junta attempting to prop itself up) she'd have been a good thing for the country - no unelected body should hold the country to ransom - definitely including the Unions. Had she gone in 1987 she'd have been a necessary correction. That she lasted until 1991 with a hubristic overreach to create the Poll Tax, and the Tories lasted until 1997 to be followed by Tony Blair was a catastrophe.
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My real name consists of just four letters, but in billions of combinations.
Eudaimonaic Laughter - my blog.
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Baptist Trainfan
Shipmate
# 15128
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Posted
(Missed edit window).
Her legacy (to me) was in promoting the individual over and above society, encouraging greedy selfishness rather than any sense of social responsibility.
I did hear her speak once: at my school when she was still Education Secretary under Heath. Although it was a pretty posh fee-paying school many of its pupils were drawn from fairly liberal backgrounds. The general verdict among students and parents was that she had spouted platitudes and possessed an annoyingly unctuous delivery ... but I think now that they also regarded her as something of social climber.
My wife, as a young teacher, not only called her "Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher" but went on strike at her Government's education reforms and especially the raising of class sizes which, she believed, would harm children - the only time she has ever struck work until the recent furore over Public Service Pensions.
By the way, her victory discourse about creating harmony etc. has always struck me as vaguely blasphemous from the way in which it subverts St. Francis' prayer for her own ends.
[ 08. April 2013, 13:01: Message edited by: Baptist Trainfan ]
Posts: 9750 | From: The other side of the Severn | Registered: Sep 2009
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Hawk
Semi-social raptor
# 14289
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Posted
Thatcher was a women of indominatable will, a forceful person who refused to back down from what she thought to be right. She cared little for caution, u-turns, and populist headline-chasing. The politicians we have today have no vision, and care only for the weekly headlines and short-term populism. In comparison with the dumbing down of politics nowadays she was the last great leader of this country. But great does not always mean good. The times make the leader, and just as bombastic, Old Empire patriarch Churchill would never have been PM if not for the crisis of political will in the late 30's, Thatcher would never have been PM if she hadn't been necessary for the times.
Churchill was a war leader, but hopeless, even damaging to the country, in peace time. Thatcher was a war leader for the economic and social instability of the late 70's and early 80's, but as the country revived and the crises of her early reign passed, her inflexibility, brashness, and inability to see the virtue of listening to the people meant she became a damaging liability. People wanted peace, but she only brought conflict.
Thatcher saved Britain from economic collapse, but did she cause other problems? There is no way to create a utopia, so of course Britain will alwys have problems, and the problems she left us with were different from the ones she inherited. But the crisis has passed. Despite the worst recession of modern times, which is hardly our fault entirely, we are not suffering blackouts, and garbage piling up in the streets and unburied bodies piling up in the morgues. We are not racked with strikes, with police horses riding into riot lines every few weeks.
Britain was broken. And the only way to fix it was with changes that the people refused to accept, and no politician had the will to take. Thatcher, despite her problems, and they were many, saved Britain, however unpalatable that fact may be. She was bitter medicine, but necessary.
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“We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
See my blog for 'interesting' thoughts
Posts: 1739 | From: Oxford, UK | Registered: Nov 2008
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
The legacy of Thatcherism?
"Scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt,"
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
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Hawk
Semi-social raptor
# 14289
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
My considered opinion: Had she lost in 1982 (as she probably would have without the Argentinian Junta attempting to prop itself up) she'd have been a good thing for the country - no unelected body should hold the country to ransom - definitely including the Unions. Had she gone in 1987 she'd have been a necessary correction. That she lasted until 1991 with a hubristic overreach to create the Poll Tax, and the Tories lasted until 1997 to be followed by Tony Blair was a catastrophe.
I completely agree. I think one of the best things Churchill ever did was lose the '45 election. If he hadn't, we'd never have got the NHS. The country was bright enough not to treat their vote as a reward for winning the war. If the electorate had been as sensible in '82 or '87, Thatcher would have a more robust legacy, and the country would be in a better state. And so would our politics. We'd probably still have a real socialist-facing Labour party for one thing, a real alternative, rather than just the tories-in-red of New Labour.
[ 08. April 2013, 13:19: Message edited by: Hawk ]
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“We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
See my blog for 'interesting' thoughts
Posts: 1739 | From: Oxford, UK | Registered: Nov 2008
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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
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Posted
Some time ago I read a commentator who said the real significance of Obama's election was that he was the first US president who wasn't basically re-fighting the culture wars of the 1960s*.
If that's true, then mutatis mutandis we'll still be arguing over Thatcher's legacy in twenty years' time, which is a depressing thought ...
* Looking at American politics, presumably the commentator thinks Obama is fighting a different decade's culture wars ...
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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
Her first term in office she did good - asserting the right of the country over the unions.
After that, she fucked everything up, making money and greed the focus of attention. If you want to know her legacy, it is the Blair Government, the Global Economic Crisis and the current poor-hating government.
I do not want to celebrate anyones death. But I will not celebrate her legacy either, the poison of which is still seeping through our country.
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Blog
Music for your enjoyment
Lord may all my hard times be healing times
take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
I would ask Marvin to come to Sheffield and talk about Thatcher to the people here. You will say "I'm in Birmingham, I know all that!, Let me tell you as someone who lived in Manchester during Margaret Thatchers rein, I did not know all that. What I post below is not directly related to this, but my personal experience. I honestly can not do the vitriol that comes from locals here at the mention of her name still.
I for reasons nothing to do with politics had reason to look up the social statistics for an area of South Yorkshire just three or four years ago. This was a suburban area, built largely post war with semi-detached houses and good gardens. However the employment statistics told a very different story. The rate of of sickness benefit given in the area was significantly higher than the national average. These people were the remains of the vast unemployment caused by the closure of the steel mills by Margaret Thatcher.
Thirty years after we are still paying, quite literally for the fight Margaret Thatcher had with the Unions. It may have broken the unions but it also broke manufacturing industry.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
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Angloid
Shipmate
# 159
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Posted
She is on record as claiming that her chief legacy was New Labour. There is much truth in that, and it makes me utterly depressed.
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Brian: You're all individuals!
Crowd: We're all individuals!
Lone voice: I'm not!
Posts: 12927 | From: The Pool of Life | Registered: May 2001
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Hawk
Semi-social raptor
# 14289
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
These people were the remains of the vast unemployment caused by the closure of the steel mills by Margaret Thatcher.
Thirty years after we are still paying, quite literally for the fight Margaret Thatcher had with the Unions. It may have broken the unions but it also broke manufacturing industry.
The steel mills and coal mines closed because they were unprofitable to run and it cost the country millions it could ill-afford to pay these loss-making industries to keep running for no reason other than make-work. Thatcher only removed the subsidies, she didn't destroy British manufacturing, she only allowed the market to destroy it.
The damage was caused by the previous governments keeping the subsidies running and propping up such failing enterprise long after they should have gradually and naturally diminished. Subsidies may seem kind and sensible in the short term, but the long-term effects are devestating when the money runs out and the dam finally breaks.
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“We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
See my blog for 'interesting' thoughts
Posts: 1739 | From: Oxford, UK | Registered: Nov 2008
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by L'organist:
That she didn't go for other monopolies - the BMA, RCN, Bar, Law Society - can perhaps be explained by the preponderance of lawyers in Parliament and the fact that she was booted out before getting round to it. The most disastrous failure was to allow the continuance of LEAs which eat up money for very little benefit.
Not to mention BALPA (the airrline pilots union) of which Norman Tebbit had been general secretary!
quote:
She did her best to stop the rot of unions and the like bullying workers and the country.
So that employers and financiers could do so instead. Thanks.
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
Before Thatcher, Britain was governed by a politics of envy and greed. After Thatcher, we were governed by a politics of greed and envy.
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
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Stetson
Shipmate
# 9597
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Posted
Baptist Trainfan wrote:
quote:
On my course we had some "Religious Right" American Christians who simply couldn't believe that I wasn't delighted - as far as they were concerned, anyone from the Right had to be better than anyone from the Left, QED. In vain did I try to explain the fact that many British Christians in the past had been Socialist or Liberal as well as Tory. That was simply off their radar.
Those Religious Right Americans may have been interested to know that Thatcher was pro-choice on abortion and voted to abolish the sodomy laws in the 1960s.
Possibly, they'd give her a pass on those things, though. One thing I've noticed about anti-abortion people is that there dire concern about "the slaughter of untold babies" can become somewhat less urgent if the person supporting the "slaughter" also happens to advocate lower taxes and de-regulation.
Posts: 6574 | From: back and forth between bible belts | Registered: Jun 2005
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
The thing I have against the Thatcher, and subsequent governments, was that rather than investing the North Sea Gas revenue into British industry and British manufacturing they used it largely to support those laid-off by the closures of the old, admittedly unwieldy, heavy industries ...
Sure, they were inefficient but nothing replaced them.
The price of mass unemployment was the price Thatcher and her ilk were prepared to pay in order to hamstring the unions.
Unlike Marvin, I was old enough to see what was happening after 1979 and whilst a short-sharp-shock of Thatcherism may have been a wake-up call to some extent it went on far too long ...
One could certainly argue that British industry had sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind - but towards the end of his life, my Dad (who was certainly not a lefty by any stretch of the imagination) had come to see the Thatcher experiment as a failure.
He worked in industry, shop-floor level, management level, he saw at first hand how once proud industries were brought to their knees.
The Thatcher regime was brutal. The former coal and steel communities of South Yorkshire and South Wales were literally bludgeoned into submission.
What replaced it?
It's all very well and good toffee-nosed Cameron and his Etonian acolytes railing against the Welfare State and a dependency culture ... but arguably they are their political forebears are the ones who created it - at least on its current scale.
Tebbit's 'On your bike,' my arse.
That's the real irony. The Tories who are railing about welfare and so on are the ones who created mass unemployment in the first place.
Blame the market if you must. I blame Thatcher.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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dv
Shipmate
# 15714
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Posted
Sadly, the drab lick-spittle politicians of today are busy unpicking what remains of her legacy. She was the greatest Prime Minister of the past 50 years. A great achiever who brought freedom to many - and showed what ordinary folk (especially women) could do if they had vision and belief. That, of course, is why the lefties (including most pinko church leaders then and now) largely hated her.
RIP
Posts: 70 | From: Lancs UK | Registered: Jun 2010
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Stetson
Shipmate
# 9597
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Posted
Oh, and I wonder if anyone who knows the history could explain this to me. Fourth paragraph.
The article is confusing. Was the Labour Amendment considered pro-choice or pro-life? I sasume the Northern Ireland MPs were pro-life, which would mean that Labour was supporting a pro-life amendment. But then, why did a pro-lifer like Widdicombe have to be whipped into supporting it?
Or was it a case of the amendment being too liberal for Widdicombe, but conservative enough for the Irish, and Thatcher supporting it out of sympathy for the slightly-conservative Irish position?
[This post was written as a continuation of my earlier post on abortion and sodomy laws.]
[ 08. April 2013, 14:29: Message edited by: Stetson ]
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I have the power...Lucifer is lord!
Posts: 6574 | From: back and forth between bible belts | Registered: Jun 2005
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
These people were the remains of the vast unemployment caused by the closure of the steel mills by Margaret Thatcher.
The mills were already dead, all Thatcher did was turn off the (expensive) life-support machine.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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hanginginthere
Shipmate
# 17541
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Posted
Does anyone else remember Thatcher's excursion into biblical exegesis? Apparently the real point of the parable of the Good Samaritan was that the Samaritan had enough money to be able to pay for the injured man's care. ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
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'Safe?' said Mr Beaver. 'Who said anything about safe? But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.'
Posts: 72 | From: Eboracum | Registered: Jan 2013
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
In 1979 the country was virtually destitute, held to ransom by the unions, in hock to the IMF. She fixed all that - and all credit to her, it needed doing. But she replaced it with a "greed is good" economy, a financial services bubble that only finally burst in 2008. And great was the fall of that house that she built on sand.
This. Any talk of how now is better than before misses that now didn't need to be as bad as it is.
quote:
Originally posted by L'organist:
She did her best to stop the rot of unions and the like bullying workers and the country.
It was not the worker she did this to benefit.
I'll not be dancing in the street, even though I feel the net of her legacy wrought more bad than good.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by George Spigot:
Say what you like, she made this country what it is today.
Yes, and I like how it is today. I have a good life with my own house, a nice car, excellent transport links for when I don't want to use the car, excellent healthcare, efficiently-run utility companies and relatively low taxes.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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Stejjie
Shipmate
# 13941
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Posted
Firstly, although my politics are huge way away from hers, people will be mourning her death so regardless of my feelings... for them.
That said, I think that the selfishness, greed and poisonous individualism that so many (of her party) complain about stem from her policies and her attitude of "God helps those who help themselves" (not a direct quote from her, but it seems to me to sum up the thrust of her policies). Certainly that's the impression I got from reading her autobiography: that if you could help yourself, great, if you couldn't then hard luck; that compromise and consensus were to be resisted; that it was her way or the highway.
I was born a couple of months before she came to power, so I guess I'm one of Thatcher's children, and to see photos/films of pre-Thatcher Britain is a bit like looking into another world. The society we live in now, for better or worse, is the product of Thatcher and no government since her, Labour or Conservative, has strayed too far away from her legacy. I wonder if the problems we're facing now are a result of that.
Perhaps Britain did have to change in 1979 - whether it had to change her way or not is another matter.
So no, no dancing on her grave and I won't speak ill of her as a person - but I'm not sure her legacy is the bundle of unbridled good that many on the right seem to think.
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A not particularly-alt-worshippy, fairly mainstream, mildly evangelical, vaguely post-modern-ish Baptist
Posts: 1117 | From: Urmston, Manchester, UK | Registered: Jul 2008
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Well, bully for you, Marvin, but that's not what everyone has got. I'm not saying that Thatcher is responsible for the 'I'm-alright-Jack-stuff-everyone-else' attitude but I suspect we're all Thatcher's children now ...
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Baptist Trainfan
Shipmate
# 15128
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by hanginginthere:
Does anyone else remember Thatcher's excursion into biblical exegesis? Apparently the real point of the parable of the Good Samaritan was that the Samaritan had enough money to be able to pay for the injured man's care.
Indeed I do: at the Church of Scotland General Assembly in 1988 (not that I was there, I saw it on the news). This "Sermon on the Mound" didn't go down too well with the collected Divines ...
Posts: 9750 | From: The other side of the Severn | Registered: Sep 2009
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Well, bully for you, Marvin, but that's not what everyone has got.
Yes, and that's why the ones who haven't got as much hate Thatcher's legacy. But if they're allowed to hate her because her policies made them poor, I'm allowed to love her because her policies made me (relatively) rich.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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