Margaret Thatcher P.m.

Has the world learnt it's lesson from Right Wing politics.

We cannot trust them.

Don't get me wrong I'm no whinging Liberal

Thatcher tried to turn Great Britain into a sweat shop.

A long term system of economic exploitation.

The economy was based on the financial irregularity of a no "Red Tape" policy
i.e no regulation. What a sell out, The Banks without any regulation "We're screwed"

Then she paid millions to get middle eastern manufacturing industries to relocate to the U.K. and give jobs to all those who didn't work with the banks

Then when her people wouldn't take work (with no minimum wage rules) as low paid "semislaves" then she forced them to take any job available (i.e. in the factory that just moved in)

And if we hadn't moved her out then we all would be working for Lucky Goaldstar (Except the "Money People" and the Military.)

Don't take the risks

Never vote too right wing

You don't want the rich elite ruling your lives.

I won't let that happen again and I hope other countries will see the signs.

Neil.

she also sank the belgrano

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Originally posted by Neil__@22 August 2003 - 17:34
A long term system of economic exploitation.

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Care to remember who voted for this 'long term exploitation' ?
Let me remind you.
A damn sight more people than voted for the current shambles.

You should also remember that Maggie was not voted out of office by the public.
Her policies were so popular that Labour could not even win with 'Mr Grey' as leader of the Conservatives, it took another 4 years of his shambling nothingness before they could take power.

And don't be fooled into thinking that just because the current government has a large parliamentary majority that it is popular with the majority of the population, it is simply that the Conservative voters chose not to come out and vote, and more of the usual floaters voted Labour.

I suspect you are too young to remember the disastrous 'Winter of Discontent' in 1979. I remember all too well the rubbish piling up in the streets, the mortuaries full because no-one would bury or cremate the bodies, no public transport, no mail etc. Far worse than anything we have seen since, but I have a feeling that we may see these scenes again in the not too distant future,

Margaret Hilda was latterly (and probably formerly) quite quite loopy. That is why, despite winning a landslide majority, the Conservative Party deposed her. There was no political reason to do so. The opinion polls were as good as could be expected for mid term and there were no obvious contenders for the job. Yet the Party grandees pulled the strings and out she went. The equivilant, for US readers, would be if Rumsfeld and Ashcroft decided to have Bush removed before the next election without consulting anyone other than senior Republican power brokers. There may even be no mechanism to do this in the US system but presumably they would only try if they considered the President had lost grip of reality.

:D Cue a lot of jokes here I guess - but he was misunderestimating things before they elected him.

He was not elected. dont you remember the Florida fiasco. Anyway I thought it was Clinton that had he little miss under estimating.

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Originally posted by lynx+22 August 2003 - 17:10--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (lynx @ 22 August 2003 - 17:10)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Neil__@22 August 2003 - 17:34
A long term system of economic exploitation.

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Care to remember who voted for this &#39;long term exploitation&#39; ?
Let me remind you.
A damn sight more people than voted for the current shambles.

You should also remember that Maggie was not voted out of office by the public.
Her policies were so popular that Labour could not even win with &#39;Mr Grey&#39; as leader of the Conservatives, it took another 4 years of his shambling nothingness before they could take power.

And don&#39;t be fooled into thinking that just because the current government has a large parliamentary majority that it is popular with the majority of the population, it is simply that the Conservative voters chose not to come out and vote, and more of the usual floaters voted Labour.

I suspect you are too young to remember the disastrous &#39;Winter of Discontent&#39; in 1979. I remember all too well the rubbish piling up in the streets, the mortuaries full because no-one would bury or cremate the bodies, no public transport, no mail etc. Far worse than anything we have seen since, but I have a feeling that we may see these scenes again in the not too distant future, [/b][/quote]
She was "popular" in South East Middle England and with the rich.

She did more to split the United Kingdom than any other person in history.


If you recall, the "Council of the North" was convened for the 1st time in 500 years, as she raped Scotland, Wales and Northern England in her policy to sell everything that wasnt nailed down (and some things that were) to her friends in the Private Sector, then using the money to give those same friends massive tax cuts.


She nearly died in a Bomb attack once.......It is the closest my community ever came to an "impulsive" street party, then we found she&#39;d survived.



Im sorry if i upset people, but there was a thread earlier about "Shooting your head of state"........this bitch was the person i was thinking off when i said..."In certain circumstances".

I am not given to extremes of emotion....the most is usually a dislike for someone or contempt.

This inhumane creature, however is one of the few people i have ever truly hated, with a passion....even to this day, a decade after she lost power.

If you look at things a little more objectively, you will find that things were &#39;sold off&#39; to pay the massive debt inherited from the previous government. I can&#39;t remember the exact figures, but I seem to remember that the UK economy was in about position 57 in the world when she took over, and was in free fall.

Turning that around was no small feat, and yes, a lot of people got hurt in the process, but without it we would have had an economic situation similar to that in Argentina of late. As the saying goes, you can&#39;t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

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Originally posted by lynx@23 August 2003 - 16:38
If you look at things a little more objectively, you will find that things were &#39;sold off&#39; to pay the massive debt inherited from the previous government. I can&#39;t remember the exact figures, but I seem to remember that the UK economy was in about position 57 in the world when she took over, and was in free fall.

Turning that around was no small feat, and yes, a lot of people got hurt in the process, but without it we would have had an economic situation similar to that in Argentina of late. As the saying goes, you can&#39;t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

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People aren&#39;t eggs though.

I agree she split the country into the haves and the have nots and totally fecked the economy at the same time.

Thatcherism was an unmitigated disaster for the whole country.

Lynx

I think you must be referring to something else. If the UK GDP had dropped to 57th in the world we would have had to have sold the Queen Mum off and lot of other stuff besides just to pay the electricity bills. I am not sure what that figure actually represents but by the time you get down to 57th you are looking at small countries like Sweden and Norway - possibly even some Second World countries. The UK is 4th in world in terms of GDP (and has been for some time). The US first, Japan second and Germany third, then I think it is France in fifth place.

The fundamental flaw in the MHT&#39;s philosophy was that the "Market" decides. This required that all support to "lame duck" industries be withdrawn and they compete on the open market. Fine in theory, but how do shipyards compete against government funded shipyards in Korea and Japan. The philosophy only works if everybody plays the game. A huge portion of our manufacturing industry died on the reefs of subsidised competition from abroad whilst Margaret played her fiddle. Even Freidman washed his hands of her.

Yes, we had workplace problems and strikes etc., - with nearly 20 years full employment peole had got complacement by 1972. However, overseas companies were not afraid to come here nor were they particularly afraid of the Unions - it was our senior and middle management that scared them.

Rat Face

Stop beating about the bush and say what you think&#33; :D

As I said, I can&#39;t remember the exact position, and I believe it was to do with economic health rather than just GDP, but from what I remember we came slightly behind Mexico&#33;

You also have to remember that if you are going to support your industries financially you have to have the money to put into them, but any excess money in the UK had to be used to repay the loans the previous government had taken from the World Bank, it was one of the conditions placed upon this country when the loans were made.

Oh, and Scotland did rather well out of Maggie. An independant commision said that Scotland should receive an extra £2 billion per year (I believe it was for seven years) than would be calculated by population alone. When Maggie came to power a short time afterwards she said this was obviously a nonsense and doubled it to £4 billion, and didn&#39;t stop it when the time limit was up. But I don&#39;t suppose anyone wants to hear about that sort of investment.

thatcher was & still is a nasty peace of work, she ruined the North by shutting down the steelworks & the pits & that is a lesson in how to destroy the biggest part of a country the North but we fought back & all we need to do know is get rid of Tory Blair & fat boy Prescott

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Originally posted by blade1356uk@4 September 2003 - 17:24
thatcher was & still is a nasty peace of work, she ruined the North by shutting down the steelworks & the pits & that is a lesson in how to destroy the biggest part of a country the North but we fought back & all we need to do know is get rid of Tory Blair & fat boy Prescott

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But weren&#39;t they all losing money? :huh:

There are 2 sorts of "Nationalised" industry, the money makers and the subsidised.

The money makers (eg BT, British Gas, Water Company&#39;s, Electricity etc etc) was where the money came for to pay for the money losers..( eg Coal, Steel, Post Office etc) this reduced the burden of subsidisation on the taxpayer.

Thatcher, in her infinite wisdom, decided that it was better to sell off the money makers cheap to her fat cat buddies...thereby increasing the burden on the country.

She then decided that it was econamical sense to pay vastly more in benefits than to keep the subsidies and so many of the big companies had to lay of 100,000s of people and the country was less self sufficient........(totally disregarding every lesson from histrory in her ideological frenzy)

With the money "saved" and the huge revenues from North Sea Oil and Gas, she paid for huge tax cuts for big business and the rich, rather than pay off the National Debt.......which she could have done by about 1986/7 with Gas/Oil revenues alone, if she hadnt gave all the money to her buddies, and been paying 3,500,000 dole wallas (2,500,000 more than when she came to power).

Her investment in public services was to cut the number of Tax Officers and Customs/Excise Officers (ie the ones that recovered £1,000,000s weekly from the rich) and increase the number of benefit fraud officers (ie the ones that wrote off £40 a time, rather than pay to prosecute). In additon her actions were such that under investment in Education and Health will take decades to rectify, even with todays relatively healthy economy.

She almost bankrupted the country, the national deficet in the mid 80&#39;s was more per MONTH than it had been annually in the 70&#39;s.....(and the 70&#39;s was devestating compared to before that)

Quite frankly, she sold the family silver.

The only reason Thatcher destroyed the mining & steelworks was a little matter of a national strike in the early seventies when Heath was booted out & to answer the question no the british coalboard were not losing money or the british steel Thatcher made it impossible for these companys to trade by buying cheap produce from Holland (Coal) & steel from Asia Sheffield steel is the best in the world & will always be when the cheaper products have rusted away.I had my own business in the late 70s to the late 80s & Thatcher was shutting down business&#39;s faster than you could set up. I am no Miner or Steelworker but family & friends were & to see people losing their jobs & houses & business was no joke.

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Originally posted by lynx+22 August 2003 - 18:10--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (lynx @ 22 August 2003 - 18:10)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Neil__@22 August 2003 - 17:34
A long term system of economic exploitation.

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Care to remember who voted for this &#39;long term exploitation&#39; ?
Let me remind you.
A damn sight more people than voted for the current shambles.

You should also remember that Maggie was not voted out of office by the public.
Her policies were so popular that Labour could not even win with &#39;Mr Grey&#39; as leader of the Conservatives, it took another 4 years of his shambling nothingness before they could take power.

And don&#39;t be fooled into thinking that just because the current government has a large parliamentary majority that it is popular with the majority of the population, it is simply that the Conservative voters chose not to come out and vote, and more of the usual floaters voted Labour.

I suspect you are too young to remember the disastrous &#39;Winter of Discontent&#39; in 1979. I remember all too well the rubbish piling up in the streets, the mortuaries full because no-one would bury or cremate the bodies, no public transport, no mail etc. Far worse than anything we have seen since, but I have a feeling that we may see these scenes again in the not too distant future, [/b][/quote]
Who said I support the present government?

And as i&#39;m 39 I do remember the winter of discontent and the run away power of the unions

I hear this argument all the time.

"The unions had too much power. so it&#39;s ok to strip every worker of ever right they have and turn them into slaves."

Thatcher tried to turn workers into slaves with no employee rights and at the same time gave employers all the power.
she stripped the employers regulation to a point where workers had no right at all and if you sank then tough shit.
She forgot one thing, not everyone can be an employer. so the ones that couldn&#39;t were screwed
and if they didn&#39;t like it the tough. no rights no say.

anyone who harks back to the 70&#39;s and thinks that justifies turning the U.K.&#39;s workforce into slaves in retrobution hasn&#39;t lived in the area&#39;s of britain most affected by thatcherite policies.

How can you justify turning the formost leader in world patents (we have more patents filed than any other country) into a manufacturing economy based upon production line sweat shop economics.

O.K. it is good for the countries economy, but then again SLAVERY always is.

you fool yourself about the conservative voters.
thet are the staubchest at the poles out of us all.

the conservative party is ruled by aged right wing idiots who still believe thatcher should be in power today. they don&#39;t vote because they don&#39;t exist

Neil

She even managed to sell off stuff the British Government didnt own...

Water Companies come to mind....the Water Companies were owned by the Ratepayer, not the Taxpayer.....ie Local Government.

She in effect Nationalised them and then sold em off in one go, leaving Local Government having to find those revenues from elswhere.

And most peoples water charges are STILL worked out on 1973 Ratable Values, despite these having been dumped in 1990 by the introduction of the Poll Tax. Every house converted to flats or vise versa since then have an "estimated" RV assigned to them (unless they fork out for a water meter)......these RV&#39;s have no relationship to what would have been given to them by the Valuation Office, but do generate huge profits for the Water Companies (being on average twice what they should be)

"But wouldnt it be sensible to charge on their Council Tax Band?"........well, yes it would. But of course they would then have a method of appealing their water bills, as they had prior to privatisation..........this wouldnt be right for a private company (probably owned by a French Company)

Rat,

We live in manchester and our community charge is £160 a month for 2 people in a one bed flat.

and as to the sell off&#39;s

How about the underground

One director paid £100 grand on shares and within a year those shares were worth £20Million

And north sea oil

wasn&#39;t that used to pay for 3 million unemployed in order to drive down wages.

When I was 15 a mate of mine was on 5 pound an hour in a factory
He would be on £4.20 now 25 years later.

Now is that progress

the employers whinge that £4.50 would cripple their business
if they cant pay a living wage they they have made profit from exploitation and don&#39;t deserve to continue.

These thatcherite slave drivers should be forced to realise her ideals are dead and get on with paying a proper wage not peanuts

Neil

Hey, im on your side here....

Im not a christian, but i&#39;d have no problems with them burning this witch....

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Originally posted by Rat Faced@5 September 2003 - 17:02
Hey, im on your side here....

Im not a christian, but i&#39;d have no problems with them burning this witch....

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Well, You got a date in your dirary free?

Ill happily join you in a pint for her wake.

I know i get very imotive over a lot of things but
Great Britain has a common enemy amd her legacy reigns on for a while
and she&#39;s only a shop keepers daughter. and dodi al fiad ( the son of the Harrads Billionaire) was only a shop keepers son

I only wish the girl herself could realise the depth of loathing she is held under.
without the excuse of "everyone hates a loser"

and to all those who use her voter support as a rescue remady
Remember one thing thatcher manipulated the voting boundaries to such an extent that on her third term as premier she would have gotten 70 less seats if the voterate had been left in place.

Moving poor people from marginal seats to secure labour constituancies is corrupt.
thay didn&#39;t move the voters just the boundaries

if that isn&#39;t voter manipulation

What is.

Neil,

I&#39;m not old enough to remember and i don&#39;t know enough to properly judge any of these things, so i won&#39;t try. Also i come from London which of course wasn&#39;t affected by the pit closures and subsequent unemployment, but i would like to pick up on one point that u made about subsidisation Rat Faced:

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the money losers..( eg Coal, Steel, Post Office etc)

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I agree that certain industries will almost inevitably make a loss and in the interests of the public good may need to be subsidised, however, in the list you give above I would say only the post office is really necessary. The steel produced in britain is the best in the world, however, producing lots of high quality expensive steel is stupid when in most cases cheap crappy steel will do and will therefore be preferred by companies. Coal was the most famous aspect of Maggies era, I think its a famous quote from the era (misquoted no doubt on my part)
"Britain produces the cheapest deep mined coal in the world" this statement was used to defend why the pits shouldn&#39;t be shut down, however, the equally famous response is that many other countries had coal nearer the surface which could be extracted much more cheaply it doesn&#39;t really make sense to waste money on digging up expensive coal.

Basically my point is that coal and steel are unnecessary production areas UNLIKE public services eg Water, electricity, post office etc, so whereas i can fully understand the logic behind subsidising critical services, i don&#39;t understand subsidising a redundant and uncompetitive industry. It seems to me that subsidising such an industry is basically the same as paying the miners unemployment benefits. I don&#39;t know numbers so I don&#39;t know which is cheaper, paying the benefits or paying them to dig up coal, perhaps it would be cheaper to employ the miners, but bear in mind that they were having to go very deep to find coal, indicating that coal supplies were severely diminished and therefore costs incurred would be rising quickly and the subsidies would have to keep rising accordingly. Also once hte coal had gone the miners would be out of work anyway, I don&#39;t know the status of the mine shafts in the mid 80&#39;s (ie how much coal left etc) so i dunno how long in the future this would have been, but perhaps a gradual phase out of mines would have been a good idea.
Thats all for now, I&#39;m sure i had another point but i&#39;ve forgotten it cos its 1am and i&#39;ve been up since 5am this morning :( I&#39;ll make a post tomorrow about the travesty of what privatisation and the power &#39;market&#39; have done to the future of our Electricity supply. :(

NB I am not a Maggie supporter and i think the brutality with which she enforced the changes she made was horrific, however, i agree with the principles of some of what she did ( just not the implementation).

I felt the effects of her regime from troubled Belfast and to have just a winter of discontent would have been a glorious summer for us.
She and others in her sect magnified the misery in this country to biblical proportions (or Shakespearian if my metaphors are faithful).
A succession of draconian, doddering Home Secretaries and Thatchers&#39; rigid upper lips presented Ireland as backward Bogmen (prompt for wisecracks).
Since her departure there has been relative calm here. She exacerbated and encouraged an unnecessary 30 years of slaughter. It&#39;s unforgivable and difficult to be objective when we&#39;ve all been marred in some degree by it. I include the British public in this. In the 20th Century no-one should have had to die for the Empire.
Incidentally, I met Billy Bragg in Belfast the day Thatcher resigned.
He strode out onto the stage with a copy of The Belfast Telegraph which proclaimed "Thatcher Out&#33;&#33;" screaming "Rejoice, Rejoice".
He proceeded with a rendition of "Hey ho, the witch is dead" from The Wizard Of Oz.
Comparable, for me anyway, to the dissolution of the Berlin Wall.

Although I am largely cynical about politicians, I do recall a small Whoo hoo as I heard the news on the radio.

She came to power quoting St Francis and then set about creating division and mis-trust in every walk of life (even her own party). I do not think history will regard the 80s as a high point in British social life. It was one of the most depressing and socially divisive periods I can remember. The 60s swung and the 70s were weird but the 80s were Yuppies and 4 million plus unemployed. It cost the country almost everything it had to sustain that level of unemployment - and for what?... to break a few Unions? I still maintain she was loopy - a documentary detailing her removal from Office highlighted her unique perspective on life. :blink:

I would like to point out that I don&#39;t really do demonisation of individuals. No one is all bad (no not even whoever you have just thought of; although they may have chosen to be mostly bad) and simply getting things wrong doesn&#39;t preclude the possibility that they may have some insights with regards certain issues. Margaret Thatcher did identify weaknesses in the way Britain did things and she rightly identified that ordinary working people had aspirations to improve their lot. But the cure unfortunately was worse than the illness.

Major may have been dull but he did set about trying to get a bit of unity in the country (as he said "Im not really into the vision thing").

Now we have "our Tone" who sadly is into the vision thing. :(

Quote:

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Originally posted by ilw@6 September 2003 - 00:07
I&#39;m not old enough to remember and i don&#39;t know enough to properly judge any of these things, so i won&#39;t try. Also i come from London which of course wasn&#39;t affected by the pit closures and subsequent unemployment, but i would like to pick up on one point that u made about subsidisation Rat Faced:

Quote:

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the money losers..( eg Coal, Steel, Post Office etc)

---

I agree that certain industries will almost inevitably make a loss and in the interests of the public good may need to be subsidised, however, in the list you give above I would say only the post office is really necessary. The steel produced in britain is the best in the world, however, producing lots of high quality expensive steel is stupid when in most cases cheap crappy steel will do and will therefore be preferred by companies. Coal was the most famous aspect of Maggies era, I think its a famous quote from the era (misquoted no doubt on my part)
"Britain produces the cheapest deep mined coal in the world" this statement was used to defend why the pits shouldn&#39;t be shut down, however, the equally famous response is that many other countries had coal nearer the surface which could be extracted much more cheaply it doesn&#39;t really make sense to waste money on digging up expensive coal.

Basically my point is that coal and steel are unnecessary production areas UNLIKE public services eg Water, electricity, post office etc, so whereas i can fully understand the logic behind subsidising critical services, i don&#39;t understand subsidising a redundant and uncompetitive industry. It seems to me that subsidising such an industry is basically the same as paying the miners unemployment benefits. I don&#39;t know numbers so I don&#39;t know which is cheaper, paying the benefits or paying them to dig up coal, perhaps it would be cheaper to employ the miners, but bear in mind that they were having to go very deep to find coal, indicating that coal supplies were severely diminished and therefore costs incurred would be rising quickly and the subsidies would have to keep rising accordingly. Also once hte coal had gone the miners would be out of work anyway, I don&#39;t know the status of the mine shafts in the mid 80&#39;s (ie how much coal left etc) so i dunno how long in the future this would have been, but perhaps a gradual phase out of mines would have been a good idea.
Thats all for now, I&#39;m sure i had another point but i&#39;ve forgotten it cos its 1am and i&#39;ve been up since 5am this morning :( I&#39;ll make a post tomorrow about the travesty of what privatisation and the power &#39;market&#39; have done to the future of our Electricity supply. :(

NB I am not a Maggie supporter and i think the brutality with which she enforced the changes she made was horrific, however, i agree with the principles of some of what she did ( just not the implementation).

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Some things are needed to be subsidised, not for short term economic reasons, but as history shows...for long term reasons.

In the 80&#39;s a lot of our Power Stations were Coal Powered, therefore she was making the country reliant on imports for our energy.

Once a deep shaft mine is shut down, it cannot be reopened...water, gas and the way geology works makes it impossible. Its estimated that we have 300 years worth of coal in the UK..against 15 years of Oil and Gas.....you work out the economics of it..........but not with todays technology taken into account, remember this was the 80s.


We have 2 world wars and numerous "conflicts" to show why some things should never rely on imports...even if it saves a little money (and it was a little money when she came to power, Post Office (inc BT) made enough to subsidise Coal and Steel).

Imports are great when it comes to choosing a new Car or TV, but no country should rely on imports for its survival, which is the position she put us into.

Other basic things that needed subsidising paid for themselves...eg Steel.

By subsidising this, there was less subsidy required for Shipbuilding, Car Industry and Rail...to name a few.
And on a purely economic front....ever hear of a loss leader?

We subsidised Steel, and that wasnt money down the drain....Once it left British Steel and went to our (now almost defunct) manufacturing base eg Sheffield..the world demand for the products more than outwayed the loss at the start of the process, in the natonal economic figures.

Dont believe me? Look at the National Deficit while she was in power, and how it plummets as she systematically destroyed our Industrial Heritage.