Thatcher Dead

[Howmanheyman 33282]

Well, it's gone from 'divided a nation' to 'not liked by large parts of the UK but not enough to do anything about it' in pretty short order, all apparently because we still live in a nation where police brutality is the norm and the press are simply an organ of state mind control, so yes, if it's between me and the people trying to shovel that crap, I'd say I am the one with reality on his side.

"but not enough to do anything about it"

But I didn't say that.

 

Lets just say she was a 'Marmite' PM rather than 'divided a nation' if that suits you better?

[Howmanheyman 33282]

Or....they just didn't hate Thatcher as much as you think, or in the numbers you think. Only action would have proved your point, inaction proves nothing. Claiming that people who hated Thatcher would remotely care if the right wing press think they're scum is frankly just make believe bullshit. And there were plenty of things all these supposedly decent objectors could have done that wouldn't have made them look like 'scum' and thus fall into the evil press' trap, it's just inconvenient for bullshit peddlers like yourself that all the incidents of actual 'protest' in the sense of go out and acutally do or say something, have all been proper scummy.

I can't abide Adrian Chiles and Lee Dixon. Do I need to stand outside the ITV Sport dept with a 'down with the Brummie' placard to prove I really, really don't like his patter?.........Or maybe stand outside your house with a '6bells......let it go for fuck sake, man' banner?

[The6Bells 0]

"but not enough to do anything about it"

But I didn't say that.

 

Lets just say she was a 'Marmite' PM rather than 'divided a nation' if that suits you better?

 

I think that's what probably suits you. Me, I prefer reality. Some loved her, some liked, some didn't care, some disliked, and some hated. But most respected her. She spurred a reaction more than her predecessors or successors, but that only goes to show she was getting shit done. The haters gonna hate, they're just never going to get people to believe they represent anywhere close to half the nation.

[ewerk 30668]

141 posts and all in this thread. Is this one of our regular closet-Thatcherite's alterego?

[Howmanheyman 33282]

I think that's what probably suits you. Me, I prefer reality. Some loved her, some liked, some didn't care, some disliked, and some hated. But most respected her. She spurred a reaction more than her predecessors or successors, but that only goes to show she was getting shit done. The haters gonna hate, they're just never going to get people to believe they represent anywhere close to half the nation.

hallelujah!!!!

 

Yes she did a lot of shit, glad we agree. Unfortunately my eldest daughter wants to go on the computer so see you later, have fun on here and play nice.

[essembeeofsunderland 811]

When Tory men are interviewed about Thatcher,they comment on her abilities as a Prime Minister yet when Tory women are interviewed,it seems to be more about her being the first woman Prime Minister than her abilities.

Edited April 18, 2013 by essembeeofsunderland

[Meenzer 15561]

When Tory men are interviewed about Thatcher,they comment on how they got turgid at the sight of her ankles yet when Tory women are interviewed,it seems to be more about her being the first woman Prime Minister than her abilities.

 

FYP

[sweetleftpeg 0]

All together now...

 

ARE YOU LEAZES? ARE YOU LEAZES? AAAAAAAARE YOU LEAZES IN DISGUISE?

[luckyluke 2]

Nah way too coherent and he wouldn't have kept himself to this thread

[Ken 119]

What a beautiful service. RIP Lady Thatcher.

[The6Bells 0]

A double-digit % rise in unemployment, taking it to levels not seen for 17 years.

 

Violent union organised protests over the closure of a steel plant, the last major employer in a depressed area of the country

 

Thatcher's Britain?

 

Nope. France. 2013. Under a social democrat president. Who likes nothing more than to tax the rich to solve all the country's problems.

 

So suck it up all you Thatcher haters (and that goes for all the scuzzy Scousers who might be browsing this week).

 

You're gonna need a bigger boat. A whole lot bigger.

[The Fish 10876]

[Howmanheyman 33282]

A double-digit % rise in unemployment, taking it to levels not seen for 17 years.

 

Violent union organised protests over the closure of a steel plant, the last major employer in a depressed area of the country

 

Thatcher's Britain?

 

Nope. France. 2013. Under a social democrat president. Who likes nothing more than to tax the rich to solve all the country's problems.

 

So suck it up all you Thatcher haters (and that goes for all the scuzzy Scousers who might be browsing this week).

 

You're gonna need a bigger boat. A whole lot bigger.

Has your Wife left you?

 

Drink problem?

 

Anger issues?

 

(Hey, just a stab in the dark, you might just be a wum).

[Monkeys Fist 42481]

Wife?

 

 

 

 

 

[Happy Face 29]

A double-digit % rise in unemployment, taking it to levels not seen for 17 years.

 

Violent union organised protests over the closure of a steel plant, the last major employer in a depressed area of the country

 

Thatcher's Britain?

 

Nope. France. 2013. Under a social democrat president. Who likes nothing more than to tax the rich to solve all the country's problems.

 

So suck it up all you Thatcher haters (and that goes for all the scuzzy Scousers who might be browsing this week).

 

You're gonna need a bigger boat. A whole lot bigger.

 

Like all of Europe, France is implementing a harsh austerity policy numb nuts. The party doing it is irrelevant.

[ewerk 30668]

A double-digit % rise in unemployment, taking it to levels not seen for 17 years.

 

Violent union organised protests over the closure of a steel plant, the last major employer in a depressed area of the country

 

Thatcher's Britain?

 

Nope. France. 2013. Under a social democrat president. Who likes nothing more than to tax the rich to solve all the country's problems.

 

So suck it up all you Thatcher haters (and that goes for all the scuzzy Scousers who might be browsing this week).

 

You're gonna need a bigger boat. A whole lot bigger.

 

Whereas Spain's right-wing government that has overseen a period of austerity has been doing so well.

[Happy Face 29]

 

 

I've had quite a few requests to put up a film I made a while ago about Mrs Thatcher - called The Attic. It's about how she constructed a fake ghostly version of Britain's past, and then used it to maintain her power. But also how she became possessed and haunted by this vision.

I'm putting it up as a bit of a corrective to the terrifying wonk-fest that took over after Mrs Thatcher died. A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios and together they built a fortress around Mrs Thatcher's memory that was rooted in theories about economics.

 

 

They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand. It's a view of the world where they see the voters - the people who put Mrs Thatcher in power - as simplified consumption-driven robots.

 

What was missing was the fact that Mrs Thatcher was also a powerful romantic politician who created a strange but compelling story about Britain's past that connected with the imagination of millions of people. It was fake, but it was incredibly powerful because she believed it. And the power of her belief raised up ghostly dreams from Britain's past that still live in people's imaginations - long after she fell from power.

 

 

The problem with wonks is that they can't deal with emotion and feeling, and they don't like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters. Yet the think-tankers have built a sarcophagus of economic discourse around Westminster.

 

What we are waiting for is a politician to come along who can connect with our imaginations and inspire us about political ideas instead of boring us to tears.

 

The film stars a wide range of characters - including Flanagan and Allen, Members of the Political Wing of the Irish National Liberation Army,

Deborah Kerr, PC Claude Morrell, Mrs Thatcher and her friend Airey Neave, and the ghost of Winston Churchill.

 

Here's the film.

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/MRS-THATCHER-THE-GHOST-IN-THE-HOUSE-OF-WONKS

[Happy Face 29]

In the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby’s daughter Marie was one of them. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although Marie’s eligibility was not disputed, she was denied help by the Department of Health and Social Security. Later, I obtained government records of the case that showed Marie had been turned down because her father was “affected by a Trade dispute”.

 

 

The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders. When she came to power in 1979, she demanded a ban on exports of milk to Vietnam. The American invasion had left a third of Vietnamese children malnourished.

 

I witnessed many distressing sights, including infants going blind from a lack of vitamins. “I cannot tolerate this,” said an anguished doctor at a paediatric hospital in Saigon, as we looked at a dying boy. Oxfam and Save the Children had made clear to the British government the gravity of the emergency. An embargo led by the US had forced up the local price of a kilo of milk powder to ten times that of a kilo of meat. Many children could have been restored with milk. Thatcher’s ban held.

 

 

In neighbouring Cambodia, Thatcher left a trail of blood, secretly. In 1980, she demanded that the defunct Pol Pot regime – which killed 1.7 million people – retain its “right” to represent its victims at the UN. Her policy was vengeance on Cambodia’s liberator, Vietnam. The British representative was instructed to vote with Pol Pot at the World Health Organisation, thereby preventing it from providing help to where it was needed more than anywhere else on earth.

 

To conceal this outrage, the US, Britain and China, Pol Pot’s main backer, invented a “resistance coalition”, dominated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces and supplied by the CIA at bases along the Thai border. There was a hitch. Following the Irangate arms-for-hostages debacle, the US Congress had banned clandestine foreign adventures. “In one of those deals the two of them liked to make,” a senior Whitehall official told the Sunday Telegraph, “President Reagan put it to Thatcher that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show. She readily agreed.”

 

 

In 1983, Thatcher sent the SAS to train the “coalition” in its own distinctive brand of terrorism. Seven-man SAS teams arrived from Hong Kong and British soldiers set about training “resistance fighters” in laying minefields in a country devastated by genocide and the world’s highest rate of death and injury as a result of landmines.

 

I reported this at the time, and more than 16,000 people wrote to Thatcher in protest. “I confirm,” she replied to the opposition leader Neil Kinnock, “that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge or those allied to them.” The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the government of John Major admitted to parliament that the SAS had indeed trained the “coalition”. “We liked the British,” a Khmer Rouge fighter later told me. “They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims.”

 

 

When the journalists and producers of Thames Television’s landmark documentary Death on the Rock revealed how the British SAS had run Thatcher’s other death squads in Ireland and Gibraltar, they were hounded by Rupert Murdoch’s “journalists”, then cowering behind the razor wire at Wapping. Although exonerated, Thames TV ultimately lost its ITV franchise.

 

In 1982, the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano was steaming outside the Falklands exclusion zone. The ship offered no threat, yet Thatcher gave orders for it to be sunk. Her victims were 323 sailors, including teenage conscripts. The crime had a certain logic. Among Thatcher’s closest allies were mass murderers – Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, responsible for “many more than one million” deaths (Amnesty International). Although the British state had long armed the world’s leading tyrannies, it was Thatcher who brought a crusading zeal to the deals, talking up the finer points of fighter aircraft engines, hard-bargaining with bribe-demanding Saudi princes. I filmed her at an arms fair, stroking a gleaming missile. “I’ll have one of those!” she said.

 

 

In his arms-to-Iraq inquiry, Lord (Richard) Scott heard evidence that an entire tier of the Thatcher government, from senior civil servants to ministers, had lied and broken the law in selling weapons to Saddam Hussein. Thumb through old copies of the Baghdad Observer, and there are pictures of her obsequious “boys” on the front page – cabinet ministers – sitting with Saddam on his famous white couch. There is a grinning David Mellor around the time his host was gassing 5,000 Kurds.

 

Perhaps it is too easy to dance on her grave. Her funeral was a propaganda stunt, fit for a dictator: an absurd show of militarism, as if a coup had taken place. And it has. As another of her boys, Geoffrey Howe, a Thatcher minister between 1979 and 1989, said, “Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.”

 

 

In 1997, Thatcher was the first former prime minister to visit Tony Blair after he entered Downing Street. There is a photo of them, joined in rictus – the budding war criminal with his mentor.

 

When Ed Miliband, in his unctuous “tribute”, caricatured Thatcher as a “brave” feminist hero whose achievements he personally “honoured”, you knew that she had not died at all.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/thatcher-may-be-gone-remember-%E2%80%93-her-cruel-influence-lives-labour-party

[The6Bells 0]

Like all of Europe, France is implementing a harsh austerity policy numb nuts. The party doing it is irrelevant.

 

That would be the same bloke who said he was going to reverse the austerity measures and go for a spend for growth strategy like the US? Did you even do the most basic of research before coming out with this bullshit?

[The6Bells 0]

Whereas Spain's right-wing government that has overseen a period of austerity has been doing so well.

 

Like Happy Face, if you're going to talk about another country, do some basic research first. Spain's economy was fucked by the trade union bound left, who'd been in power most of the time since the end of Franco and had ruled for 7 years until being kicked out with their worst ever election result in 2011.

[The6Bells 0]

http://www.newstates...es-labour-party

 

You should never believe a word anyone says if they're the sort of person who can in all seriousness come up with crap like 'the Belgrano was not a threat' or 'the Belgrano was retreating'. These things are proveably false using both Argentine and British primary sources from the time, and has been backed up by serious military historians since. It's basically like trusting the word of someone who tells you the holocaust never happened, it really is that much of a massive distortion of basic historical fact.

[Monkeys Fist 42481]

3.00 am ......

 

What a cock jockey

[ChezGiven 0]

He's right about France but incorrect about Spain, not that what he posted on Spain was in anyway a point pertinent to his argument.

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3904]

I am so glad she is dead. Just a little disappointed she was allowed to die peacefully. I think it would have been better if she burnt to death in a house fire which took her gun running son with her.

[The6Bells 0]

He's right about France but incorrect about Spain, not that what he posted on Spain was in anyway a point pertinent to his argument.

 

And by that logic, you can judge Cameron's policies of today without reference to anything Gordon Brown did. In a word, nonsense.