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Gotta keep milking the Falklands angle by having them carry the copse.

No but I have a lot of respect for our soldiers and her funeral day will mean a lot to them as the decision she took to remove the Argie's from the Falkands changed their lives forever and cost the lives of many of their friends.

max_tranmere wrote:

There will be a
> large military presence including many Falklands veterans and
> it is for that reason I may attend.

Makes it sound as if you will be negotiating with No 10 or the Palace as to where you will sit in St Paul's rather than just turning up and standing in the street watching with some/many others...

Good prime minster my arse !

1. She supported the retention of capital punishment.
2. She destroyed the country's manufacturing industry.
3. She voted against the relaxation of divorce laws.
4. She abolished free milk for schoolchildren ("Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher").
5. She supported more freedom for business (and look how that turned out).
6. She gained support from the National Front in the 1979 election by pandering to the fears of immigration.
7. She gerrymandered local authorities by forcing through council house sales, at the same time preventing councils from spending the money they got for selling houses on building new houses (spending on social housing dropped by 67% in her premiership).
8. She was responsible for 3.6 million unemployed - the highest figure and the highest proportion of the workforce in history and three times the previous government. Massaging of the figures means that the figure was closer to 5 million.
9. She ignored intelligence about Argentinian preparations.
10. The poll tax - say no more.
11. She presided over the closure of 150 coal mines; we are now crippled by the cost of energy, having to import expensive coal from abroad.
12. She compared her "fight" against the miners to the Falklands War.
13. She privatised state monopolies and created the corporate greed culture that we've been railing against for the last 5 years.
14. She introduced the gradual privatisation of the NHS.
15. She introduced financial deregulation in a way that turned city institutions into avaricious money pits.
16. She pioneered the unfailing adoration and unquestioning support of the USA.
17. She allowed the US to place nuclear missiles on UK soil, under US control.
18. Section 28.
19. She opposed anti-apartheid sanctions against South Africa and described Nelson Mandela as "that grubby little terrorist"
20. She support the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and sent the SAS to train their soldiers.
21. She allowed the US to bomb Libya in 1986, against the wishes of more than 2/3 of the population.
22. She opposed the reunification of Germany.
23. She invented Quangos.
24. She increased VAT from 8% to 17.5%.
25. She had the lowest approval rating of any post-war Prime Minister.
26. Her post-PM job? Consultant to Philip Morris tobacco at $250,000 a year, plus $50,000 per speech.
27. The Al Yamamah contract.
28. She opposed the indictment of Chile's General Pinochet.
29. Social unrest under her leadership was higher than at any time since the General Strike.
30. She presided over interest rates increasing to 15%.
31. BSE.
32. She presided over 2 million manufacturing job losses in the 79-81 recession.
33. She opposed the inclusion of Eire in the Northern Ireland peace process.
34. She supported sanctions-busting arms deals with South Africa.
35. Cecil Parkinson, Alan Clark, David Mellor, Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitkin - TWATS !
36. Crime rates doubled under Thatcher.
37. Black Wednesday ? Britain withdraws from the ERM and the pound is devalued. Cost to Britain - ?3.5 billion; profit for George Soros - ?1 billion.
38. Poverty doubled while she opposed a minimum wage.
39. She privatised public services, claiming at the time it would increase public ownership. Most are now owned either by foreign governments (EDF) or major investment houses. The profits don?t now accrue to the taxpayer, but to foreign or institutional shareholders.
40. She cut 75% of funding to museums, galleries and other sources of education.
41. In the Thatcher years the top 10% of earners received almost 50% of the tax remissions
42. 21.9% inflation.
43. She produced Mark Thatcher - ooopppsss !

John Redwood has just said that the coal industry employed 700,000 people in the years immediately after World War 2 yet by the time Maggie took office in 1979 it employed about 250,000. Does anyone know why it shrunk by 450,000 workers during that time? We are led to believe that she was the only PM in generations (probably ever) who implemented policies which would bring about massive increases in unemployment. If the shrinking of the coal industry post-1945 up to 1979 happened on that large scale, and this wasn't the result of policy but happened with a certain amount of inevitability to it, that suggests the rest of the workforce were probably doomed in later years whether Thatcher had folowed the policies she did or not. Can someone who knows more about this than me enlighten me please. Thanks.

Wotcha Max,

Max, the link below will help explain, particularly the section Reasons for the Decline of the Coal Industry



It is absolutely true that the coal industry was in decline before Thatcher came along, but Thatcher was determined to crush and destroy it as quickly as possible.

Scargill got a number of things wrong including the timing of the strike, but what he did not get wrong was Thatcher's determination to destroy the coal industry and in doing so, break the power of the unions.

Having said that although nuclear power replaced a lot of coal use, the UK has still not come up with a satisfactory way of dealing with the waste in a cost effective way and the clean-up costs are absolutely enormous. It would appear without taking on and underwriting huge amounts of the cost of nuclear power generation, the UK will not get any private company to build and run a nuclear generator.

The telling paragraph in this link is here

"From a wider perspective, there is a certain inevitability to the decline of the industry. But, from a local and practical point of view, there is a tremendous personal cost. Perhaps the real government failure was not the refusal to keep the industry afloat. But, more could have been done to quickly promote economic regeneration and find new work for the miners who lose their jobs."

The destruction of the coal industry devastated the communities at the time many of whom were almost solely reliant on the pits for employment. And virtually nothing was done to address the resulting unemployment by successive governments to this day. So if you go to the North East today there is nothing much that has come along to replace the influence of coal mining and instead we see the New British Economy of minimum wage, zero hours contracted work.

Hope this helps.

the average life expectancy of a miner was 52! how many of these old guys celebrating her death would be alive today if they were still in the business of extracting coal,why would you want your kids to be a miner better they did something else.

Thatcher was an easy way for the labour movement/left to explain their decline. Manufacturing costs and wage demands were exceding what we could afford but they could not see that.
Union power was waining and they needed a scapegoat. They did not live in the real world, it was just give me more money regardless of the cost.
Labour and Conservative ministers had lost their balls, something MT had not.

She did not do everything right, the poll tax was a disaster, but she stood up for Britain more than some of those on the left who would have had us all getting as much as possible for no work

firefly wrote:

the poll tax was a disaster,

I know everyone believes the poll tax was a disaster and in as a policy it was but in principle what is wrong with everyone contributing an equal share?

We used to burn coal fires to centrally heat homes.The clean air act in 1950s changed that
We used to have steam trains.
we used to make coal gas to supply gas cookers before North sea gas.
We used to have a steel industry that used lots of coal

Interesting article on the madness of Europe. Why not clean up what goes up the chimney like the Germans are doing and continue with a coal industry?