As well as stopping their milk.

Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher.

She was the right person for PM when she was.

Least she didn't drag us into any illegal wars.

Argentina might disagree

They may disagree but they started it... We just finished it

Years later they admitted that both the war and the attack on the Belgrano were legal.

I'm still expecting that silly cow of a president of theirs to stick her nose in about this.

Which was a bit of a fluke, seeing as she'd just written off 30% of the Navy at the time. The war not only saved her from a growing tide of dislike at home, it saved the navy too.
We were bringing ships back that had been sold to the Aussies months prior, IIRC.

She was right about some of the stuff she did, including many of the privatizations and rolling back subsidies for busted industries. She carried the logic too far when she was opposed though, and tended to accept huge collateral damage where a politician's duty is really to compromise. Admittedly Scargill was just as bad as her, but a slightly better PM would have probably been able to persuade the NUM to dump him and find somebody who could negotiate in some kind of good faith.

Her chief misdeed seems to be going unmentioned thus far, although I am sure Private Eye will rectify that. Using an arm of the UK govt to move dirty bribe cash around for the Al-Yamamah arms deal was bad enough. But nobbling the National Audit Office so that the problem would go away introduced some of that same corruption into our government. The NAO has been useless ever since. In that respect the whole thing was a betrayal of her own principles of probity. Plus the deal itself may have saved thousands of jobs, but the method and cost were functionally no different from any other of the industrial subsidies to which she was usually so implacably opposed. So it was a doubly inauthentic act.

She set a trend for breaking or corrupting institutions that impeded her will. It was one that Blair followed repeatedly; when he spanked the BBC for offending him over Iraq; plus whatever he did to get away with selling knighthoods, and burying another investigation into BAE. It's anti-democratic, and plain bad government. I don't doubt that it happened before Thatcher too, but her propaganda implied that she was putting a stop to that sort of thing, and it was a lie.

Aside from that she had a firmly held but slightly incoherent set of beliefs. A classically liberal economic outlook mixes badly with illiberal social views and centralizing authoritarianism, and the cracks were visible often. She was an ideologue who usually resorted to pragmatism only for purposes of revenge.

On the plus side, she did bring out the very best of one of my heroes... Gerald Scarfe

im on the floor crying with laughing ...

they don’t say good things about me when im alive, ho hum ...

i take that as a compliment, thank you ...

I was never in a Union in the UK, I never saw the need. Here in Germany, I was in a union for 9 months, but the company made 250 staff redundant and the union didn't do anything, a complete waste of dues.

The reason the UK is not as successful as Germany is that it sold off or outsourced its industry from the late 70s on, switching more to service industries. The problem is, if everybody works in service industries and nobody actually makes anything any more, you have to import everything.

Yes, there are unions over here, but they don't seem to be any more successful than the UK unions, in general.

She did a lot of good, at the beginning, but she turned into a megalomaniac and went a little doolally at the end and that is what she will be most remembered for, the excesses. I can still remember the long dark nights, with no power in the 70s, when there were strikes. Try getting sympathy today, by turning off the electricity in the evening!

So can I, and the rubbish piling-up in the streets and the dead going unburied. The Labour govmt back then had also broke the country (sound familiar) and had gone to the IMF begging for some money. Inflation was rampant and the Unions seemed to be running the country.

Whatever you think of her she will be remembered worldwide. Not sure you can say that about the Labour Prime Ministers *shrugs*



I can remember the power cuts and everything else too. Politics seems to run in cycles and yes it does sound familiar.

The lights going out happened under the Tories as a result of the Three Day Week to save energy because of the miners strike. The rubbish in the streets happened under Labour in 1978 during the Winter of Discontent. The strikes were partly caused the rampant inflation caused by the oil shortage caused by OPEC Oil Embargo in 1973. With inflation rampant unions pushed for higher wages to maintain parity. The problem was as one group did well the next union wanted parity of wages and so there was a never ending cycle of strikes to get wage parity. The increase in oil prices also drained the foreign reserves so we had to get a bailout from the IMF.

How very true!