Why Thatcher is hated

[mudskipper]

She didn't steal our pensions, she didn't try and destroy the working classes using mass immigration, she didn't bankrupt the country and leave a note to their sucessor going "there's no money left" having no shame in not only bankrupting the nation but giving our childrens children a debt mountain to repay, she didn't start illegal wars based on fabricated dossiers, she didn't arrest pensioners as terrorists for speaking out against unlike anyone foolish enough not to be awe of the messiah at Labour party conferences

There's lot you can't blame on Thatcher

Does it have to be binary? Pro-Tory or Pro-Labour?

Surely you can criticise one philosophy without naturally being an uncritical supporter of its polar opposite?

[Paddy]

I hope I'm around when Tony Blair goes

[mudskipper]

I hope I'm around when Tony Blair goes

I think the going rate is about 20K.

[proggy]

Does it have to be binary? Pro-Tory or Pro-Labour?

Surely you can criticise one philosophy without naturally being an uncritical supporter of its polar opposite?

WHS

[EternalOptimist]

WHS

WSS.

She is a she

[proggy]

WSS.

She is a she

Thanks for the heads up. I hope I didn't offend, it's hard to tell sometimes...

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Does it have to be binary? Pro-Tory or Pro-Labour?

Surely you can criticise one philosophy without naturally being an uncritical supporter of its polar opposite?

WSS - if I was being really critcal I could say that that kind of binary thinking was typical of the Thatcher era and has only got worse, but I don't really blame her for it entirely - we caught it from her friends the septics.

[darmstadt]

I left the UK at the height of her power as there were no contracts and no permie jobs in IT available at that time yet there were abroad so I presume that was her influence.

[DimPrawn]

I'm certainly no leftie, but I found her modus operandi very cold. She wanted to replace heavy industry with high tech industry and the City. She wanted to remove the curse of the Unions. She wanted to get rid of social housing and sell off the utilities to private companies.

But how she went about achieving these aims was ruthless and unremitting.

I won't shed a tear at her funeral.

PS.

We rid ourselves of the self-serving, meddling, myopic, unelected dictatorship of the Unions only for the Tories to embrace the EU!

[pjclarke]

Politically I was diametrically opposed to her, but she got one thing right :

Engineering and scientific advance have given us transport by land and air, the capacity and need to exploit fossil fuels which had lain unused for millions of years. One result is a vast increase in carbon dioxide. And this has happened just when great tracts of forests which help to absorb it have been cut down.

For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s ...

Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the Royal Society 1988.

Speech to the Royal Society | Margaret Thatcher Foundation