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Post by mermaidsal on Oct 9, 2009 11:54:58 GMT
As it happens she did but mainly this is a thread designed to let one particular lurker not a million miles from the Lancs coast know that if he wants to re-register he's now very welcome
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 12:00:17 GMT
Thatcher did more damage to this country than Hitler could ever do..!
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Post by redstriper on Oct 9, 2009 12:02:45 GMT
mumf.
if you really believe that you are even more deluded than I previously thought...
RS
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 12:05:36 GMT
P.S...COULD SOMEONE TELL THE SHADOW ARMED FORCES SECRETARY THAT IT IS THE TORIES WHO ARE PLANNING ON SIGNING UP THE EX-LEADER OF THE BRITISH ARMED FORCES AND NOT THE LABOUR PARTY AS HE THOUGHT....THE THICK PILLOCK!!!
He called it a "gimmick by the Labour party"
Roll up ...Roll up... Join 'Square peg' in voting Tory..!
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Post by mermaidsal on Oct 9, 2009 12:06:57 GMT
Maggie did several harsh things somebody was bound to do, and needed to do, regardless of party but she also viciously knocked out areas of the country for a generation and let greedy amoral arseholes shape Britain for a generation. You might enjoy living in Little America but I don't, I want Britain back please.
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 12:07:26 GMT
mumf. if you really believe that you are even more deluded than I previously thought... RS It's a FACT.. SHE CLOSED THE MINES AND SHUT DOWN THE MANUFACTURING HEARTLAND IN THE MIDLANDS.
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Post by Ariel Manto on Oct 9, 2009 12:11:36 GMT
An interesting excerpt taken from a piece by Terry McPartlin 6th May 2009. "Thatcher - decline and fall
Poll Tax
But the first nail in Thatcher’s coffin was driven in by the 16 million people who refused to pay the poll tax. Thatcher saw this as one of the flagships of her 1987 government. Why, she said, should poor little old ladies living in 5 bedroom mansions pay the same rates as a family of 6 living in a three bedroom council house? The rates, a broadly progressive local tax on property values, were always a source of grumbling among the Tory party rank and file, numerous letters were written to the Daily Telegraph and local newspapers by ‘angry rate payer’ and company, mostly bemoaning the council spending money on terrible Bolshevik policies like nurseries or translation services. So in an attempt at populism Thatcher decided the rates had to go.
The poll tax proposed to replace the rates was a flat rate tax on local residents. Why should a duke pay more than a dustman, asked Tory Minister Ridley? The effect was dramatic. The Community Charge, as it was known, meant enormous bills for the poor and overcrowded and big discounts for the rich. At the same time, it also meant that the local authorities could only control directly around 25% of their budgets, whereas previously they had controlled around 50% (including rates on businesses, which were now set by the government).
The effect was immediate and dramatic. Anti poll tax unions sprang up in every town and estate. Millions of people simply couldn’t afford to pay and many more refused to do so. Thousands were dragged to court and many ended up being jailed. It was one of the most obvious pieces of anti-working class legislation in decades. On 31st March 1990 the Tories organised a police assault on what had been an overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration of 250,000 people. Young and old, political and non political the march was gigantic. What’s more it was organised without the support of the leaders of the unions or the Labour Party. The Labour leaders had placed all of their eggs in the basket of fighting for this or that amendment to the legislation, break the law? Heavens no! The march turned into a pitched battle, South Africa house was set alight and the riot vans moved in.
But the poll tax was doomed, Thatcher’s popularity plummeted and Kinnock suddenly found himself in the lead in the polls. The anti poll tax movement spread to every corner of the country. It was compared with the peasants’ revolt of 1381, which had developed in opposition to a medieval version of the poll tax. The fight against the poll tax was the biggest act of civil disobedience in British history. The end was nigh for Thatcherism. No alternative?
Thatcher’s mantra was, ‘there is no alternative’. The fight against the poll tax showed that wasn’t true. If stood up to Thatcherism could be beaten. It was not inevitable, but none of the official leadership had the guts to stand up to her. That’s how she got away with it for so long. We toppled her over the poll tax because it was a unique movement that the official leadership wasn’t in a position to take over and sabotage.
Eventually, the divisions over Europe within the Tory Party resulted in a leadership challenge against Thatcher. After she failed to win outright on the first ballot, she was eventually persuaded to resign. As the car pulled away from Downing Street a tear appeared in the corner of her eye, but it was drowned out by the cheers of millions of working people. She was gone at last.
The New Labour myth machine would have us believe that Thatcherism was necessary, that it was in some way inevitable. It was necessary yes, from a bourgeois perspective to attack the working class to ensure their profits. It was necessary to try and shackle the unions, to try and destroy any points of opposition. Thatcherism and Reaganism in the USA were part of a period of ‘mild reaction’ and a drift towards ‘parliamentary Bonapartism’. They reflected the fact that capitalism had changed, that the post War boom had ended and the relations between the classes had changed. Capitalism could no longer afford reforms. The days of the 1950s and 1960s were long gone; consensus politics, the so called ‘Butskellism’ (the bipartisan policies of the Tory Butler and Labour politician Gaitskell), was a thing of the past.
Thatcher has always been portrayed as a strong leader. She was certainly dogmatic, stubborn and inflexible, but her longevity in power was achieved in part as a result of accident and in large measure as a result of the absolute incapacity of the Labour and trade union leaders to seriously challenge the Tories. Weakness and prevarication invite aggression and the Labour Leaders helped to create the conditions whereby the Tories were able to lay in to the working class for over a decade. Thatcher was no great thinker either. Her social base within the Tory Party was the nouveau riche, the petty bourgeois upstarts and the yuppies, the city slickers and the wide boys, the very same people who brought us the credit crunch. Large parts of the country were decimated, whole industries wiped out of existence. Dogmatic monetarism drove the Tories’ politics and it was the working class that suffered.
Tony Blair admired Thatcher, particularly for her determination and what he as a bourgeois politician considered her achievements. The fact is though that from a working class perspective Thatcherism was an unmitigated disaster. The 11 years that she was in power certainly changed British politics, in fact it underlined Britain’s position as an ex world power, completely in the thrall of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Thatcher created discord where there was harmony and polarised British politics. Her reign represented a desperate attempt by the British ruling class to return to the days of the empire, where their rule was unchallengeable. By the end she was isolated, leading a deeply divided party having been hounded out on the back of the campaign against the poll tax, the biggest movement of working people in Britain since 1926."One interpretation of events.
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Post by hoekofneverland on Oct 9, 2009 12:13:32 GMT
As it happens she did but mainly this is a thread designed to let one particular lurker not a million miles from the Lancs coast know that if he wants to re-register he's now very welcome Was she really that bad? I don't know much about politics but wasn't she a saver and kept us well in the black? and Good old Gordon's almost bankrupted us and put us wayyyyy in the red?
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 12:14:48 GMT
THATCHERISM WAS AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER...and so was the poll tax
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 12:16:02 GMT
As it happens she did but mainly this is a thread designed to let one particular lurker not a million miles from the Lancs coast know that if he wants to re-register he's now very welcome Was she really that bad? I don't know much about politics but wasn't she a saver and kept us well in the black? and Good old Gordon's almost bankrupted us and put us wayyyyy in the red? The World is round....There's a global recession son..! Have you seen how many use Aldi these days ...?
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Post by mermaidsal on Oct 9, 2009 12:18:18 GMT
As it happens she did but mainly this is a thread designed to let one particular lurker not a million miles from the Lancs coast know that if he wants to re-register he's now very welcome Was she really that bad? I don't know much about politics but wasn't she a saver and kept us well in the black? and Good old Gordon's almost bankrupted us? The books were artificially straight because she was an asset stripper. She sold off the commonwealth, from council homes to parks, and attracted revenue by deregulating the City and opened up the country to scammers. Then she got hustled off the stage before that all hit the fan. She also saved by putting 3+ million on the dole on starvation benefits. (I'm not defending poor old tortured Gordon, a moral socialist behaving as an economic Tory and tearing himself and his credibility into pieces in the process)
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 12:19:37 GMT
wELL SAID SAL....YOU CAN USE ME AS AN EXAMPLE OF POVERTY IF YOU WISH..
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Post by hoekofneverland on Oct 9, 2009 12:23:42 GMT
Wasn't she good for anyone who wanted to get off their arses and do something with their lives. It's law of the jungle, natural. Kill or be killed world. It still is now but Labour just disguise it. Anyway, it's good to have different opinions ;D minx
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Post by Ariel Manto on Oct 9, 2009 12:24:15 GMT
There's a bit of a queue, Mumf!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 9, 2009 12:24:42 GMT
'starvation benefits' Jesus wept. Anybody would think people were dying on the streets. Who's this McPartlin guy? 1979 or 1997? 1997 or 2009?
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 12:26:48 GMT
There's a bit of a queue, Mumf! I'm off to have a moan to my mate Derek Twigg....
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Post by Ariel Manto on Oct 9, 2009 12:41:01 GMT
And, for the sake of balance, a more right of centre perspective from a book precis for Claire Berlinski I read some months back. " The critique Thatcher offered was heavily economic, and to this day it warms the heart of free-market economists. But at bottom, as Berlinski demonstrates, Thatcher’s critique was moral. Socialism of the sort that had infected the UK was morally wrong. It wreaked psychological devastation on those unlucky enough to be touched by it. They would absorb the habits of not working, of passivity, of resentment, of dour pessimism, of neediness. It’s one thing to talk about labor market rigidities and declines in productivity, and certainly there were economists around Thatcher who did. But for Thatcher herself, the drama was at the level of social psychology, a morality tale of a people capable of much better, at times of greatness, dragged down by an appalling and self-imposed dependency.
Needless to say, this was a top-down view of society’s ills. The frugal-minded grocer’s daughter who went to Oxford, married well, was a successful commercial chemist, and went on to great political achievement was not much inclined to sympathetic inquiry about daily life in the working class, let alone of those on the dole. She seems to have viewed her own success as proof of the possibility of anyone’s success. From such a perspective, those who do not succeed tend to be victims—to be precise, victims of socialism and its immoral and degenerate proponents. There was no need to walk a mile in people’s shoes before diagnosing their problem and proposing a solution. More than anything, I think, the permanent fury of the British left against Thatcher has its origins here.
Of course the Tory view of the anti-Thatcher rage is very different, a tale of the defense of elite privilege by those who have contrived to make themselves the beneficiaries of a socialist-tilted system: rent-seekers of the world, unite. But in the end, one does not address the charge of indifference by changing the subject. Nor does one adequately address it by spelling out a step-by-step program whereby the poor will be able to improve their condition. Poor Tim, he’s never been the same since he lost his son in the mine. That perspective is very different from: poor Tim, trapped in a dying trade and in need of retraining to join the modern economy. The underlying condescension the left detects here is real.
Thatcher does have market economics on her side, however. She never was able to make good on her promise to wring inflation from the British economy, but the coal industry was indeed dying, with unprofitable mines kept open as a result of union agitation, strikes, and flying pickets. And neither is Thatcher’s moralism without foundation: It is not especially sympathetic or compassionate, but then what kind of society would you have if you abandoned the idea that people can be the agents of their own circumstances? The answer to Thatcherism propounded by Thatcher’s rival, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, in interviews with Berlinski, is that there had to be a way to accomplish the modernization of the British economy without Thatcher’s indifference to the real problems of real people. That almost sounds right, until one asks the obvious follow-on question: had he made it to 10 Downing Street, would Kinnock actually have delivered the economic reform along with his ample and sincere compassion? Had Thatcher’s neoliberal economics not reversed the drift toward socialism in the UK, would the gap between the exaggerated decline of Britain and the actual decline of Britain have closed in favor of the latter?" Extracts taken from Claire Berlinski, “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
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Post by french toast on Oct 9, 2009 12:49:36 GMT
why have we got a jock running england????
fuck labour right off
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Post by Northy on Oct 9, 2009 13:13:27 GMT
mumf. if you really believe that you are even more deluded than I previously thought... RS It's a FACT.. SHE CLOSED THE MINES AND SHUT DOWN THE MANUFACTURING HEARTLAND IN THE MIDLANDS. those pits that were costing us millions a week in taxes and a country run by unions, glad she had the bottle to do it; we'd be even worse off than zimbabwe if the militant unions had kept on going. don't you remeber the 3 day week and nighst without power Mumf FFS
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Post by PotteringThrough on Oct 9, 2009 13:26:33 GMT
Scargills fault in relation to the mines.
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Post by Inverness Stokie on Oct 9, 2009 13:57:49 GMT
why have we got a jock running england???? fuck labour right off 1000 I agree, Scotland run (or try to) their own country, even though it is tied in with England in some parts. Why don't you just sling Brown out and get someone English in, Blair was Scottish aswell wasn't he ?
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Post by scfcrmagic on Oct 9, 2009 14:30:55 GMT
I liked maggie she (tin hat ready)...If you go to the shops to buy goods how would you feel if the price went up or down according to how much you earnt and how much your house was worth??? I'm guessing you would expect to be charged the same as everyone else?? so why then should you pay more for your bin to be emptied and the police, schools etc..just because your house is worth a bit..the price for all these services is the same ..... As for the miners..they used to go on strike every 5 mins ..Maggie squared up to them..now had they had any sense they would have backed down and the pits could have reopened..Nationalised Industry doesn't work...because nobody is accountable and the tax payers money pays for it if it fails...Look at how the politicians waste taxpayers money....buying tv's and wallpaper at £60 per roll...would they waste all this money if it came out of their pocket?? I doubt it...
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Post by Huddysleftfoot on Oct 9, 2009 14:39:32 GMT
I'm still waiting to organise the "Ding dong the witch is dead" party, all welcome bring a bottle.
I hope I dont also get crushed in the rush to dance on her grave.
And yes, I mean it ;D
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Post by mumf14 on Oct 9, 2009 14:41:17 GMT
I'm still waiting to organise the "Ding dong the witch is dead" party, all welcome bring a bottle. I hope I dont also get crushed in the rush to dance on her grave. And yes, I mean it ;D .....and I'll dig the hole...!
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Post by salopstick on Oct 9, 2009 14:41:19 GMT
As it happens she did but mainly this is a thread designed to let one particular lurker not a million miles from the Lancs coast know that if he wants to re-register he's now very welcome certsin voters ruined it more in 1997
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Post by MarkWolstanton on Oct 9, 2009 14:52:22 GMT
It's a FACT.. SHE CLOSED THE MINES AND SHUT DOWN THE MANUFACTURING HEARTLAND IN THE MIDLANDS. those pits that were costing us millions a week in taxes and a country run by unions, glad she had the bottle to do it; we'd be even worse off than zimbabwe if the militant unions had kept on going. don't you remeber the 3 day week and nighst without power Mumf FFS I remember the mortgage rate flying up to fifteen percent, people being chucked out of their homes and jobs right left and center and riots in the streets much more clearly. All done to the tune of a tiny percentage of people getting fat on the back of it all. I also remember the cunt Norman Lamont blaming everyone else for his ineptitude and John Major blaming Norman Lamont for his ineptitude. I recall being thankful I resisted putting a brick through my television every time the witch of Grantham appeared with her fucking Victorian values. Ah memories. More the pity that folk who should know better actually want them back with a one dimensional empty vessel as leader.
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Post by salopstick on Oct 9, 2009 14:59:34 GMT
coming from south wales i know alot about miners but mumf you have to realise that if it is cheaper to import coal than mine it then business says close them down
it did not help with the unions being how they were
i know families suffered because of it, we still have the mines and the coal ready to start agin when need be too
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Post by Deleted on Oct 9, 2009 15:13:44 GMT
I remember the mortgage rate dropping down to half a percent, people being chucked out of their homes and jobs right left and center. All done thanks to the votes of a huge percentage of fat people.
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Post by wizzardofdribble on Oct 9, 2009 16:27:22 GMT
Its cheaper to import most things but we don't because of the social costs...industrys closing...people losing their jobs...spending less money...people losing their jobs etc etc just look at the steel industry...Pottery Industry...Textiles...all 'outsourced' by cheaper labour/raw-material abroad....replaced by fast food outlets and retail-parks and hundreds of thousands of useless College Courses to massage the unemployment figures... What Thatcher did was speed up Britains decline NOT cause it..but unlike now..she had North Sea Oil Revenues to cushion the blow to the tune of 100 Billion pounds a year...mainly going on social security payments as a DIRECT result of her Monetarist Economic Policies...and all the money recieved from Privatisation...which we are now seeing the results of with massive fuel bill price hikes... Next to go up is Water..just check out the huge price hikes early next year...and look at Public Transport...Trains in paricular..most expensive train fares in Europe..thanks to the privatisation and break up of the Rail Network... Then we had Councils forced to sell their Housing Stock but forbidden to build any new housing..Result?...massive lack of social-housing and property prices all over the place..destabilising the financial-markets and pension funds...Social and Economic costs that will be with us for generations... Of course 'New Labour' continued along this path..trying to out-Thatcher Thatcher...but the bubble set-up in the 1980's was bound to burst sooner or later..all the deregulation and removal of necessary constraints on financial-markets could only eventually lead to chaos... And the problem as always is that the people responsible for the mess NEVER have to clean it up....
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Post by leeklad1 on Oct 9, 2009 16:32:25 GMT
just look what she did to the miners
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