Salmond admires Baroness Thatcher

[coppercrutch]

straying back into dodgy ground again I see careful mate! and as to the witch helping us all by encouraging stagging what do you all think has got us into this credit crunch morass in the first place? oh that'll be all the testosterone fuelled city traders playing at betting and getting bonus's the size of small countries thrown there way whether they fail or not and sailing into the sunset leaving joe public to pick up the mess.

On a more personal note went to see Mark Thomas last night (excellent praisworthy person) but shamed myself by accidently spending some money with "beetroot blue" you just can't escape the fat fascists:sad:

 

What is dodgy ?

 

Anyway I do partly agree with what you say about city traders and all the nonsense that has gone on. However that was only started by Thatcher. We 'allegedally' have organisations in place to make sure it is under control.

 

FSA = joke. I could do a better job.

[Guest S.U.S.S.]

God Bless Maggie Thatcher.

[shaun.lawson]

So Churchill not only lived life on the edge, drank too much, boshed the Nazis and abused ugly birds.........He also shot strikers !!

 

Legend.

 

Interesting thread this. Some knowledgeable historians in our midsts. Always good to learn new stuff. I also admire Thatcher, you don't have to agree with all her policies to know she was a great leader.

 

Got me thinking though, you could say the same thing about Hitler. Undoubtedly one of the World's most impressive leaders, shame he was a ****. Same could be said of many other great leaders, Kubla Khan etc...

 

Why are so many great leaders evil gits at heart ? Any thoughts ?

 

It's not that surprising when you think about it. Great leaders tend to be very intelligent - and if you're intelligent, you're probably a bit of a schemer too. Plus, there has to be something slightly wrong with anyone who wants to be that powerful: politics is showbiz for ugly people, and most leading politicians have egos to match. Put together high intelligence and a monumental ego, and the results can be most unedifying.

[shaun.lawson]

God Bless Maggie Thatcher.

 

Hmm, Maggie. First things first: this country was in a quite staggering mess in the late 1970s, and increasingly, seemed literally ungovernable. The Winter of Discontent, the Three Day Week a few years earlier under Ted Heath, rubbish left in the streets, and the unions simply too powerful for their own good. Something had to give - and that something was the Iron Lady.

 

The thing about Margaret Thatcher was actually, she wasn't a conservative at all. She was a radical, and Victorian-style "let 'er rip!" liberal, who thrived on confrontation, and, it must be said, was extremely lucky in her enemies: Michael Foot, Arthur Scargill, Neil Kinnock and General Galtieri. A good number of the changes she made were undoubtedly necessary. But the trouble was the sheer glee she and many of her colleagues seemed to take in the consequences, both in Wales and Scotland; not to mention gross comments such as "on yer bike!" by Norman Tebbit (one of Therapist's political heroes, I'll bet) at a time of 3 million unemployed.

 

Like many leaders in power for too long, she also grew increasingly out of touch and surrounded only by nodding acolytes. Eventually, it became not about her party at all, but about her; and the more unpopular she became, the more she just dug her heels in. As neo-liberal as she supposedly was, there was an awful lot of hypocrisy about her government: while claiming to be "rolling back the frontiers of the state", actually, it was under her watch that local authorities lost any real influence at all, and she embarked on the disgraceful politicisation of the civil service; and while ending her premiership as the Europhobe par excellence, it was actually her who signed the Single European Act in 1985 (which led in turn to the Maastricht Treaty, and where we are today), and her whose government took us into the ERM with the pound disastrously overvalued.

 

To be sure, there's no doubting her legacy. In effect, she shifted the centre significantly rightwards, something accepted by Tony Blair's New Labour. But the sheer nastiness of it, culminating in the disgusting abhorrence to any civilised society that was the poll tax, laid the ground not just for her own fall, but that of her party as well. By moving them so far rightwards, towards dogma and away from pragmatism, she left the Tories floundering around, not knowing any longer what they stood for - and as they lurched towards the extremes, Blair took full advantage: with policies that weren't that dissimilar, but crucially, with a human face. Especially when it came to public services - which, by starving them of funds, the Tories had played an utter cynical game with, effectively blackmailing the public into accepting mass privatisation.

 

You might argue that she oversaw an economic miracle; equally, you could argue that she really just took us from one slump to another. You might argue with some justice of the position she restored Britain to in international affairs: though I'd have to point out her embarrassing refusal to agree to sanctions on apartheid South Africa, and faintly comical fears about the power of a reunified Germany. I'm at a loss to see what her government achieved in Northern Ireland either. But, with all that said, Napoleon's maxim of a good general being a lucky general holds as true here as anywhere else: North Sea oil providing the lubricant with which she could transform the nature of the economy, and much of the country too.

 

It wasn't so much One Nation Toryism as One South-East England Toryism - but the die was cast. While other Prime Ministers are just too weak and cowardly to do much in office, her legacy given we were in peacetime was truly remarkable: and while I'm no fan at all, and did a jig of delight aged only 12 when news came through at school of her resignation, perhaps she was what was needed given the difficulties of the time.

[Geoff Kilpatrick]

Interesting you mention Northern Ireland in the Thatcher legacy Shaun. She actually created Sinn Fein by default by letting the hunger strikers die. Before that, the republicans didn't have a political face at all. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Well, as things transpire now maybe it is a good thing but it was a law of unintended consequence.

 

And then, having let them starve (I have no sympathy incidentally) the NIO then effectively created the conditions for the demands Bobby Sands & co had in the first place, leading to the joke shop that was HMP Maze where there was no such thing as prison rules, it was a holiday camp.

 

The cracker though was the Anglo Irish agreement. It was at that point that Unionist "resistance" was tested to the maximum (I vividly remember the days of action - my Dad took the car around as we tested the various roadblocks just for something to do, especially since Ballylumford walked out and there was no electric!) but it did lead to the Duisburg talks in 1988, which were the forerunner for Hume-Adams, which led to the Downing St declaration etc.

 

So, it can be argued, by unintended consequence, Maggie was the midwife of the return of NI devolution, despite her government failing with the implementation of rolling devolution from 1982 to 1984!

[shaun.lawson]

Interesting you mention Northern Ireland in the Thatcher legacy Shaun. She actually created Sinn Fein by default by letting the hunger strikers die. Before that, the republicans didn't have a political face at all. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Well, as things transpire now maybe it is a good thing but it was a law of unintended consequence.

 

And then, having let them starve (I have no sympathy incidentally) the NIO then effectively created the conditions for the demands Bobby Sands & co had in the first place, leading to the joke shop that was HMP Maze where there was no such thing as prison rules, it was a holiday camp.

 

The cracker though was the Anglo Irish agreement. It was at that point that Unionist "resistance" was tested to the maximum (I vividly remember the days of action - my Dad took the car around as we tested the various roadblocks just for something to do, especially since Ballylumford walked out and there was no electric!) but it did lead to the Duisburg talks in 1988, which were the forerunner for Hume-Adams, which led to the Downing St declaration etc.

 

So, it can be argued, by unintended consequence, Maggie was the midwife of the return of NI devolution, despite her government failing with the implementation of rolling devolution from 1982 to 1984!

 

Events, my dear, events. I actually grew up assuming Gerry Adams had no voice, given the stupid government censoring of anything he had to say! For me though, the bottom line is that, just as the war on drugs never gets us anywhere, and the war on terror will probably never get us anywhere, the (relatively) hard-line stance of the Thatcher government meant there was no possibility of things getting better in Northern Ireland at all - and it was only when people like John Major and David Trimble had the courage to act against the views of much of their core constituency that things finally started moving.

[Geoff Kilpatrick]

Events, my dear, events. I actually grew up assuming Gerry Adams had no voice, given the stupid government censoring of anything he had to say! For me though, the bottom line is that, just as the war on drugs never gets us anywhere, and the war on terror will probably never get us anywhere, the (relatively) hard-line stance of the Thatcher government meant there was no possibility of things getting better in Northern Ireland at all - and it was only when people like John Major and David Trimble had the courage to act against the views of much of their core constituency that things finally started moving.

 

To be fair, it was Peter Brooke at the NIO who was first to respond to the feelers coming out of the nationalist/republican side and, for a perceived English colonial master, he did a great job, till Gay Byrne wrecked his career when he practically forced him to sing on the Late Late Show on RTE on the day of the Teebane massacre. Then Paddy Mayhew, his successor, declared that Britain had "no strategic, selfish or economic interest in Northern Ireland". This all happened to MT resigning in November 1990.

[shaun.lawson]

To be fair, it was Peter Brooke at the NIO who was first to respond to the feelers coming out of the nationalist/republican side and, for a perceived English colonial master, he did a great job, till Gay Byrne wrecked his career when he practically forced him to sing on the Late Late Show on RTE on the day of the Teebane massacre. Then Paddy Mayhew, his successor, declared that Britain had "no strategic, selfish or economic interest in Northern Ireland". This all happened to MT resigning in November 1990.

 

Oh yes, I do remember that now you mention it! Mind you, didn't the fact that figures such as Brooke and Mayhew were sent to the NIO show how seriously the government took any possibility for a solution? Not exactly figures of huge authority, were they?

[Geoff Kilpatrick]

Oh yes, I do remember that now you mention it! Mind you, didn't the fact that figures such as Brooke and Mayhew were sent to the NIO show how seriously the government took any possibility for a solution? Not exactly figures of huge authority, were they?

 

Probably. NI was seen as the 'booby prize' of the Cabinet under the Tories. Having said that, Brooke and Mayhew were probably more effective than some of the Labour luvvies that followed. Mandelson was a disaster, as was John Reid, despite being "big hitters".

[grumpyjambo]

As Frankie Boyle said, when thatcher dies, there'll be 5 million Scots with spades voulenteering to dig her straight to hell

 

I've got a new spade waiting for the day.