Baroness Margaret Thatcher Has Died

[P.K.]

He also didn't resign his service after the Falkland's War - he stayed on this 1986, four years later! Link

 

I realize this will be all very inconvenient to your reputation as MF's military historian, and I wonder what evidence you have to refute General Thompson's own words?!

 

Hardly "inconvenient" at all Mr C. I simply tell it like I remember it. Even after 25+ years!

 

I read a fair bit on it after the conflict but not much about the nitty-gritty if you like was available. Until a monster documentary was made, about three hours of it I think there was, including interviews with the Argy combatants so the generals must have been long gone. Some extremely interesting and hitherto unknown things came to light. Well, unknown to the public at large that is. Including how Colonel Jones actually "won" his VC.

 

The battle for Goose Green should have been over in darkness but once the first shot is fired all the planning goes out the window. So at dawn one of the Coys was stuck below a crest held by the Argies so Jones went down there to get them moving. Jones decided that they would advance in extended line uphill with no cover against a heavily defended enemy which was one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. However in the British Army you obey orders so up they got and forward they went into heavy fire. Several men were immediately hit and the rest went down. The Coy commander said in an interview that "It was obvious that this was no place to be at all".

 

Jones then ran down the back of the line, presumably to try and outflank the Argy position. The Coy Commander was aghast. As he said "We hadn't discussed it and I had no idea what he was doing". Jones then turned against the enemy but he hadn't outflanked them and had exposed himself to a position on his right. They opened fire and he was shot in the back.

 

The Argy who may have killed him, a Corporal Rios iirc, said in an interview that his action was "loco" - crazy. I suspect, because we will never know, that once several of his men had been killed obeying a totally stupid order Jones just lost it. Personally had I been in charge I would have relieved him of his command for stupid tactics and putting ALL of his men at risk. Like one of his guys said "We all wondered what he was doing there" because he should have been commanding the battle, not taking part in it. And when you hear your commander has been killed you start to think you're losing.

 

For this action Jones was awarded the VC. I often wonder why. I suspect someone wanted a hero - a "political" VC perhaps? Make your own mind up.

 

The same documentary also interviewed Julian Thompson. It was then he admitted that after one particularly acrimonious exchange with Whitehall he told his Command Group that he would win the islands back and then he would leave. That was the first I had heard of it and I've tried to find a clip of it but no dice. I thought he had left immediately but clearly I was wrong. In the interview Thompson was also put under a lot of pressure to admit GG was a waste of lives and resources. All he would admit was that "Some good things came out of it" for which he earned my sympathy. The last thing people want to hear is the lives of their loved ones were wasted and I'm sure Thompson was thinking of that. However he certainly didn't say it was worth doing!

 

They also interviewed the Argentine Commander at Goose Green - Piaggio??? He had no idea why they attacked his position at all, it had no military value, so he decided to surrender because he knew it was a complete waste of life on both sides. He actually said he did not want to sacrifice his men for a military nothing - unlike the British High Command...

 

Now that is how I remember it some 25 years later.

 

Incidentally Mr C how old were you during the Thatcher years?

[Chinahand]

This is one of the few times I've felt Ed Milliband has got things pretty much right:

 

BBC Link

[ballaughbiker]

Cross Ross said: Thatcher's regime relied upon LIES and kiddie fiddlers

Nurse, Nurse! (s)he's out of bed again....

[prism10]

She did what had to be done. During the 1970s, uk was producing shite cars at premium prices, subsidised by the tax payer. They were spending twice as much mining coal as the stuff was worth, subsidised by the tax payer. On top of this, the people producing this shite wanted massive wage increases for doing it. It had to stop.

Of course these days there is no British car industry!

 

As for Miners. Given the large scale compensation paid out to them by Labour for the various long term personal injuries suffered by miners over the years. The industry itself with its inherent dangers was on its last legs on just health and safety grounds.

[GD4ELI]

 

She did what had to be done. During the 1970s, uk was producing shite cars at premium prices, subsidised by the tax payer. They were spending twice as much mining coal as the stuff was worth, subsidised by the tax payer. On top of this, the people producing this shite wanted massive wage increases for doing it. It had to stop.

Of course these days there is no British car industry!

New Mini, Nissan, Aston, Jaguar, Vauxhall (will build new GM Astra), Bently, Honda, Land Rover, Lotus, McLaren, Morgan, Rolls-Royce, Toyota.

 

Britain now producing MORE cars than Germany: How the UK has become the car production capital of Europe

 

[CrossRoss]

just saying it took a year or so for the creepy stuff about Jimmy Savile to be publicly accepted after he died.

 

What do you think they did together for all those Christmasses?

 

Anyway I am done for now, TTFN

[ballaughbiker]

I for one wouldn't begrudge compensation for anyone seriously injured down the pit. It was, as you point out, a very dangerous place to work and some of the injuries were terrible. It's not somewhere I'd have ever wanted to work but there were much worse jobs with considerably poorer pay.

 

 

What do you think they did together for all those Christmasses?

Oh don't go, enlighten us. Was it just those in the nasty party ?

[asitis]

This is one of the few times I've felt Ed Milliband has got things pretty much right:

 

BBC Link

Agreed, for once he had dignity and gravitas at the despatch box everyone won !

[Lost Login]

This is one of the few times I've felt Ed Milliband has got things pretty much right:

 

BBC Link

 

I much prefer Glenda Jackson's contribution. From the Guardian:

 

Here are the key quotes.

When I made my maiden speech a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place but Thatcherism was still wreaking, as it had wreaked for the previous decade, the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents.

 

Our local hospitals were running on empty. Patients were staying on trolleys and in corridors. I tremble to think what the death rate for pensioners would have been this winter if that version of Thatcherism had been fully up and running this year.

 

Our schools, parents, teachers, governors, even pupils, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising in order to be able to provide basic materials, such as paper and pencils. The plaster on our classroom walls was kept in place by pupils artwork and miles and miles of sellotape. Our school libraries were dominated by empty shelves, very few books, and those books that were there were being held together by ubiquitious sellotape and offcuts from teachers' wallpaper used to bind those volumes so that they could at least hang together.

 

But by far the most dramatic and heinous demonstration of Thatcherism was certainly not only in London, but across the whole country in metropolitan areas, where every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless. They grew in their thousands. And many of those homeless people had been thrown out onto the streets from the closure of the long-term mental hospitals. We were told it was going to be called Care in the Community. What in effect it was was no care at all in the community.

 

I was interested to hear about Baroness Thatcher's willingness to invite those who have nowhere to go for Christmas. It's a pity she did not start building more and more social houses after she entered into the right to buy, so perhaps there would have been fewer homeless people than there were. As a friend of mine said, during her era London became a city Hogarth would have recognise. And indeed he would.

 

But the basis to Thatcherism - and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperate, desperately wrong track that Thatcherism took this country into - was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward ...

 

What concerns me is that I'm beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis of the spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side. That is not happening now. And if we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from.

 

It reminded me how things really were under Thatcher and for all Blair's faults it was only when he was elected that education and the health service started to get the increase in funding they required

[Thomas Jefferson]

A good extract about Margaret Thatcher's fiscal policy, from a talk by Noam Chomsky:

 

 

State expenditure relative to GNP was the same at the end of her time in office as when she first took office; expenditure did not decrease, it merely shifted from welfare and public services to subsidisation of private enterprise. And poverty increased to Dickensian levels.

[Matt Bawden]

A good extract about Margaret Thatcher's fiscal policy, from a talk by Noam Chomsky:

 

 

 

State expenditure relative to GNP was the same at the end of her time in office as when she first took office; expenditure did not decrease, it merely shifted from welfare and public services to subsidisation of private enterprise. And poverty increased to Dickensian levels.

See, there you go again....in earlier posts you praise Thatcher for doing what was necessary and then in this one you post your hero (Chomsky) and then state she was wrong by putting the UK back to Victorian times.

[La_Dolce_Vita]

She did what had to be done. During the 1970s, uk was producing shite cars at premium prices, subsidised by the tax payer. They were spending twice as much mining coal as the stuff was worth, subsidised by the tax payer. On top of this, the people producing this shite wanted massive wage increases for doing it. It had to stop.

 

I remember miners being offered work at different mines 20 miles away from home, but they would not do it because it meant travelling or moving. That did not stop them travelling to be flying pickets though. I found this quite unbelievable. I moved four times in just over a year in order to keep working, I even changed countries. 3M unemployed? Hmm. I have my doubts. If you were willing to travel, there was plenty of work. That I know. The real problem was similar to the problem these days in uk. Apathy. These days immigrants are blamed. Truth is these days they are doing the jobs benefits scroungers refuse to.

What an irritating post. "They should have just moved home". No they shouldn't. Why should people have to leave their community, family and friends?

[ballaughbiker]

back to Victorian times

You weren't paying proper attention. Our very plausible intellectual said it was a Dickensian picture...... It doesn't really matter if it's 101% bullshit, as long as you say it with enough gravitas and appropriate gesticulations, someone like TJ will believe it. I'll wager Chomsky's never even been to South Yorkshire let alone during the unfortunate Thatcher reign.

[Matt Bawden]

 

 

She did what had to be done. During the 1970s, uk was producing shite cars at premium prices, subsidised by the tax payer. They were spending twice as much mining coal as the stuff was worth, subsidised by the tax payer. On top of this, the people producing this shite wanted massive wage increases for doing it. It had to stop.

 

I remember miners being offered work at different mines 20 miles away from home, but they would not do it because it meant travelling or moving. That did not stop them travelling to be flying pickets though. I found this quite unbelievable. I moved four times in just over a year in order to keep working, I even changed countries. 3M unemployed? Hmm. I have my doubts. If you were willing to travel, there was plenty of work. That I know. The real problem was similar to the problem these days in uk. Apathy. These days immigrants are blamed. Truth is these days they are doing the jobs benefits scroungers refuse to.

What an irritating post. "They should have just moved home". No they shouldn't. Why should people have to leave their community, family and friends?

Leaving Thatcher aside for a minute, er because sometimes people have to. You are mistaken in thinking that everybody has rights, nobody really has any rights, you're born, you live and then you die what occurs in between is down to a lot of things and rights as you put it aren't there.

 

For some unknown reason you actually seem to think you live in Nirvana, well you don't, you have no rights, you live and give it your best shot or in your case sit on your ass and expect everything to come to you.

[Thomas Jefferson]

See, there you go again....in earlier posts you praise Thatcher for doing what was necessary and then in this one you post your hero (Chomsky) and then state she was wrong by putting the UK back to Victorian times.

I think she did what had to be done in relation to the unions, but she was very wrong when it came to financial deregulation, the shift in state expenditure from public services to state subsidisation of private business, and the immoral Ayn Rand type of individualism she espoused. I'm all for individual liberty, but we are also a community and we have a responsibility for each other.