Baroness Margaret Thatcher Has Died

[prism10]

 

However those who support the freemarket seem happy that it is paid to the nationalised railways and much of it falls into the shareholders pockets.

Those who support the free market were happy for the banks to be nationalised.

[Chinahand]

let me take you back to the night of 9/11 when you saw the people celebrating in the West Bank. The footage rightly made people sick. However someone realised the timings did not make sense and found out the 'celebrations' were filmed several weeks earlier at a wedding. I still feel the news editors who showed such deliberate false distortion should be thrown in jail.

It is more complicated than that - there were celebrations on the West Bank (and elsewhere) after 911, these were witnessed by reputable, verifiable journalists, but they were not cameramen or women and so there was no footage of the celebrations. The news editors in compiling these true and accurate accounts spliced in archive footage of earlier celebrations which were totally disconnected from 911 and the accounts the journalists were giving. I agree this is a terrible abuse of journalistic ethics, but the lie of the footage, does not make the journalists' reports a lie. Large numbers of people did celebrate 911 openly and publicly - and frankly I'm not particularly surprised by that.

 

Over PK's insistence only those who were of age during her reign can comment on Thatcher - well I think that is a rather jaundiced view. I was in my final years at University when she fell, and her influence overshadows my formative years. I saw my father full of worries working to build up a manufacturing business in troubled times* and my family's discussions of careers included the sad fact of high unemployment.

 

The Island in the early 80s was a sad, declining place struggling to find a sustainable way for its population to make a living. It might not have been a Yorkshire Colliery town, but to claim I cannot give an opinion on Thatcherism because I did not experience that aspect of it first hand is to ignore the fact that I have the capacity to learn from 3rd party experience.

 

We, as people, have opinions on many things, and there is a visceral advantage to be able to say "I was there", but many an insight can be gained from a detached point of view, one that brings other diverse experiences to an affair. White people can comment on racism, men can comment on feminist issues, Chinese on American affairs, and 20 year olds on what they think about Maggie and the 1980s.

 

What is important is to say something relevant. Shouting the "Bitch is Dead" brings very little to argument - and for people who weren't even born when she was in power to think such behaviour is Trendy, while giving an important insight to how divisive a figure Maggie was, mainly tells us how easily these people are influenced by others, and not what they think for themselves.

 

 

 

* - by the way Maggie did not destroy British Manufacturing - it emerged from her, and Major's, tenure considerably stronger than when they started. LINK

 

[Chinahand]

Why should people have to leave their community, family and friends?

Isn't the simple answer because others are no longer willing to be forced to pay to keep them there? The flip side of your demand for welfare is that others are forced to pay it. Isn't that just as liberty destroying, LDV?

 

The miners etc needed ever more subsidy. People had to pay for that - real money taken from real households. That was the essence of Maggie's point about society - you can't just go - "Oh society will pay for this" what that means is "Somebody else will pay for this."

 

The miners were perfectly welcome to carry on doing exactly what they were doing - but they could no longer do it while demanding other people pay a subsidy for them to do it.

 

The problem of "other people's money" is at the heart of socialism - and for all your claims that anarchism can get rid of money you are still left with one lot of people taking up the time and labour of another lot of people with all the tensions that produces if it is not felt to be a fair exchange.

 

Subsidies like that destroy value in multiple ways - it stops a business being efficient, and it forces people to pay these businesses money that these people otherwise would have used as they wished, it forces them to give it to those who use it inefficiently. People simply couldn't afford the taxes to pay to run an economy in such an inefficient way - the electorate knew this, and that is why they elected Maggie and then re-elected her, as all the opposition had to offer as an alternative was the same old, same old of socialism and subsidies.

 

That is the danger Labour are flirting with now, to Blair's annoyance!

[P.K.]

Over PK's insistence only those who were of age during her reign can comment on Thatcher - well I think that is a rather jaundiced view. I was in my final years at University when she fell, and her influence overshadows my formative years. I saw my father full of worries working to build up a manufacturing business in troubled times* and my family's discussions of careers included the sad fact of high unemployment.

 

Oh yes. Giving orders on who can post on here always works. I actually thought it would be interesting to know how those who did not experience the incredible division and turmoil stacked up against those who did experience it hence I merely asked for a D-O-B rather than the claim you are making. It's just that Glenda Jackson was one of the few Labour MP's to go to the recalled parliament and boy despite all the booing did she make a speech. What she said afterwards really stuck in my mind "I had to speak out to stop history being re-written" and you only have to look at all the Thatcher arse-kissing that's been going on to see Jackson's point.

[Matt Bawden]

 

 

I have no opinion of Maggie Thatcher I wasn't old enough to be affected by her policies. However I do find it a little disturbing people having parties now that she has died, we look at people in the middle east who have celebrations when there is a terrorist attack on the West and quite righlty condemn them for celebrating the death of people yet there are people out there who are doing the same thing.

Well we celebrate Guy Fawkes night every year and.......... I am sure none of us knew him

 

As for the celebrations in the Middle East. let me take you back to the night of 9/11 when you saw the people celebrating in the West Bank. The footage rightly made people sick. However someone realised the timings did not make sense and found out the 'celebrations' were filmed several weeks earlier at a wedding. I still feel the news editors who showed such deliberate false distortion should be thrown in jail.

Who's we?

[Lonan3]

 

Over PK's insistence only those who were of age during her reign can comment on Thatcher - well I think that is a rather jaundiced view. I was in my final years at University when she fell, and her influence overshadows my formative years. I saw my father full of worries working to build up a manufacturing business in troubled times* and my family's discussions of careers included the sad fact of high unemployment.

 

Oh yes. Giving orders on who can post on here always works. I actually thought it would be interesting to know how those who did not experience the incredible division and turmoil stacked up against those who did experience it hence I merely asked for a D-O-B rather than the claim you are making. It's just that Glenda Jackson was one of the few Labour MP's to go to the recalled parliament and boy despite all the booing did she make a speech. What she said afterwards really stuck in my mind "I had to speak out to stop history being re-written" and you only have to look at all the Thatcher arse-kissing that's been going on to see Jackson's point.

+1

[prism10]

 

 

 

I have no opinion of Maggie Thatcher I wasn't old enough to be affected by her policies. However I do find it a little disturbing people having parties now that she has died, we look at people in the middle east who have celebrations when there is a terrorist attack on the West and quite righlty condemn them for celebrating the death of people yet there are people out there who are doing the same thing.

Well we celebrate Guy Fawkes night every year and.......... I am sure none of us knew him

 

As for the celebrations in the Middle East. let me take you back to the night of 9/11 when you saw the people celebrating in the West Bank. The footage rightly made people sick. However someone realised the timings did not make sense and found out the 'celebrations' were filmed several weeks earlier at a wedding. I still feel the news editors who showed such deliberate false distortion should be thrown in jail.

Who's we?

Me and my family.

 

As well as some protestants

[La_Dolce_Vita]

 

.

[La_Dolce_Vita]

I have no opinion of Maggie Thatcher I wasn't old enough to be affected by her policies.

That's a stupid thing to say. So you have no opinion on anything before you were old enough to have experienced it first hand?

[mojomonkey]

 

I have no opinion of Maggie Thatcher I wasn't old enough to be affected by her policies.

That's a stupid thing to say. So you have no opinion on anything before you were old enough to have experienced it first hand?

 

Its not stupid, I understand where thommo is coming from with that view.

 

LDV - Do you have an opinion on Alec Douglas-Home?

[La_Dolce_Vita]

Not much of one, but then I don't know much about Alec Douglas-Home. I don't know the history of his time in office. Although I do think his government's views on how to maintain British naval power and influence across the world were over-ambitious - this being the East of Suez policy which called for a rapid naval expansion that couldn't be met due to economic problems. That's an opinion. I don't know how much his government's policy affected me.

 

I have opinions on Churchill, Asquith and Lloyd George. Also a number of US Presidents. Many military men. Many political figures. Even Stalin. All lived before my time. And you DON'T?

[Thomas Jefferson]

 

I have no opinion of Maggie Thatcher I wasn't old enough to be affected by her policies.

That's a stupid thing to say. So you have no opinion on anything before you were old enough to have experienced it first hand?

 

LDV, what you are seeing here is the relativist indoctrination of the education system. No need to know anything about anything outside of your own limited existence if everything is relative and there is no objective truth.

[Jack Meoff]

 

 

I have no opinion of Maggie Thatcher I wasn't old enough to be affected by her policies.

That's a stupid thing to say. So you have no opinion on anything before you were old enough to have experienced it first hand?

 

LDV, what you are seeing here is the relativist indoctrination of the education system. No need to know anything about anything outside of your own limited existence if everything is relative and there is no objective truth.

Where you even born whilst Thatch was in power? lol

[Thomas Jefferson]

Where you even born whilst Thatch was in power? lol

 

Yes. Does being born while Thatcher was in power make an opinion on her policies more valid?

 

I always thought backing up an opinion with facts is what made them more or less valid.

[Lonan3]

 

Where you even born whilst Thatch was in power? lol

 

Yes. Does being born while Thatcher was in power make an opinion on her policies more valid?

 

I always thought backing up an opinion with facts is what made them more or less valid.

Very true, Mr Gradgrind = but even facts can't cancel out the benefits of personal experience.