'in 1975 my mum left hospital after giving birth to my sister with two full sets of bedding and 24 terry nappies. The midwives almost told her to take it.'
I left hospital in the US with a baby in my arms five times during the 90s, carrying with me sample cans and bottles of three different brands of baby formula 'sponsored' by large multinational corporations who had paid the hospital to plant place their products there for the potential new customers. Bedding and cloth nappies would have been far more useful, not to mention the provision by the hospital of more than one breastfeeding counsellor for a teaching hospital that delivered about 500 babies a week, but apparently neither the hospital nor the companies who make those products saw the potential for profit in items like that, so they didn't bother.
How is it a misspending of money for a health service to provide useful basic necessities for babies?
Cuba, afaik, is the only economy in the Caribbean that is not a disaster area despite the embargo by the US that prevented it from engaging in trade with the world's largest economy. Literacy rates in Cuba are outstanding.
'On the other hand MT realised that you cannot spend your way out of debt.' This is not widely accepted in economist circles, especially right now in the US, which has embarked on a massive spending programme in order to generate a spark in the economy, and where the economy is predicted to grow this year between 3 and 4% if I heard correctly. Take a look at some of the US criticism of the economic bitter pill that Ireland was forced to swallow recently. A lot of very well regarded voices think that a rising tide raises all boats, and that austerity breeds poverty in both the long run and the short run.
Vera Brittain wasn't the only mother who sent her children abroad during WW2 - my mum's cousins from Liverpool spent years living on the farm in Ireland while their father, my grandad's brother, served in the submarine service. They weren't the only British evacuees who were sent 'home' to Ireland by any means, many of them sent in order to avoid being lodged with non-Catholic families in the British countryside. Would you choose solidarity over the safety of your children if you could send them to a place unlikely to be hit by bombs?
Hunger strikes and internment article showing chronology and background. The reinstatement of prisoner of war conditions and political prisoner status was at stake for the prisoners. Since they did not recognise the courts that convicted them of their offences, and fundamentally questioned the legality of the process under which they were arrested, tried and convicted, they believed their convictions were meaningless and that their imprisonment was effectively internment - detention without trial. The first prisoner to participate in the Blanket Protest, the precursor to the Hunger Strikes, in 1976, had been interned up to 1975 and returned to the same prison in 1976.
While Thatcher was indeed not in power during the initial stages of the protest, she presided over the death of the hunger strikers. After it was all over most of the demands of the prisoners were met but without the government publicly admitting the prisoners had achieved political status; violence in the community had escalated astronomically, including the murder of many prison officers. Death and misery and an exponential increase in bitterness, stalemate on the political front and a massive increase in the credibility of the paramilitary forces on both sides were the immediate and lasting legacy of her style and policy in NI.