To wonder who is more hated, Blair or Thatcher?

[WetAugust]

Seems that Blair is planning a return to UK politics.

"The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) reacted with surprise to the news of Mr Blair's conversion. 'During his premiership Tony Blair became one of the world's most significant architects of the culture of death, promoting abortion, experimentation on unborn embryos, including cloned embryos, and euthanasia by neglect,'..."

Thatcher. Idislike the woman so much words can't express.

Unions were anti-democratic organisations before Thatcher took them on. They had there anti-democratic closed shop rules which were championed by Labour until they eventually backed down about that after EU pressure. Labour still has it's anti-democratic block voting system and electoral collage system giving a sitting MP more about 600 times the voting power of a Party member.

Blair was a nasty, lying arsehole but she was a nasty, viscious, inconsiderate, ruthless arsehole with not an ounce of compassion or sensitivity in her body.

Mrs Thatcher did more to raise the poor from poverty than Blair ever did.

BLAIR!

You only have to look at his smarmy face to know he's an arse and as for that wife of his, well!

Blair for me. But I suspect there must be a generation divide here ...

Growing up in a mining town during the 80s, got to be Thatcher by a country mile

You have got to be kidding about Thatcher doing more for the poor than Blair

Dreamingofsummer my thoughts exactly !

The Miners thing is always brought up as a point against Thatcher yet it was Scargill who forced the strike and stopped those miners from taking their salary then a redundancy check and moving to a different area for new employment. The result that they used up their last pennies of savings trying to keep loss making mines open leading to their extreme poverty afterwards.

Thatcher inherited 13.5% inflation and more than one million unemployed with a budget deficit that had lead to debt being almost half of the GDP. Income tax rates came down for all. Labour had 85% income tax rate for the wealthy remember. Thatcher increased VAT as this is a fair tax proportional to how individuals spend their money.

By The time she left economic growth as around 4% annually and the Uk was running a budget surplus of around 6billion a year and economic output was greatly increased due to better industrial relations with far fewer days lost to strikers actions.

But wasn't it Thatcher who forced the closing of the mines for no real reason? When there was loads of coal left in them?

Would power prices be so high if we were still extracting coal?

have you read upthread? having coal in it doesn't mean it is profitable to extract that coal....

so much uk coal is deep, narrow, cracked seams - often with the added problem of working around ancient unmapped other mines. mines were in closure from the end of WW2...in fact the prev labour govt saw more mine closures...

aside from which you don't need to be a genius of economics to know that any town that relies on a single industry is vulnerable to unemployment.

Thatcher - without a shadow of a doubt, I grew up in the industrial north.
Novack - she reduced the defict by selling off everything, and giving tax cuts to the rich.
I am not denying that the selling was wrong, but the money should have been used to invest in the schools, NHS, and the transport system. Instead they were neglected to the point of no return.

Well my dh is an ex electrician who used to work in the mines. That isn't his version.........

I dare say we wouldn't be paying so much for gas and electric if they were still owned by us.
Novak, Thatcher did what all Tory governments have always done, made the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer.
She messed up the NHS in an effort to economise, which ended up costing more, and the mines that were profitable were closed in an attempt to stop the unions.

My uncle was a legal exec for the coal board at the time, there were many, many mines making plenty of money, she didn't want to know, she just wanted to crush the unions.

Yes Dawndonna that is more like my take, and my Dh's take on it...and he was at The Battle of Orgreave too.....as was my teaching colleague (and there is a whole other story)

He used his redundancy money to do a degree in maths. He often says that the miners strike was the best thing to happen to him....................but still hates Thatch

Dawndonna

^I dare say we wouldn't be paying so much for gas and electric if they were still owned by us.
Novak, Thatcher did what all Tory governments have always done, made the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer.^

That's the tired old refrain, but it isn't true. The poor aren't poorer than they were, they're richer. They just haven't got rich as fast as the rich have.

Novack - yeah, she made a great deal of 1m unemployed. And then stuck it up to 3m, IIRC.

That's a funny definition of rich. We have people in the UK, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, who are homeless and relying on food banks because they can't afford enough food. 'Rich' is a bizarre way to describe that.

Alun Budd Thatcher's chief economic advisor admitted that the 80's policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and the public sector were a cover for attacking the unions and workers. They actively sought a confrontation so they could devalue labour through higher levels of unemployment. This was because businesses were achieving lower levels of profit. She wanted to create an industrial reserve army to increase private profits and make the case for cuts to public spending. This lead to 30 years of stagnating wages and high levels of unemployment.

Any one see any parallels there with what Scameron is up to now?

If Thatcher hadn't torpedoed the Belgrano she's have been out on her arse afer 5 years. Although I doubt it was her own idea.

Labour weren't winning in 1983, not with Michael Foot in charge.

I think they are both a reflection of the sort of policies favoured by the moneyed elite since at least WW2. Labour or Conservative - it makes no difference really. The real interests that they both serve are the same. Of course reform was needed in the labour markets but it didn't really make England as a nation more competitive - all it did was enable the shifting of nearly all manufacturing production to East Asia. Breaking the unions did not create a more pliable working class - it made them or their children essentially give up (re demographic problems across the Western world). They can't field adequate armies beyond the officer classes (who are drawn from their own ranks) because the majority of their own population is deeply bitter and suspicious of them because of these past and current policies. They know, with good reason, that they are likely to come back to nothing and what they are fighting for are all lies.