Sorry another MT thread... Educate me!

[99problems]

MT was Prime Minister before I was born so I'm aware how ignorant I sound. But can someone please explain to me why she is so unpopular? A recent thread about N.Korea was really enlightening, and after doing a google search it's hard to find a well-rounded account of her policies.

Read that she encouraged greed (not sure how?) and staged war against working class (to do with taxes?). And also that the Falklands War led to a rise in her popularity. Can someone please sum up what MT was about?

excuss my iggorance, but MT couldn't have done this all by herself.

my little knowledge of politic is that any new agenda must be be submitted and a vote is then casted in the houses of parliment

I will give you the personal courage thebody

hoarder not all of us are well versed in everything historical and political.

I was a teen in Thatchers time and far too busy thinking of fashion, boys and pop to bother with politics at the time.

i only know bits and pieces of past pms, they dont frequent my mind as other historical things of interest do.

yes its good to know, but now well ALL know due to this. and we live in THESE times and have enough to deal with the current *that are the government.

now ill find out if this gov are a mess because of or despite her.

we learn something new every day.

this is going to be news headlines for prob the next month or so now so well know the full story by then!!

btw-my abiding memory tbh is the Spitting Image puppets! and that impersonator that did her so well. that was MY Mrs T era.

I think part of people's view on MT depends on where they come from. I am from S Wales so can see the effect that the sudden loss of heavy industry had especially as little was put in place to fill the void. I agree with others that heavy industry was already in decline but there were better ways of managing the process.

I don't think she had much choice over the Falklands, she had to order their defence after the Argentinian invasion.

I hated school milk so I will thank her for that one.

I remember the Spitting Image sketches they were fab.

I think in seeking to roll back the scope of the state her ideology created a Britain that was a bit less kind and a bit more selfish. I do think she was fundementally honest politician who believed in what she was doing and wasn't as focussed on courting public opinion as today's politicians of all parties are.

As I understand it the poll tax was council tax but instead of paying it based on the value of your house or the number of bedrooms you paid based on how many people lived in the house.

So rich couple in a mansion pay very little and the family of 8 living in a 2-bed flat pay much much more.

Some of her notable achievements were:

• Deregulating the financial system, with consequences that we are living with today.

• Selling off council housing stock, but refusing to allow councils to use the money to build new homes, so exacerbating the housing problem.

• Abolishing rent controls, with the result that private rents have gone sky-high, which has also massively pushed up the housing benefit bill.

• Removing support for manufacturing, which not only destroyed a number of traditional communities, but led to the UK becoming a service-based economy, which has had a variety of consequences.

• Introducing the national curriculum and also the concept of "parental choice" into the schools admissions process, which may seem like a relatively minor thing, but has in fact been extremely costly to administer, has created huge amounts of stress on parents and children, and encourage schools to resort to dubious methods to attract pupils (e.g. teaching to the test, "helping" children with exam coursework etc)

Of course there are loads more, but those are some of my favourites.

Can I just agree with chaz, I too remember spitting image puppets and would absolutely LOVE to see them back.

They lost the ridiculous 2 David's their credibility ( lib/lab) and made famous people laughing stocks. Bring it back.

As for maggie I just can't think of anyone more divisive, more admired and reviled in equal amounts. What a legacy.

All of the above and the interest rate on your mortgage at its highest was 15.4%.

Repossessions at its worst and no council houses to help as she sold them off.

And the money that she got for the houses that was supposed to build new ones disappeared.

As a student I was liable for Poll Tax even in Uni Halls of Residence. I forget to pay .

The Duke of Westminster paid the Poll Tax for his staff living on his estate because even he couldn't justify paying the same as his gamekeeper.

lordy I swore earlier today I wouldn't join any of these threads but I remember in the mid-80s MT at a Tory Party conference reciting the terrible things that Labour councils were doing and saying: "children in our schools being told they have an inalienable right to be gay!" (cue big roar of outrage from conference)

So - was her point that the right to be gay is alienable? Vile
Or: given her support of [can't remember name was a shirt mfr businessman and Tory MP and all gay and that and had a terrible time in the 80s] was she lying because she thought that being anti-gay was good for the core?

left the Tory party horribly anti-gay (when they really weren't or at least didn't need to be) for more than a decade. Michael Howard was terrible, IDS was rubbish. Now - 25 years later than anyone sane - DC is being attacked for being "radical" on this, ffs.

All parties were crap on homosexuality for much much longer than justified. But she was - imo - dishonestly homophobic, so that's why I was not a fan.

However I am not doing the "ho ho ho" thing about a person dying. I would if I was

forgot not forget

Ach, l'esprit de l'escalier: Harvey Proctor.

"There is no such thing as society"

This quotation sums her up for me. She destroyed one nation conservatism, and allowed the market to prevail.

Mrs Thatcher is in no small part to blame for the current economic crisis.

If you've read any Dickens, you'll notice a recurring theme of debt, debtors prisons, problems with banks. His childhood was marred by a Victorian credit crisis, a smaller version of what the world's going through now.

At that time, irresponsible financiers crashed banks, ruining & bankrupting their customers. After the dust had settled a whole raft of legislation was put in to protect ordinary people and their current accounts from irresponsible banking.

Basically there's everyday, low risk banking (or it should be) and then there's investment or merchant banking. The wealthy people who go for high risk investments are attracted by high potential profits, but they can also lose everything. Ordinary people just want to know their money is safe. Sure we get much less interest, but it's secure. It's all about risk: people are entitled (or should be) to know the level of risk their bank is taking with their money.

The Victorians made sure these two areas of banking couldn't overlap. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher's government stripped the layers of law and regulation that had protected the likes of us from bankers gambling with our money. The City boom in the 1980s was caused by the sudden removal of checks and balances. We were promised it would all be fine. The market would decide!

Well, we've seen what happened. That we are in the state we are now is at least partly down to Thatcher, and her fellow travellers round the world. They're the ones who allowed encouraged the free for all that has led to our current misery.

As Roger Person, a BBC reporter said ?It was Margaret Thatcher who in a series of bold reforms from 1979 onwards gave the City the freedom to trade in everything and anything. She removed restrictive practices, she encouraged the free flow of capital to and from anywhere in the world, she created the notion of the City as the Great British Success.?

The Mrs T haters......theres Scameron (big fan, me...not) with his shakespeare speech.

do you think (trying not to go off the original subject) he will/ has inspired the same level of hatered and distrust?

seeker
I am no defender of Thatcher but that quotation is often taken out of context and does change the meaning a bit.

"They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation"

It doesn't suddenly become a warm and cuddly sentiment but neither is it a total rejection of social obligations.

However, you can see the roots of the views on entitlement and making a contribution to society if you want society to support you that are reflected in current policy.

did a poster say elsewhere MT didnt like single mums? Im pretty sure I read somewhere once that she wasnt exactly there and hands -on to her own children? too busy running the country i suppose but that would have virtually have made dennis a single parent-ish? IFSWIM.

Free school milk was first removed by Harold Wilson: Thatcher just took the Labour policy and applied it to more year groups.

If you are under 50, you need to google also about the social and political backdrop of Britain in the 1970s. Unless you understand the 3 day week, the unburied dead, the power cuts, the IMF bail out etc, you cannot begin to understand what a difference was made. And the amount of EU rebate she secured for UK was a largely unsung success.

DCs infant school had free milk. in cartons.

i remember the milk at school too. small glass bottles and 'humphrey' starws. and some of us had a bit of sugar put in if we didnt like it naturally.

that was with Wilson or Heath in power.

She let ten Irish prisoners starve to death on hunger strike (including Bobby Sands, who was an elected MP) because she refused to grant them political prisoner status rather than treating them as common criminals.

"Bodies went unburied" sounds like they were left rotting in the streets. There was a brief strike by 80 gravediggers in Liverpool and Tameside in January 1979 that meant that about 150 funerals were delayed. Hardly evidence that the country was in a state of anarchy.

Of course, she made two major contributions to freedom of speech: banning broadcast interviews with members of Sinn Fein, and, in Section 28, banning local authorities from "promoting" homosexuality.

Quite impressive for someone who proclaimed herself in favour of liberty and against the nanny state.

OP - there's something you need to take into consideration when you read about her and the comments on here etc. Politics from 70s until early-mid 90s was much more 'tribal' - you were one or the other. There wasn't the same fight over the middle ground. Thatcher was up against a Labour party who talked about being socialists, there were people who genuninely thought the Soviet states in East Europe had it right. People would openly call themselves communists. Political parties were much much further apart in what they promised/believed in, and the economic theories they believed in were different.

What i'm saying is the hatrid of her as an individual wasn't all due to who she was or what she did (a lot of which would sound like the sort of thing the Labour party would be happy with now!) but what she represented. For a lot of people it was "us and them" politics, and she was "them".

I'm not sure if we are better now that we have parties who are much closer together, it does feel like there's not much of a genuine choice between them and people are more likely now to vote on personalities of the main leaders, because there's not the same clear, easy to understand difference between what they believe.

Report of street party to celebrate her demise, in Scotland.
Even I think that's in bad taste.