To spend my morning watching the funeral of Maggie Thatcher (on BBC) ?

[JugglingFromHereToThere]

She was our first woman prime-minister - a significant personal achievement, especially for the daughter of a grocer from Grantham, born in 1925

Also I agree with those that say these ceremonial occasions are something we do really well in Britain.

So AIBU to be watching this morning - in spite of disagreeing with many of her policies ? Will you be watching ?
And what do you make of both her personal achievement and her legacy ?

I can't see Cherie Blair wanting one for Tone.

Cherie Blair might go first of course.

I'm a bit sick of hearing about the "grocer's daughter" bit. From what I gather the family were very comfortably-off and her father was Mayor of Grantham. Not exactly a working class family.

Bit of sick of the whole thing actually. The last week has been just like being back in the 80's. Grim then. Grim recreating it now.

I didn't so much mean a funeral for every PM, what I meant is the one proper 'power' the Queen had left, the say over 'protocol', was lost over Diana.

Last year we had Madness on the roof of the palace and the scene with Bond at the Olympics, when Dave decided we needed cheering up. She's becoming a right old puppet for the government. A tool being used to tweak public morale to suit whoever is in power.

If that is the case we've lost the role she played in the British constitution.

They had enough money to send her to Oxford in the days before free tertiary education (yet another thing she ended, IIRC)...

Clawdy, I don't care for it much either but TBH they lived above their shop and she was a "scholarship girl" to Grammar school and Oxford. Not, I think very comfortably off.

What is extraordinary (in the 1950s) is that she managed to get a parliamentary seat as a Conservative. She was a woman, a mother and lower middle class. I know that Denis facilitated the finances but there were only 26 women MPs, I think, when she entered parliament.

In 1959 she was competing against posh boys who had "had good wars".

I think it's fair enough if you look at how things would have been in the 1920's Clawdy(I was surprised when I started this thread to learn that she was born in 1925)
I'm sure if you were a girl born in Grantham in the mid 1920's you would very much be defined by your father's occupation.
I think becoming PM from this beginning and as a woman is the most interesting aspect of her life.

I thought the funeral was spot on and a suitable send off. The music and choice of readings and hymns was beautiful.

Francis Maude said he will publish the cost of the funeral so it will be interesting to see the cost. Whatever it is and whatver your politics it has to be acknowledged that it was MT who negotiated the annual EU rebate and to date that has been worth £75 billion.

I was a teenager when MT became PM and spent my student days in a mining area. I didn't vote for her and didn't agree with many of her policies and certainly suffered as a result of some. However she deserves respect for the position she held and that came across well today.

I considered nc for this but cba so please don't lynch me.

My Grandfather was on the selection committee that chose her as the candidate for Finchley. He always told us how, when he came back from the meeting, my Grandmother asked how it had gone and he said, Well, there was this woman. She looked aghast and said, You can't have a woman MP! But he said there was something about her that stood her apart from the rest. I don't think they ever worried about her background, in fact my Grandfather had a similar one with his Dad running a shop. Class wasn't really mentioned so it was just the issue of her being a woman - and she seemed to allay any of their fears about that pretty soundly.

grovel I suspect that they were pretty comfortable and certainly the sort who considered themselves a bit 'better'.

Pre the 1944 Education Act those who didn't win a scholarship to a Grammar School could pay to go instead. I don't doubt that if Margaret hadn't won a scholarship then Alderman Roberts would have paid. My father won a scholarship to his grammar school, but substantial numbers were fee payers, (and pretty thick, according to him.)

MsJupiter I remember being in the hairdressers in 75 at the time that she was standing for the leadership of the party. I can remember another customer saying that she didn't think it was right for a woman to stand.

I'm reading the John Campbell biography of her. It seems to be an objective account and not without criticism of her. What does come across is quite how difficult it was to progress in politics as a woman and how single minded she was (clearly to the detriment of her family life).

MsJupiterJones, why would anyone lynch you for reporting a bit of political/social history?

At least two selection committees before your grandfather's rejected her as candidate.

"They had enough money to send her to Oxford in the days before free tertiary education (yet another thing she ended, IIRC)..."

Er, no. Not even close.

Some myths:

• Thatcher closed the mines - no, more were closed under Wilson.
• Thatcher destroyed manufacturing - no, manufacturing output rose during Thatcher's term (shrunk during previous and subsequent Labour terms)
• Thatcher ended free university education - these were in fact introduced in 1998 by the glorious socialist heroes of the shiny new Labour government
• Thatcher scrapped the grant and brought in student loans - student loans were introduced by the Major government but had low take-up. The Blair government were the ones that scrapped the grant and forced everyone onto student loans.
• Thatcher caused house prices to spiral out of control by selling off the council houses - no, in real terms house prices didn't rise under her government, whereas they doubled in real terms under the susbequent Labour government
• Thatcher cost the country billions in ERM - in fact this happened under the Major government, and the cost, around £3 billion, less than the brainfuckingly stupid gold sale by Gordon Brown at the lowest level in recorded history
• Thatcher destroyed pensions - wrong, another Brown calamity, he snatched dividend tax credits a relatively small sum of money (couple of billion annually) in the great sea of public spending, but huge in percentage terms when compounded over the life of a pension.

The 1997-2010 Labour government was in fact far more divisive than Thatcher's.

Her funeral is costing taxpayers, we are told, £10m, although the government hasn't bothered to tell us what the bill actually is.

To be frank, even if it cost 20M it's a small amount, compared with the EU Rebate (because of the CAP). I know that not everythin on Wiki is 100% correct, but if the amount of rebate in one year recently (some of the figures/pie charts are for 7/8 years ago) was 5 BILLION, then over the years the amount returned to the UK (or not paid to the EU, depending on how it is worked out) more than covers the cost of this funeral.

No idea how one would work out the actual cost anyway - while some of the armed forces and police would have been on duty, they would have been doing other things. Even if all of those who were working today especially on the funeral security, etc, plus their transport costs, meals and other expenses, I suppose some of the extra cost would have been security for foreign diplomats etc, and for crowd control measures.

I'm not a massive supporter of Maggie T, and after seeing part of the procession (and not being religious) I watched "Have I Got More News For You" for about 45 minutes, and then saw the last 10 minutes or so when I remembered it was still on BBC 1...

Heard there was some minor protest near Ludgate Hill but think that was at the same time as the Queen was arriving so coverage was not on the procession with the coffin. Seems like whoever planned the protest got the timing/location badly wrong, possibly completely unaware that there would be short gaps when the Thatcher family and Royal party arrived at St Paul's.

Was interesting to hear discussion on Five Live this evening with one protestor complaining about how there were hundreds of people protesting (admittedly at Ludgate Circus) and suggesting the media did a whitewash in not reporting it - he was wrong, of course, as there seems to be plenty of coverage on websites, though the ratio protestors : supporters was very different from 1:1 !!

We don't owe her for doing her job.

The hospices of the UK are currently celebrating a £60 million grant between them. This could make a massive difference to ordinary people (who can't afford the Ritz) in their dying days.

Could have been £70 million.

"They had enough money to send her to Oxford in the days before free tertiary education (yet another thing she ended, IIRC)..."

I am going to stand by my statement that her family could afford to send her to Oxford. My Dad got his higher matric (pre-war equivalent of A levels) at 17. He would dearly have loved to go to University, but his mother was widowed and there was no option of staying in education until he was 20-21. He had to go out to work to bring a wage in. Mrs Thatcher's family evidently didn't need the extra wage. Having a moneyed husband made Thatcher's subsequent career change a whole lot easier. She is on record as saying that she couldn't have done it without Denis's money. No such option for my Dad: he finally got his degree as an external student whilst holding down a full time job and bringing up two children.

House prices had rocketed under Heath. I recollect that the houses members of my family were buying at the time doubled in price between 72-74.

Did not watch!

Yoni, completely wrong about the student loans. I started at uni in 1990 and had a student loan - MT was the PM not Major.

That's a very interesting bit of personal/social history MsJJ, thanks for sharing it with us !

Domestic, sorry it looks like it was 1990 when she was still in power. But nothing like the current scheme.

It was the start of the current scheme. No one could have implemented the whole thing without an outcry. She set a course that is now complete.

The student loan...I went to uni in 1992 and there was a student loan, but if I remember correctly it was in addition to the grant and completely voluntary. I am remembering correctly right?

Er, manufacturing output did go down under Thatcher. It's falled off the cliff since, but it started under her. When she was in power it was 20% of GDP and when she left it was 17%. The average house cost £30,000 more when she left than it had when she arrived. It wasn't just the sale of council houses either; the 88 Housing Act which destroyed tenants' rights was done specifically in order to encourage 'investment' in the housing market. The UK joined the ERM (at the wrong time and also at the wrong rate) under Thatcher, although Major was Chancellor at the time. She definitely introduced student loans, although again Major was Chancellor. Thatchers' pensions legislation led to mis-selling on a gargantuan scale, which cost billions in compensation. Even people opting out of Serps cost more than it would have done to keep them in there.