Maggie Thatcher, the iron lady

[Stressedout65]

Not an aibu know, but just watched Mrs Thatcher v The Miners on C5 from last night. I remember the strike vividly but felt far removed from it as we weren't part of a mining community.
For those who can remember her, good or bad for Britain? Admire her or hate her? I can't decide. Part of me thinks she was a complete & utter bitch, another part of me thinks she had more balls than all the wet blankets currently running the country now or since

Ps.I suppose it depends if you're a have or have not

Well, she knew the price of a pint of milk whereas the current option doesn't know who paid for his £100k curtains. So she wasn't perfect but she's better than what we have now.

She was a competent politician and expert leader. I despised her policies then and still despise what she did now. She wasn't good for the country at all. She was good for a small subset of people who benefited from her policies to the detriment of everyone else.

I don't blame you for asking the question because the current shower are so bad that it's come to the stage that Maggie is looked back at fondly. How far we've fallen.

Okay, almost fondly

She was a conservative. Enough said for me I’m afraid. I disagree with conservative policies, so she could have been amazing for all I care 🤷🏻‍♀️ But her policies, like all conservative policies, are ultimately aimed at serving a small part of the population.

She was a human being with strengths and weaknesses. She was incredibly caring about the people she knew, but had a blind spot on a population basis. She doesn’t seem to have been a terribly good mother. The unions absolutely needed sorting out, but whole communities shouldn’t have paid the price for union intransigence.

Like most people, some good, some bad.

Not a fan, not my type of politics. But she had some back bone and raised the profile of women in politics. Lots of people where l come from loathe and detest her (the north but not the mining part). Mainly for the poll tax and milk thievery

I both respect and despise her.

Most people, most things and most ideas are neither totally good or totally bad. Margaret Thatcher was a human being and as such was flawed. She led a campaign to deindustrialise areas of the country that relied on heavy industry culturally as well as economically. She and her government did not build a replacement local economy to support communities. The effects of that were brutal.
She was a woman leading the conservative party in the 70s, with an enormous strength of character and integrity based on her beliefs. Some of our beliefs are different to hers.

I'd be interested to read a considered and we'll thought out argument on this thread, but I expect there will be lots of "she was the devil incarnate", which I think would be a waste as we could learn a lot politically and personally from her story.

I voted YANBU but only because it is never unreasonable to ask a question.

I was born in the mid-70s and remember 'Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher' from the playground. I come from a city where she is hated and with damn good reason. That venomous hag brought my city to its knees then pissed all over it.

I'm not British and I wasn't around when she was the PM so I could be taking total crap. I disagree with her policies and I'm not a fan of her in general. But I feel like she was who she said she was and had integrity. Believed the things she did and pushed that agenda forward. It wasn't about pleasing whoever to get votes. I would have never voted for her but I can appreciate the straighteness. That being said, I can be talking out of my ass cause my sources are very limited.

I'm a have - if you mean owning a home, employed, doing ok financially etc. I came from a 'have not' background and worked hard to get to the top.
I found Thatcher repugnant. She cared nothing for those struggling. She had no compassion at all. She shed tears and concerns only for her idiotic son and herself when she was thrown out of office.
If she put as much energy into building up industry and creating jobs in struggling areas as she did into breaking strikes and dismantling industry (whether 'old industry' or not) her legacy would be different.
As for testing the Poll Tax in Scotland ..............

I disagree with a lot of things she did, and we're still seeing the effects.

I read somewhere that she was either the only or one of the very few politicians to actually do everything promised in the manifesto, so there's that, I suppose.

I presume you are not paying over the odds to rent an insecure private house to raise your family in?

She was a good politician and an absolutely disgusting human being

@Grapewrath

She was a good politician and an absolutely disgusting human being

Exactly.

She was a bit of a mixed bag tbh. She worked hard, she had more in common with ordinary people than most, first female PM an all that. She made some really stupid policies though and stood her ground at times when she should have, yielded or compromised. That was her Achilles heel, she had to win, her ego wouldn't allow failure or compromise. It caused her to defend her policies at all cost even when it was clear they were incredibly bad ones.

She ushered in (alongside Reagan) an era of neoliberalism that we are still seeing the effects of today, and we probably always will. I was born working class in a highly industrialised area, and she decimated that community to the extent that it has never recovered. As someone above has said, she was great for the people that did well from her policies. Most people, however, did not.

Thatcher....had integrity

She did not.
She lied about the sinking of The Belgrano. She supported her equally vile son in using mercenaries to overthrow a government and greased palms to get his businesses going.

No integrity.

She was marmite at the time.

And still is now.

But many people did very well during her tenure. And in that of her heir Blair (whose main achievenent was turning the Labour Party into a Thatcherite one)

When she came to power, the country was on it's knees.
The government subsidised the coal industry, among others, heavily. She wanted people to stand on their own 2 feet and to take ownership of the mines.
She showed courage in not bowing to the unions and having the foresight to have coal stockpiled and transport arranged for it.
Scargill took the Heath government down in 74 and she was determined it wouldn't happen again, in that she succeeded.
She undermined the unions, which was no bad thing.
She had the courage of her convictions and stuck to them, not a quality that is abundant in today's politicians.

We are still reaping her legacy. I despise her and all she stood for.

www.ibtimes.com/dancing-her-grave-elvis-costello-defends-anti-margaret-thatcher-song-even-after-iron-1344243

@Grapewrath

She was a good politician and an absolutely disgusting human being

I'd go with that. I'm a miner's daughter and was 19 during the strike. I also went to university (first in my family) without having to pay a penny because we had full grants. The whole union/miners thing is a lot more complex than good hardworking blokes and salt of the earth families v the evil woman in the posh suit. Sure, she decided to use the miners to break the unions in general, but the mining industry was, by then, already an anachronistic behemoth. The local miners' leader lived at the bottom of our road and he was a layabout whose organizations orders and policies were as much to blame for what happened as MT was.

I'm a Labour voter, always was, always will be btw.