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

Totally despise her and all she stood for

@legotruck why do you presume that?

But you are right, I've been fortunate to get to middle age, with a good husband, 2 kids, always had job security & now paid off the mortgage. I count my blessings. We're not rich but ok.
If I'm honest I do think she was a strong leader, stood by what she believed in & had more strength & determination than any of them have had since she was Pm. As a previous poster has said she raised the profile of women in politics.
However, I despise her just as much and despise her policies. She and future governments have contributed to the destruction of whole communities and industries, left very little UK industry & well paid jobs, and a severe housing shortage. There have always been haves & have nots, but as life was starting to improve a lot in the 1960's it is going back again and the gap between rich & poor is getting wider. She had contempt for the "working class" it was plain to see. The miners strike was more than about closing uneconomic pits, it was a personal vendetta for her.
We live in an ex mining area now & the old boys still hate her today as much as they did back then. Cant say I blame them!

And the narrative that Unions are a bad thing

"Part of me thinks she was a complete & utter bitch,"

I can't stand Margeret Thatcher. But why do you have to use such a misogynistic phrase as call her a bitch?

Another way to view the selling of council houses.
If workers striked and couldn't pay the council rent, it was the council that went short, they couldn't evict families.
However once the house was purchased / mortgaged and the worker was considering strike action the mortgage lender wouldn't be a lenient as the councils.

It was actually another way of breaking the control of the unions.

I got chatting to a former shipyard worker, who spoke of the ridiculous reasons why the unions would call strikes, Including guys getting sent packing for coming back to work drunk after lunch so rather than them taking the punishment the union would call a strike.
He firmly believed that the unions was the reason for the demise of shipbuilding on the Clyde.

in order to massage the unemployment figures – pushed many job seekers on to disability benefits.

Yes true, and wrong to do.
Still, better than what the Blair government did. He put people - particularly the sick and disabled - on the road to destitution.

Blair's solution wasn't to help them anymore than Thatcher. No. He just took their money away.

I'm not saying it was a good time but at least people could survive on disability benefits under Thatcher.

@AssassinatedBeauty

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.

Totally agree with this - coming from a mining community I was brought up with nothing but disdain for her, but when I was old enough to learn about her for myself I do have a certain respect for her. I do think that being a woman in a man's position (at the time) she tried to outman the men - I see this with women business leaders nowadays. Taking all the negative stereotypes of men (cold, harsh, getting things done at whatever cost) and applying it to running a country or a business never works out well.

Her policies were awful. The utterly vile Section 28 of the LGA was bad enough but I really believe that British society became much more individualistic under her, an unfortunate trend that has never been reversed.

I met her once - she had the hardest eyes I have ever seen and that's all that went through my mind at the time - like a shock.

@Tealightsandd you might be interested in this!

www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/02/first-new-deep-coalmine-in-uk-for-30-years-gets-green-light

From what I understand Labour closed more mines than Thatcher's government? I also was led to believe we had to close them because it was a requirement by the EU (EC or EEC as it was then)?

True about Labour, but they didn't close so many at once; it was much more gradual. And more generally: Thatcher was ideologically opposed to job security, which she thought discouraged effort and 'entrepreneurship', and her policies led to more unemployment than at any time since the war.

Not true about the EU/EEC. Several EU countries have more mines than the UK does. This sounds like one of the myths created to get northerners to vote for Brexit.

Honestly can hardly bear to think of her
Despite now being very comfortable,own house,holiday home ,investments etc
Will despise her for the rest of my life x

I met her once - she had the hardest eyes I have ever seen and that's all that went through my mind at the time - like a shock.

I’ve never met a politician I’ve actually liked. They’re a strange breed IMO

@AnyName1

If we could get a Welsh person on board we'll have covered all the Celts.

Oh and I'm Welsh 😁

She had blood on her hands. Many people died because of the things she did.

Thatcher was on the whole industrious and competent at doing what she set out to do, until she overreached herself with the poll tax. However, most of what she set out to do was IMO damaging to the country.

@HmmmmmmInteresting

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.

This in spades

@Lockdownbear

Another way to view the selling of council houses. If workers striked and couldn't pay the council rent, it was the council that went short, they couldn't evict families. However once the house was purchased / mortgaged and the worker was considering strike action the mortgage lender wouldn't be a lenient as the councils.

It was actually another way of breaking the control of the unions.

I got chatting to a former shipyard worker, who spoke of the ridiculous reasons why the unions would call strikes, Including guys getting sent packing for coming back to work drunk after lunch so rather than them taking the punishment the union would call a strike.
He firmly believed that the unions was the reason for the demise of shipbuilding on the Clyde.

Having studied the ruin of ship building on the Clyde it was a lot more complex than that

@peanut919

She doesn’t seem to have been a terribly good mother.

I struggle to be a good mother working 9-5, I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for Thatcher trying to raise two kids whilst simultaneously running the county, particularly in that era.

I always wondered why Labour didn't reopen the mines when they took over in 1997.

Presumably it’s because they knew they weren’t sustainable. As a nation we’re phasing out coal as a hangover from the Victorian era that is incredibly bad for the environment.

If Maggie hadn’t closed the mines, do people really think we would be mining anything like the same quantities of coal as we did then today, when we’re trying to move to more eco-friendly methods of producing power, like nuclear and wind farms?

I don’t really see that there was much alternative to closing the mines, I think it would have happened by now anyway. The terrible mistake that governments (Tory and Labour) made was not investing heavily in those mining communities to ensure there were other opportunities for employment. Instead they were just left to rot.

But we still need energy. We (well, the majority) don't want to go back hundreds of years. Lighting, heating, TV, internet. We don't get enough from alternative sources like wind farms, and so we have to import.

Coal was home produced. We didn't have to rely as much on other countries - like China - for our needs. We might not be able to be completely self sufficient, but being as much as possible is good for society, employment opportunities - and national security.

Awful re apartheid in South Africa
Mates with Pinochet
Wasn't just mining ruined many British industries/ dockyards, steelworks
I don't think she would have handled the pandemic well as pp mentioned -I'm sure she would have had a 'survival of the fittest' mentality and been eyeing up private healthcare had the nhs collapsed

I struggle to be a good mother working 9-5, I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for Thatcher trying to raise two kids whilst simultaneously running the county, particularly in that era.

Fair enough; but the biggest problem with Thatcher's parenting was that she very obviously favoured one of her children over the other. And if she had to have a favourite, she chose the wrong one!

I'm from Liverpool and was at still at school during the "managed decline" of my city. I was a young adult when she covered up for the police at Hillsborough (who have recently evaded justice again.) I have Irish heritage and grew up the callous disregard of the civil rights of nationalists.

"I’d like to live long enough to savour/That’s when they finally put you in the ground/I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down." - Elvis Costello

‎"If you say money's all that matters
Then you'll pay a price
Doesn't matter what you do
You'll kill to get a slice
Cos the wicked witch of Westminster
Left an evil curse
Now it's down to Thatcher's children
And it's getting worse" - Pete Wylie

‎

@ddl1

Thatcher was on the whole industrious and competent at doing what she set out to do, until she overreached herself with the poll tax. However, most of what she set out to do was IMO damaging to the country.

The poll tax was fairer than council tax.

Tony Blair did even greater damage to the country.

She was a consummate politician and a strong leader with more gravitas than any of the current lot but she was totally out of touch with much of the UK. Her policies were suited for her type of people and in railroading them into Britain, it has turned the most die hard Labour voters into versions of Tory lite. She did not listen to her advisors, she was stubborn. She dismantled our industrial heart but didn’t replace it with anything. She may be remembered most for the poll tax and ‘milk snatching’ but the ‘right to buy’ was the worst of Tory policies under her leadership and it has created a hellish scenario where there is no decent social housing left coupled with an overinflated housing market where houses are seen as commodities rather than homes.

She was also a hypocrite having vast wealth in tax havens and her diaries were left to the nation in lieu of tax. I tried reading her autobiography but couldn’t stomach it. A loathsome woman.

Awful woman - irreparably damaged the housing situation in the UK with 'right to buy'.

From a selfish POV I was pleased at the time when free school milk was withdrawn because I hated milk (still do - not a childish fad as I'll eat/drink pretty much anything else). As an adult, I see that that drink of milk might have been the most nutritious thing some children got to consume all day, so that too was a dick move in a wider sense.

@Tealightsandd I agree with some of your points, but the fact remains that burning coal is terrible for the environment. Also only 13% of our energy comes from coal nowadays, according to this: nexusenergysolutions.co.uk/where-does-the-uks-energy-come-from/