Maggie is Dead.

[Talkinpeace]

at last.

'Strong leaders are not necessarily good for countries.'

It depends what state the country is in. In wartime we needed a strong leader, Churchill, but he was voted out in peace time.

After teh Labour disatste in the 70s where we needed to be bailed out by the IMF and where strikes were frequent and where Britain was declining economically and was known as the "sick man of Europe", we needed a strong leader and that was Thatcher, while the Labour ninnies were suggesting we unilaterally disarm.

Well I think there will always be massive and irreconcilable polarisation of opinion over her. Suffice to say, those who hail her as being "just what the country needed at the time" are very very seldom from areas she ruined.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with difference of views and people disagreeing with everything that she did.

But what is objectionable is people who demonstrate such hatred that they talk of celebrating her death. That shows what these people are really like, and it isn't "progressive".

Re: megalomaniacs....
The problem is, this is supposed to be a democracy. And we are supposed to be able to influence the way the country runs by selecting our constituency MP who represents us at Westminster.

But the UK constitution - or lack thereof - gives a huge amount of essentially unchecked power to the PM. MT took massive advantage of that, so did TB. He made quite a few changes to cut down his democratic accountability. I knew what they were at the time, and was pissed off, but i forget now. Tempus fugit and all.

So the PM, elected by maybe 20,000 voters in their own constituency, gets to completely ignore the MP you voted for, be they the same party or different, and plough on with what the jolly robins in their head are telling them to do.

This is not a good system. Thank god Cameron has the Lib Dems weighing him down like a ball and chain, or who knows where we'd be.

Anyhoo... on a lighter note, a few weeks ago in the course of a random conversation with my niece (14) I said " Magaret Thatcher stole my milk at school"
Niece (with sad face) "Aww, was she bigger than you?" .

Say what you like about Mrs T but she put her all into the job and was never in it to milk the system for her own gain like the bunch of schemers we've got now (on both sides). Can you imagine her fiddling her expenses or using taxpayers money to buy herself a second home? She didn't tell lies and 'spin' either which is something I detest about modern politicians. Even the people who didn't agree with her policies knew exactly what those policies were. Nowadays we don't know what any of them really think, they seem to change their 'policies' to whatever seems most likely to keep them in the money power for a bit longer.

I adored her.

pixel
Maggie had a multimillionaire husband : her nest was well feathered the day she married him.

But, yes, much as I fundamentally disagree with much of what she did, I do believe she had integrity

and breaking the unions (possibly not as completely as she did) has saved the UK from the 45% youth unemployment that is crippling Southern Europe.

Will lose no sleep over it!

I agree pixel. I always thought she knew how much a loaf of bread cost, I don't feel that about anyone sitting on the gov or opposition benches now could tell you.

I'm not sure her start in life was so humble, was it?

Small town girl for sure, but her father a local businessman, Alderman & Mayor, wasn't he?

Thatcher wasn't born in poverty, but she was like many of us - middle class. One of teh people, not one of teh elites.

She wasn't like Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman, Tony Benn or Anthony Lynton Charles Blair. She wasn't a privileged Guardianista. She was one of us, one of the people and she was looked down on by both the privileged Tory elite and the privileged progressive elite. But unlike them, she understood the people and that is why she was the longest serving peacetime Prime Minister of the 20th Century, never kicked out by the people, but removed by the Tory grandees and the Tory elite against the wishes of the people who knew that she was just like us.

"Indeed, more than any of her grouse-moor Tory predecessors, let alone her privileged modern-day successors, she was determined to smash the obstacles that held people back. As one of her Shadow Cabinet reports put it in the late 1970s, her party?s aim was to ?jump the class barrier?.

To the patrician, public-school Tory Wets, this was anathema. There was no love lost between the grocer?s daughter and the privileged men who once dominated the party. ?I felt no sympathy for them,? Mrs Thatcher said later of her well-heeled opponents. ?They had fought me unscrupulously all the way.?

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2306560/Margaret-Thatcher-did-workers-Leftie-critics-did.html

No one ever did their argument any favours by linking to that rag.

And I don't say that because I'm an evil leftie.

If Thatcher was so "one of us" why did she work so hard to erase traces of her accent?

'If Thatcher was so "one of us" why did she work so hard to erase traces of her accent?'

Because Thatcher was one of us born in 1925 and at Oxford in the 1940s. Times were different then. Just listen to newsreels and listen to received pronounciation on BBC newsreels. Many BBC presenters and actrors and actresses all had to have elocution lessons in those days in order ot get ahead because the elite did not want to hear the accents of the people on their airwaves.

In those days, people like us, the working and middle classes were considered oiks by the great and the good, but everything has changed since those days and now Anthony Lynton Charles Blair, the former Fettes public school boy, has to affect a mockney accent, and Thatcher was a major caused of that change as she broke the glass ceiling that held working people back from earning money like the elites.

As Alan Sugar said, in teh 1980s any cheeky chappy and clever young man or young woman from Essex could earn lots of money in the City and as he so rightly said those jobs were no longer reserved for the "elite".

But the battle for our rights is still not fully won. The elites still sneer at the papers that we read and call them "rags", they still think our views are less valid than theirs. But Thatcher taught them a lesson, and new Thatchers will arise from among the people and our voice will be heard.

The Daily Mail IS a rag. I am not one of the elite and yet I realise this. It is homophobic, misogynist, and tells outright lies. It focuses on people's insecurities and exploits them for thinly veiled political gain. Moreover it is badly written and often not even proof read. That's my definition of a RAG. I'd prefer the papers I buy to be written by people who have done some research and can write in decent English.

However, that's by the by.

'I'd prefer the papers I buy to be written by people who have done some research and can write in decent English.'

Then why on earth do you buy the Guardian?

Of course you are not the elite. You are not Harriet Harman and Tony Benn and Anthony Lynton Charles Blair, but it sounds like you have been taken in by their type of thinking and by those who view the people's paper as a "rag".

Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens and Richard Littlejohn can all write in decent English. They may not have gone to the schools that Anthony Lynton Charles Balir attended, but they make a lot more sense than his mockney mutterings.

Where on earth have I said I buy the bloody Guardian??????????

Talk about assumption! The world isn't neatly divided into Guardian and Mail readers! Good grief......

I not been taken in my anyone. I concluded the Mail is shit all on my own!

'I concluded the Mail is shit all on my own!'

Then please reevaluate your decision. Close your ears to the siren voices of the aristocratic progressive elite. Read the paper that is read by the people and by those who make it the world's leading online newspaper.

Ask yourself if those millions are wrong.

As the New Labour elite showed us, you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool Daily Mail readers all of the time.

Cast off your chains, set yourself free; Littlejohn, Phillips and Hitchens, read the wise words of those three.

You are definitely on a wind up. Very funny!

I am not on a wind up, I am not part of New Labour.

The Daily Mail is widely regarded as a well written paper. The Guardian is widely regarded as a badly written paper, hence it's nickname of the Grauniad.

Fargo86, I didn't know that, but I find nothing within it that I can disagree with.

Fargo, I think that comes from its reputation for tyos rather than the quality of the writing. The Guardian always had the reputation of concentrating so much on design that their proofreading wasn't up to much. At least I learned that when I was working on Nottingham University's paper in the 90s. That was the dizzy zenith of my journalistic career.

The Mail's website is certainly highly regarded in terms of layout and ease of use.

However some of their junior reporters are dreadful. Their articles are littered with spelling mistakes and rogue apostrophes and missing captions.

I'm not talking about the "heavyweights" you mention.

And claig, to reiterate, it is very simplistic to divide people into Tory voters (DM readers) and "New Labourites" (Guardian readers). There are a few more grey areas than that :)

Oh the irony. TYPOS not tyos.