OT- Margaret Thatcher Dead- RIP

OT arriving Friday night staying Hilton Gateshead,can I can just step outside my door and jump on bus to Angel of the North?

 

I thought thatcher was a legend.

I find it very distasteful celebrating the death of a woman who had the biggest mandate to rule than pretty much any leader prior too or since. She said she'd take on the unions and did so. They country was on its arse we went cup in hand to the IMF in the 70's to bail us out. The government owes no one a living and I fail to see why industries should be shielded from market forces and artificially propped up at tax payers expense. Coal wasnt needed and most of the industry was making a loss. As was the car industry and manufacturing business. She removed red tape and made it easier for companies to trade. It wasnt her fault that certain industries were inefficient and expensive and poor quality. Only the fittest survived. We all moaned when the government propped up a few banks. But they got their money back. That wouldn't have happened with mining. The unions destroyed industry by tgwu going for 35% over inflation wage increases reducing working hours and going for a 3 day working week. It's no wonder our industry failed. When opened up to market forces.

It got what it deserved.

People seem to forget that under the labour government the dead were not being buried. We had power blackouts, pensioners died because of fuel shortages, the army had to collect the bins. So anyone making out she didn't do the impossible is deluded.

As to privatising everything, I had an insightful conversation last night with a bloke who is high up at n power. The electricity network was sold because the infrastructure was falling to bits due to under investment by numerous labour governments. It would have bankrupted the country to repair it. Or taken massive tax increases. Which would have made her popular eh?? We would be in a worse state than Greece is in now. The country had been badly run for decades.

The sooner people realise you're in control of your own life take responsibility for it rather than expect a government to sort it out for you.

She allowed people to buy their own homes cheaply an gave hard working people with aspirations for a better life the chance to achieve it.

I think it's distasteful celebrating the death of an old lady from a stroke who did a lot of good disgusting to be frank.

 

Get the #21 bus.

You need to go along Low Fell and past Allerdene and it's on the right hand side of the road from there. You need to be very careful crossing over the road.

You could have booked into the Angel View Hotel, it's just across the road from The Angel.

 

Ta,will be doing this trip Saturday morning so no drink taking!

 

your not ganna weigh it in are you?(otoon pikey n all that)

 

Like to say thankyou Maggie. It needed someone strong to bring the country back into line after the leftwing and unions tried thier best to destroy the country in the 70s, thankfully she managed to break the backs of the unions after the stranglehold they held under limp wristed leftwing governments. Most people would struggle to name the Prime Minister before and after her, but she will remembered, hated by some, loved by others but respected by all (nearly all anyway)

 

I find your misguided right-wing leanings disguting, foolish and immoral but I won't be saying anything that suggests you stop sharing them as you try to guilt people into doing here.

Thatcher was a 100% grade A ****. She was the Queen, no the King of ****s such was the level of her ****ery.

She destroyed the North of England and Scotland to such a state it may never recover for the working and lower middle classes here. Scotland are lucky they have the chance to opt out thru Independence which gives them the ability to fix what the slag done and watch the Toff **** Cameron and dim witted Gideon have done, and continue to do despite all the evidence they are wrong and failing, for the last 3 years.

My Mum came to tell me the twat was dead yesterday. She knew I would bbe that happy to hear the news that she couldn't help deliver it with a wry smile, despite being a devout Catholic and the type of person who would never normally think ill or speak ill of the dad.

When my Mum told me I thought of all my fellow Scousers, some not with us any longer, whose lives she ruined thru her dogmatic and ideological hatred of our great City (and other great Northern Cities such as Newcastle and Sunderland), the 96 who she betrayed by assisting the police and authorities cover up the fact their hatred of Football fans and scousers (well most "skint Northern monkeys") led to levels of incompetence that caused 96 innocent men, woman, little boys and girls to be killed by those tasked with keeping them safe, and wept with joy.

My only regret is that there were some very special people who didn't get to witness the great day when she died and will miss out on tramping the dirt down and pissing and dancing on her grave.

 

Not one person in the North, Wales, Scotland and Ireland will ever respect her and thats what the Right can't stand and hate the most. If they could, the toffs and bigots would force the people who justifiably hate her guts say they respected her and pay some type of homage.

They can't handle the truth that, just like Ronald Reagan with the right wing Yanks who worship him, the British Right Wing worship a fraud, a woman of mythology who achieved very little of any good or lasting good when its held under the microscope.

I hope it hurt. A lot.

 

I genuinely can't believe you're blaming maggie for hillsborough.. Who next?

My right wing leanings are not that much of a lean. But as a typical leftie you feel the government owes you a living. And should be there to shield you from the nasty world.

There are some aspects of socialism I agree with. But blaming thatcher to me is ill informed and uneducated worthy of knuckle dragging morons. Who incidentally went looting after celebrating her death in street parties. You've done the same as all true socialists and ignored the main part of comment. Then twisted it into something else.

The problem with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other people's money to spend. .

 

Thatcher just didn't dismantle the unions. If she did the I would have supported her every action.

Problem with the mining union? Simple. Close down all the pits so there's no miners left.
Problems with the steelworkers? Simple. Close down most of the steelworks and demolish them so that there's hardly any steelworkers left.
Problems with the car workers? Simple. Close down the car industry. No more problems with the car workers.
Problems with the rail unions. Simple. Announce in the parliament that she was going to close down the railways. Thankfully she got stopped on this one.
Problems with the shipbuilding unions? Simple. Make sure that the yards are closed.
Problems with the printing unions? Ah, a bit of a problem here can't close down the papers but will have do actually do something practical here.

And that was the basic gist of her actions. If anyone was causing her problems then she'd close the whole industry down and throw everyone onto the scrap heap. This meant that anyone in an area of high industry would be living in areas where the secondry and tertiary knock-ons would be horrendous.

But she didn't care. She lived in the South where there was no industry and her actions weren't as noticable. During the miners' strike I was in London for a few months and it was easy to forget what was happening back home. It was only when I saw miners' wives begging for cash in Camden Market (and being ignored) that I saw the only visible sign of the problems back home.

She was fine. Her mates in the City were fine and everyone not in an industrial area was fine.

Yes, she had to sort out the unions. They were holding the country to ransom at best and cancerous at worst. Not that I have anthing wrong with the principles of unions but the way that they handled themselves was out of order and very much out of control.

So, the unions had to go. I will grant you that. But they didn't have to go by closing down the industrires. She could have been stronger and fought the unions and fought to keep the work then she would have been an Iron Lady worthy of the title. But by just closing down the industry and making the UK fit only for stock brokers and call centre employees is nothing to thank her for.

She crippled this country economically and if you step back and look at how we're supposed to support nigh on 60m people with little agriculture and even less industry then you can see that the economical problems we're having is only going to get worse. Germany have said only last year that our problem is that we don't make things. That's Thatcher she has forced the major industries to close and started the general de-skilling of the workforce.

The simple fact is that the more that try to support the 60m people by running call centres and lots of non-productive jobs the worse that UK plc is going to be.

And people want to applaud her? She was the first and perhaps the second-worst of a bad bunch (the one we had two incumbents ago was just as bad).

 

Thatcher taking away the rights of unions led to many, many people having to work up to a 90 hours per week for less than a pound an hour to make ends meet...She was undoubtedly the single most divisive PM in our history, and I for one think it is totally out of order that the tax payer is having to foot the huge bill for her funeral...As an cheaper alternative they could just as easy open up one of the mine shafts and chuck her down the hole..

 

She had spine like no one since Churchill.

She dismantled the unions, which was necessary.

What tips the balance for me as to whether she was simply an OTT super-Tory or something much worse is her championing of Pinochet.

Pinochet was a mass murderer, as was well known. He was arrested at the behest of one democratic country for trial in another, wholly in accordance with proper legal procedure. Thatcher called it being snatched fom his bed of pain by a judicial kidnapping, and did everything she could to attempt to cause him to be exempt from the legal process.

I could potentially regard everything that was done with respect to industry as a misjudged or misguided or cack handed attempt to do what she thought was necessary. Her support for Pinochet makes me thing that at the end of the day she was just a person who glorified the strong and despised the weak (even if she wasn't afraid to take on someone her own size).

 

Coal mining was coming to the end of its life. Most of the mines made a loss. there wasnt demand for it. Car industry was inefficient and poor quality. All the industries were inefficient, all she did was open them up to market forces where they had to adapt or die, unfortunately they crumbled as were too far gone.other countries were able to produce things of better quality and cheaper. That probably down to the unions putting the costs up..

The businesses that survived are now worldwide monsters. though probaly foreign owned but british made. JCB, Land rover, Aston martin.. The ship building stopped as it was done cheaper else where, also we reduced the size of the navy we werent building ships.

We all benefit from globalised consumerism as we want everything cheaply as possible. we are all no doubt using our chinese/ japanese made phones or computers made in the same places, Tv's from the same place, driving german or french or japanese cars because theyre better than what we made.. Its farcical people complain about there being no britsh industry but no one supported an did exactly what the companies did went where its cheaper.

 

The unions destroyed British heavy industry not Thatcher. Why would anyone buy a product that is 4 times the price of something foreign just because its Brirish? I am from Southampton and we used to have a Ford Transit plant that employed thousands, yet they were always on strike for an extra 15 minute break or an extra biccie with thier tea and it was all down to the unions. Needless to say Ford closed the plant and moved it to Europe where it was cheaper to ship the Transits back to the UK. Our country was broken and it needs a firm hand once things are in the ****, I could not imagine any other politician windbag from that era fixing the country as she did. The propsed minutes silance is tacking the piss though.

 

☒ No money for the disabled
☒ No money for the unemployed
☒ No money for the NHS
☑ £8 million for a funeral

It’s called austerity.

 

No. There are far more who can't believe your diatribe of pure ****e.
She sold our right to work by promising our industries to Europe as long as we had the banks. One winter did not mean we had a bad system. It did mean we were being treated like ****e by the industries. We would not need unions if we were treated fairly and with respect. We were paid far less than our European counterparts for more hours. There was no investment in our industries so we could not compete on a level playing field.
And much much more but too busy.

 

If this were true, then how come those very same workers (and many, many are the exact same workers) moved from work down a pit to work in a car plant that became, and still is, the most efficient car plant in the world?? Could it be that the fault didn't lie with these demonised workers whose greed apparently brought down British industry, and that rather it was the fault of the management for not investing to keep the industries up to date?? Many of the pits that closed were still run at a profit. The increased cost to British industry and people of importing expensive coal from abroad is far more than any subsidies that were being paid to the coal industry. She had no mandate to destroy British industry and we should not be paying towards a celebration of her life.

 

Name one heavy industry that the unions issued the winding up order of and the sale of the assets.

The unions may have caused most of the problems but they never actually closed down one single industry. That was, in every case that I can think of, the government of the day.

If Thatcher had a mind, when the unions were beaten she could have gone to the workers and got the industry going again. But, no, she had to stamp on the defeated; why else was Consett closed down? That was an efficient profit making plant but was pulled down with indecent haste to stop the workers, those who dared to oppose her, from working.

And it's no use having foreign owned companies here. Look at the water privatisation fiasco; the money all goes overseas and not here with the sole exception of Dŵr Cymru which is a not for profit organisation, but the rest of the time the money goes overseas.

Gordon Brown got this spectactularly wrong when he had billions injected into the country to kick start industry. Yes, twenty or thirty years ago that would have worked but since all the 'British' companies are owned overseas and using cheap foreign labour this means that unless one holds shares in firms like Costain for the Cross Capital Rail Link then nothing would have dribbled down into the British economy.

At the time we had industry and, yes, it was a mess and needed to be restructured after the unions lost. But selling it or closing it isn't the way forward for future generations.

We've heard talk here of price of goods. Well, I bet that German steel is still dearer than Chinese or American steel. But if I wanted to build something that's going to last I'd get the lads on the Ruhr to get the stuff in. And before Thatcher we would have got the steel in from Consett, Redcar and from a certain city in South Yorkshire.

Just because we're assembling Nissan cars here in Britain doesn't mean that we're manufacturing; that means that we're large scale flat-pack assemblers. Buy a Nissan, Toyota, Honda or even a 'British' car and the money goes overseas. The British car industry is just as British as Nike is Cambodian. When the largest British car manufacturer is Morgan then you have to wonder if her project really worked. I used to work in Stuttgart, at Zuffenhausen, between the Porche factory on one side and a large 'British' car company on the other. That was sobering to say the least, to be having to be hundreds of miles off the Cliffs of Dover to see a 'British' car.

And, yes, the ship building industry may be dying but, guess what, we're still building ships on this planet. But how many here on these islands these days? Not a single one. That is not progress in my book at all.

If a country doesn't own its industry and just rents it out then that country isn't, economically a sound country at all. Thatcher made the great gamble of having London as the world's premium financial centre. Where the Square Mile isn't the top in one thing it may be second in another. That's fine when the amount of second places is suffcicient to knock most of the other financial centres into a cocked hat.

That's great when it lasts; but to finance four countries of 60 million from one square mile in London is madness. It's not hard to spot the weak link here; Bin Laden spotted the same with New York. This is why the UK Government is fighting tooth and nail to make sure that the bankers don't get tempted to go abroad. We're in the sorry state now where we have to support the bankers the insane bonuses that the EU wanted to stop. Because if the financiers in the Square Mile get tempted to go to Bonn, Paris or elsewhere then the lights will go off in this country.

If we still had a manufacturing base of our own then we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in. We've been kept going by wasting the opportunity of North Sea Oil; that has been used up to keep this country going. It's more or less gone now so what's going to pay the rent now?

She has shafted this country good and proper and still people deny the damage that's done and what it's going to come.