I love a good unsubstantiated anecdote.

Who needs proof when you can just type "I know for sure" at the start of your comment.

Why didn't you just type "FACT!" in big letters at the end?

Absolute funking bollarx !

Here's a graph showing unemployment rates during her tenure:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/unemployment-rate

And that took me all of 5 seconds to find.

Next lie....?

That hasn't appeared to have worked correctly.

Apologies, I shall try again:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/unemployment-rate

In case it hasn't worked again, just set the filters to Jan 1979 and Dec 1990.

And then look at the massive hump in the middle.....

So the only people who believe Thatcher did anything good for this country are those who directly gained financially from her premiership?
Well doesn’t that sum up the right perfectly?
Who cares what damage she did to 75% of people in this country as long as you’re one of the 25% who gained?
All the things she did to damage this country and its citizens ignored ‘cause there was a nice pay rise for coppers and plenty of chances to use their shiny new battens against the people paying for that pay rise (and the battens).
Sell off all the social housing but who cares about the people who needed that housing after you if you were one of the ones who benefitted from the selloff. Ditto privatisation. High bills are more than cancelled out if you’re one of the people who bought the shares aren’t they?
Run down the schools to the point where they’re disintegrating? Not a problem if you can afford public school for your kids.
NHS bankrupt? Who cares? If you’ve got BUPA cover and BUPA shares it’s a double celebration.




Try looking beyond your circumstances for once and acknowledge the damage she did to the vast majority of this countries peoples.

aries22, Thatchers legacy is that she split a nation and it will never be forgotten. The woman was pure poison.

if you had been to Consett , County Durham where her policies closed the steel mill there, the main employer for miles around or Chesterley Street, County Durham, where her policies closed the towns coal mine. The only industry around that area, you would have seen the poverty and death of communities that her policies caused but being a Torry, I don't suppose for one moment that would worry you in any way.

You just keep bowing down to your craven idol.

But he wasn't there superwhite so why should he care?
Empathy?
Your typical Tory can’t even spell it.
Aries obviously feels he benefitted from her time in office so he’s happy to ignore the damage she did to people who weren’t him.

tatter, just about sums him up.

....and that sums up where we are now nicely.

"There is no society" she famously said.

Well...there was.

But she destroyed it and replaced it with the self-serving, vacuous, "what's in it for me?" mess that we've got now......

Are people more selfish nowadays than they used to be?

Probably not......it's just socially acceptable not to give a toss about anybody other than yourself now.

Evil cow.

I knew if I added my opinion, it would create a stir, especially my mate tatter.

By the way, Scargill refused to take a vote, as he had lost the 3 previous ones, as to whether or not the miners should strike. So don't blame anyone else but him.

Most mines in the Midlands were against the strike.

Is aries taking a siesta? He seems to have gone underground.

Pity they didn't send him down the pit. He'd probably have made a good pit pony.

Wolfie, didn't Thatcher leave them open after the strike? Well they got their thirty pieces of silver but they were eventually closed.

The strikers were voted on regionally Sunny as required by the precedent set in earlier votes over pay and this decision was upheld by the courts.
Why arrange a national ballot about proposed local closures?

We all know which side of the picket line you were on so remind me how many people died because of police violence during the strikes?
How much compensation was paid out to miners attacked by the police after the battle of Orgreave?

Or do these FACTS escape your memory?

It was quite amazing for me to speak to a Police Officer from the North East, who was coached down to South Yorkshire, along with his colleagues. He openly admitted to me that he and his mates deliberately bated the striking miners into attacking them, Presumably so they could beat the $hit out of them.

That officer is my son in law's father, he said he now feels ashamed of their actions but that is what Thatcher did to our society. You can't blame Scargill for that.

How much compensation do injured police officers get from any violence through strikes and riots, Tatter?

There are always bad apples in every basket, but you seem to place the blame on all of them, instead of the few individuals that get out of control.

So by your rationale, the miners were blameless. Typical from you.

Aries,

Straw man (i.e. you are attacking arguments I have never made).

As it goes, Tony Blair is the one politician I despise more than Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown was an ambitious non-entity promoted way beyond his capabilities.

I have no truck with Martin Mcguiness although I do support Irish Nationalism so long as it achieved by peaceful means. If you care to know why, my ancestors came from Ireland on the back of the potato famine which has led me to read up on the colonial history of the British in Ireland. Just another legacy of the British colonialism, like, for example, the Falkland Islands.

As for Margaret Thatcher being the best prime minister I have seen, this is a matter of opinion. I rate her as the second worst, only above Blair for the the blatant self-seeking lies he told regarding weapons of mass destruction. I distinctly remember him coming on TV and saying 'this is not about regime change, this is about weapons of mass destruction' even though he knew there were none of any consequense. This is playing politics with peoples' live. There is every possibility Thatcher did the same by turning a blind eye to intelligence on a forthcoming Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, in all likelihood so winning the subsequent 'war' (against 16 year-old untrained Argentinian boys - who , believe it or not also have mothers, fathers and sisters just like 'our' sixteen year-old boys) would enable her to win an election she was almost sure to lose. Thatcher divided the country - benefiting a few whilst disadvantaging the many. She made greed and self-interest acceptable - and we continue to see the results of this to this day.

To make things clear, I have no affiliation to any particular party and in my relatively long life have voted for all of them and from time to time abstained, both through apathy and on principle.

I am neither a left-winger or a right-winger and I do not think economics is the most important thing in the world. For this reason, Harold Wilson, even though he didn't have a particularly good record on economics, was a far better PM than Margaret Thatcher simply by reason of creating the idea of the Open University which has had a positive effect on more people's lives than anything Thatcher has ever done - mine included.

Wolfie,

As it happens I have seen Arthur Scargill's house.

It was nowhere near as big as either 10, Downing Street, Chequers or The Ritz - where Mrs. Thatcher lived when she passed away.

Tonight I shall go and have a drink for Margaret Thatcher's death. I shall raise my glass to the night sky, and THANK HER, and celebrate her life. People on thi...s seem to have a very strange view of history. So here are a few little nuggets with how and more specifically WHY a lot of industries were destroyed by her, and what's more, ...destroyed with the MANDATE OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. The seventies were blighted by the trade unions waiting for winter and then coming out on strike at it's heart. Holding the country to ransom for ANNUAL pay rises of up to 36% ABOVE inflation. This was the likes of Scargill and co. And they bled us dry. We were bankrupted by them. And then the Winter of Discontent happened. And they ALL came out. Miners, power workers, transport workers; even funeral directors, everything tied into the TGWU came out. My own grandparents lay on a slab for 2 months waiting to be buried. The entire country was a ruin. Rubbish not collected for months, rats everywhere. And the unions laughed, and brought down Callaghan's Labour Government. And Thatcher stood up at the General Election and made ONE SIMPLE PROMISE. Elect me. And THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. ELECT ME AND I WILL DESTROY THEM. She won a landslide. On that promise.And she became the last elected Prime Minister to actually hold true to her election promise. She did exactly what she said. She utterly destroyed the unions. Obliterated them. The cost was those industries. We knew that would be the price. But we would not allow them to hold us to ransom again. What she did, she did with our BLESSING. The socialists and people who backed those strikes have only themselves to blame for what happened. Baroness Thatcher didn't destroy those industries and communities for fun or as part of a class war. She did it to stop them holding the country to ransom again. And then she held the purse strings tight and re-built the economy and the country and Britain again stood tall and thrived. And we won back the global respect we had lost while the left wing ruled. In the Falklands we were thankful for her being in office. Those of us who went 'south' in '82 did so knowing we had a leader who would not - and did not- interfere. She sent the military and allowed us to do our job. Gave us the money, the equipment and most of all THE FREEDOM to get the job done. Our lands had been invaded. We had a gun up our nose. SHE led us. Frankly Thatcher took a very broken Britain by the hand like a strict old fashioned Matron and LED THE COUNTRY BACK TO WHERE IT HAD ONCE BEEN. We were the worlds 3rd major power in ALL respects. And as for the world, it has NEVER been safer than when Thatcher was in Downing Street, Reagan was in the White House and Gorbachev was in the Kremlin as the three spoke DAILY. They laid the ground for the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Russians were TERRIFIED of her. And the world again feared Britain. And lets not forget that she gave people the full right to buy their own council property. Her vision was that the TENNANT and the tennant alone could buy that property.As soon as her party stabbed her in the back the feeding frenzy began as under her the famous Tory grandee greed was held in check. So they stabbed her, led by the europro traitor ponce Heseltine - who didn't have the guts to face her openly and alone - they arranged her removal. And we have been a broken patsy for europe ever since. So yes, tonight I will celebrate the death of Baroness Thatcher, with thanks, with respect, and with sadness, because she allowed me to know what we could be, what we could achieve, what it meant to be BRITISH

Interesting to read the total rubbish on here about the Coal Industry from people who never worked in it. I worked in it, and was a striking miner in the 84/5 strike. I worked at Bedwas Colliery in South Wales, and we voted by a huge majority by a show of hands NOT to strike, as April was a stupid month to start. The following day, we turned up for our shift, and were met by louts (Not an understatement) from Maerdy Colliery in the Rhondda Valley. They had pick-axe handles and baseball bats, and stood right outside of the pithead baths where we would change for work. We were threatened that if we went down the pit there would not be a car in the car-park with an intact window in it when we came up again. THAT is left-wing democracy!!! That day I went from being a proud Socialist, son of a Labour Councillor, to a card-carrying Tory.

Four months into the strike, and still no ballot, Mick McGachey was asked why there was no ballot, to bring unity. His reply was the most callous statement I remember. By this time families were split, communities destroyed by divisions among those supporting the strike, and those not. Miners were selling everything they had to feed their kids, and Scargill and cronies were staying in hotels, being chauffered around in Union-owned Daimlers. ("Us and them, Lads. Us and them." In my mind "THEM were the ones supposedly in Daimlers.) McGachies reply was, "Why risk it? We have over half the coalfield out with us." RISK WHAT???? Doing what the members wanted rather than their elected "representatives?" Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Our colliery was losing millions of pounds per WEEK. It was merely a hole in the ground, with huge geological faults. Every day was a risk, as we were having falls in the strata day after day after day.

When they closed the pit in 1987 I used my redundancy to go back to college and qualify as an accountant. I could never vote Labour knowing what I know about finance now. I hear calls of "Tax tyhe rich." They might as well be, "They take all of the risk, and earn the money, but we should all have equal share despite some refusing to work." Over-tax the rich, watch them take their earnings overseas to protect them, and watch the country shrivel and die to the whimpers of the lazy saying "They stole my share." (I am not saying that all folks out of work are lazy. There are those that can't work. I mean the ones that WON'T work.

Wolf, we don't need to have been a miner to know what the result of her policies were. I have probably done more real research into the effects of her time in office than you.

You are talking about your personal experience which is fine but what you don't seem to be taking into account is the larger picture. You were able to take your money and study to be an accountant but that in itself does not qualify you to run a countries finances. You are obviously taking your role as an accountant too seriously. Even your chancellor is a complete idiot and is not not for purpose. He hasn't solved anything in three years. Every prediction he makes has to be revised downwards, so god help us if you with your qualifications came to be chancellor. Having said that, I don't see anybody with a jot of common sense making a worse go at it than George.

Anybody for a pasty tax? what an idiot. he got nothing right in that budget and had to back track on several issues.

What really gets me about you Torries is that you can close a good number of Remploy factories, I suppose you know what they are. Well if not they are factories that employ disabled people. The work they did was useful and gave them them a sense of belonging and pride in what they could achieve. Now what have they got to look forward to? Not much as a lot of the centres that used to cater for these people have had to close because of lack of funds. Caused of course by the cutbacks in funds from the government.

The Torries have easy targets when making cutbacks, it's always the weakest in society that suffer with Torry policies but hey never mind, whilst this is happening the richest in society get a five pence in the pound tax cut. Great.

You Torries who support these polices make me sick to the core but then it always been a case with you lot. as long as I'm OK, stuff the weakest they don't deserve a decent life but I do because I'm able to earn a decent living.

As far as the lazy, they shouldn't be given an easy ride but only the the rich can get away with tax avoidance, if your paying PAYE, it's not possible. Being an accountant, I presume you know all about that.

SuperWhiteinExile, Greengrocer.
I am quarter Irish, my father's father and his brothers left the Republic of Ireland at the turn of the 20th century and came to England looking for work. Some went to the shipyards in Newcastle upon Tyne, one, my father's father, went to the coal mines in Ashington and became a miner. My dad became a miner. My mother's father and brother were miners - my mother's brother died in an accident at the coal face. My dad was picked out for being good enough to be sent to Durham University to study engineering, and he won a promotion to the pit at Hamstead in West Bromwich, and later West Cannock 5 in Staffordshire. So that's Irish roots and the pit pony digs dealt with, I hope. I went to West Bromwich Grammar school and university. You want to try any more digs?

Breretonwolf, well said, all of it.

I repeat. Coal mining in this country was becoming uneconomic. I would love to have seen a management buy-out by the NUM to see how long they could keep mining the coal at whatever it cost to get it out of the ground, selling it at market rates, paying the miners the wages they wanted and make a profit for re-investment. And I wonder how long it would have all lasted.

Shipbuilding began to go when iron ore in this country began to run out and became too costly to mine, and we had to import steel. China and Korea have iron ore and cheaper labour than we do and could produce ships more cheaply. Who's going to place shipbuilding contracts with Britain when they can get them cheaper in China and Korea? What would SuperWhiteinExile and Greengrocer do about that?

Ditto with cars in Korea and Japan. I had a Datsun - now called Nissan - with great mechanical reliability and - get this - a radio and cassette player as standard, when even just a radio was an optional extra on a Ford Cortina. Hello? Which car are you going to buy? What would SuperWhiteinExile and Greengrocer buy?

Arthur Scargill was living in a grace-and-favour apartment in Barbican in the City of London, fully paid for by the NUM, until last year, when the NUM called a halt. Scargill appealed and lost, and guess what, he had to go and live back in his other house in Yorkshire.

Under Labour, the highest rate of tax was 98%. Rich people like the Rolling Stones left the country and went to live abroad - they wrote Je suis un pop star.... come and restez la, with me in Vence.... you might know that song.... When the Tories came in, they reduced the top rate of tax to 60% and guess what? The rich exiles came back and the total tax take - the money the Treasury got from taxation - went up. More money to spend on health, education and defence.

You look at the tributes being led for Thatcher this week. Then compare them with the tributes led for Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Jim Callaghan. And watch future tributes for Tony Blair. (Don't bother with Gordon Brown's - nobody will notice his passing.) And then ask yourself: who did the best for Britain? It's ok - you can make your own minds up. I know I will.

Actually, it was Je suis un rock star.

So coppers, squaddies and accountants think she was lovely?

Kind of proves the point of everyone who despised her really when three of the least trust worthy, least respected groups in society big her up.

What next? “My father was a South American dictator and he wouldn’t have a word said against her”?

We all of us are born into this country with fantastic opportunities ahead of us. I have worked with Syrians, Egyptians and white South Africans who would give their eye teeth for the opportunities that we in Britain have.

The die is almost always cast in our early years. With good parenting, and attention to our schoolwork, we can become good people and get a decent education and enter full-time employment and make something of ourselves.

Or, at the other extreme, we can go down the road the Mick Philpotts of the world go down. An ex-squaddie himself, his was a world of violence, crime and living on benefits. No prime minister in the world could have changed that, and Philpott can hold no one responsible except himself. Instead, he will blame 'society'.

Too many people in this country, parents included, fail to take the opportunities presented to themselves and to their children. We can all do something to improve our lot, and it's often hard work. It's hard work just to keep up, but we must do it.

It's the lazy way to blame the government. If you're prepared to work hard to change your life, you can do it. But don't criticise while you're sitting on your árse doing nothing.

Don’t be crazy Aries social mobility in this country has been plummeting for decades.
The rich get richer the poor get poorer and that is a fact that you cannot deny (or at least provide evidence for if you do deny it).
Here’s a bit of data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdGduSWpFX3JZZmwxVTJacnhpNmxJLWc#gid=0

Born poor? Get ready to die poor.

Born poor? Get ready to die poor.

----

Far too simplistic! You are suggesting in life you are either rich or poor. You miss the middle ground who are neither. Wealth also fluctuates throughout life. There are now more opportunities than there ever was. Yes who you know and where your from is to your advantage and there is still work to do with regards social mobility. Trying it say this is all the fault of Thatcher is ridiculous. She did nothing to help and in many ways hindered it. However under many years of Labour it continued to grow and will continue under this government. Throwing money at social mobility hasn't worked so they must find a new way but no party has the answer. The Tory system sometimes affects those that need support and Labours policy creates people who rely on support and are not prepared to contribute.

Jim Callaghan was equally a poor PM as Thatcher and in some ways caused a lot of tension that Thatcher inherited. He buried his head in the sand with the issue of mining and let them hold the country to ransom with strikes. By 1980 mining was an uneconomical industry that we could no longer continue to support. Thatcher got it wrong because she never considered what people from the mining industry would do for work once the mines had gone. That's her big failing that no one could deny mining was finished but once she defeated people like Scargill she abandoned whole communities who had no new source of income and really suffered.

In no way am I in favour of Thatcher but some honesty is required.