Margaret Thatcher

Is 'very left wing' extreme or not? Just out of interest.

Very left wing is right ( oh I love the English language - couldn't do that in French or German)

Nelliemoser - ah, but the left is so much more narrowminded than us on the right. The definition of conservative .... well need I say more.

Ana The "very" bit means its just as unreasonably extreme as being very right wing. The word "bigoted" comes to mind.

Really? It's just that bluebell described her daughter as being very left wing, and said that she was proud of that.

Clearly drink too much don't understand all that - oh forgot I'm not intelligent.

FO Ana. - I've had enough of your petty stupid moronic responses

Message deleted by Gransnet for breaking our Talk Guidelines. Replies may also be deleted.

Oh, I see - it's OK for you to accuse people of 'petty, moronic responses' but no one else is! You know what I said was true.

You're going to get banned, bluebell - and I'll be glad!

Well you know what Groucho Marx said!

Can't stand having someone bright to stand upto you can you?

Criticise me but leave my dd alone

All these bloody posts are too long to read anyway.

In the words of Dragon's Den, I'm out.

I agree that the unions in the 70s had gone too far, but its a bit rich to say they were lining their pockets while glorifying Thatcher, who lined her own and those of her cronies by selling them utilities which BELONGED TO US , all of the complaints and overcharging now is because they have to make money to pay dividends to their shareholders - why should we in the south west pay higher water rates for example to keep beaches clean and provide water for tourists? - it should be shared costs across the board, like it used to be
Only the South east really benefited from Thatcher, obscene when you see the devastation wreaked on wales, the north and scotland

we now have to pay to import coal because the stupid woman poured concrete down the pits out of sheer spite

Sorry, i hate her, will always hate her, and cannot see how people think she was so great.... she was a nasty self serving person, who lacked compassion, and ruined our once great country

I watched Norman Tebbit speaking in the House of Lords. He expressed himself with the utmost dignity........

...and Glenda Jackson with the utmost eloquence....

What was the quote about 'the price of everything and the value of nothing'?

Touche Grannylin

Sorry, cannot do accent ecu.

johanna if you have an Alt Gr key press that while you key in 'e' and it will give you é.

susie I agree with you about selling off utilities etc. But please don't think that everybody in the SE is rolling in it - there are significant pockets of deprivation - and not everybody in the SE supported what she did.

Grannylin I thought Glenda Jackson was very brave to stand alone and make the statement she did, despite great efforts being made to drown her out.

What I think has really upset a lot of people is the scale and cost of the funeral (particularly when Mrs T was very critical of unnecessary public expenditure) and the queen's attendance. It feels like, by favouring Mrs T over all the other deceased prime ministers, bar Churchill, the queen has thrown off the mantle of impartiality. Those loyal supporters of the queen who live in areas devastated by industry closures will, I suspect, be questioning whether the monarchy actually represents all of the people of Britain or just a narrow part of the traditional establishment.

"As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism. I am sure they will be more efficient. What I ventured to question was the using of these huge sums as if they were income."
Harold ('you've never had it so good') McMillan, Lord Stockton, on what he considered to be the misuse of the funds accruing from the sale of state assets.

As upset as you all are at MT and 'what she did to this country' many are equally upset at what Labour did for 13 years. You don't hold the monopoly on outrage. I see freedom and competition as good things, I see dumbing down as bad. I see encouraging children to mediocrity as appalling. I see churning out unemployable young people with all their hopes, dreams and expectations into the reality of the market as shocking. And the schools ticked the boxes and schools became better and better and children passed more and more worthless exams. But the end result? Then we have Labour's open door immigration policy, pity our poor kids faced with the well educated, ambitious and hungry from the rest of Europe. The poor working class don't stand a chance against them.

MT did in many ways manipulate votes by allowing people to buy their council houses but those peoples' lives improved immeasurably. Labour manipulated votes by their benefit largesse. MT should have created a sovereign wealth fund from North Sea oil. Gordon Brown shouldn't have sold off the gold reserves at the bottom of the market and created the useless FSA.

The comments about the Falklands I find strange. Would you have left those people, British people to their fate and yet supported Tony Blair on Iraq? Etc etc. Tit for tat but at the end of the day, surely we all want a better society where those who need to be cared for and supported are and the rest work?

What we argue about is which party can do that. Labour has just had 13 years of trying and left the country with in excess of a trillion pounds of debt.

Ana so that's what the Alt Gr key is for, you learn something everyday as my Mother used to say

This is a balanced article in the Economist:

www.economist.com/news/briefing/21576081-margaret-thatcher-britains-prime-minister-1979-1990-died-april-8th-age