Margaret Thatcher

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Margaret Thatcher

Postby Matt the Czar » Mon Mar 16, 2015 8:09 pm

Why does she get such bad press here? It seems like she was the devil of britain.
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby CarrieVS » Mon Mar 16, 2015 8:25 pm

What here specifically, TCS? I can't say I'd noticed, it's not like we go out of our way to talk about her - we haven't had a single thread where Thatcher was or became the subject of discussion (as opposed to being brought up in one or two posts as a comparison or such like).

I put 'Thatcher' into the forum search and got 2 pages of results. To be sure, nearly all were expressing disagreement or dislike with a couple of neutrals, but they were pretty much all casual mentions and that's not a lot for 2 years worth of forum.

She's usually brought up by the Brits in the forum - in the same way that when looking for an analogy or such like, Americans are most likely to bring up something from the US - and it's hardly a secret that an awful lot of Brits regard Thatcher's government as rather a bad thing. To be sure there's also a lot of people who think she was wonderful - it's a very polarising subject, like Marmite - but this forum's political views do tend towards the left, I think, so it's hardly unexpected.
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby Marcuse » Mon Mar 16, 2015 8:31 pm

Margaret Thatcher was, depending on who you ask, either the savior or destroyer of modern Britain.

In the 70s, Britain had some problems, some of those problems came from the pretty weak Labour government and its unwillingness to challenge powerful trade unions. Striking workers forced the adoption of the "three day week", which was exactly what it sounded like, Britain only functioned for three out of seven days a week, instead of five. The UK had to go to the IMF for emergency funds as well and the currency was devalued.

In the midst of all this, Thatcher emerged as a right wing candidate for Prime Minister. She campaigned, as might be expected, on an anti-union, pro-privatisation platform, with the aim to "roll back the frontiers of the welfare state". She won a landslide victory in 1979, and served about two and half terms.

Thatcher's government was characterised by large scale privatisations of formerly nationalised industries, such as British Steel. In most cases, failing institutions were bought up by the government, put back on their feet, and then sold on. Her battles with the unions, in particular the miner's strike, were key to her leadership. She effectively shattered union power in the UK, proving that when pitted against a government willing to endure the threat and application of strikes, unions were a lot less influential than they'd like to be. She also rolled out the purchase of council houses, and pushed an agenda of home ownership that is arguably partly responsible for the housing crises and high prices we see today.

The problem with all of this was that it was highly uneven in character. Thatcher brought the UK out of the recession of the 1970s, but left behind vast swathes of the country to unemployment, hardship and poverty, while the South of England grew ever more prosperous. Effectively, she's loved by the people who benefited from that and loathed by the people who lost out.

She was a blunt, uncompromising politician, who was described by civil servants from the Foreign Office as "thinking about foreign policy in primary colours". She supported Ronald Regan in opposing Soviet communism, and fought a war in the Falklands against Argentina to protect the settlers there. She forced through an agreement for a rebate of monies paid to the EU that persists to this day.

Plenty of people see her as pushing a right wing agenda that leaves people behind, fails to help those in need, and focuses on a "greed is good" mentality. To others, she was the champion of people working to have it all, a kind of emulation of the American Dream idea. In the end, I can respect her as a politician and a person while disliking the politics she stood for.

Ironically, she never did roll back the frontiers of the welfare state, spending was static throughout her time as PM, and was about the same in real terms when she left as when she began.
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby LaChaise » Mon Mar 16, 2015 9:04 pm

Didn't she also use Scotland as some kind of an economic crash test with the Poll tax? I think I remember my (Scottish) English Civ. teacher talking about that a lot.
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Tue Mar 17, 2015 1:27 am

...
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby cmsellers » Tue Mar 17, 2015 2:06 am

I noticed that Thatcher definitely gets bad press on Cracked. There was some article that said we have yet to see a real-life version of the Wicked Stepmother from Disney's Snow White, and maybe a quarter of the top two pages of comments were Brits quoting that and bringing up Thatcher.

i commented that Thatcher was low-hanging fruit and suggested that Indira Gandhi was a better example. I got a lot of downvotes. I'm not sure if they came from Brits pissed off that I'd called them out on going for the easy joke, or people who thought that I was talking about Mahatma Gandhi, or people who genuinely think that the Iron Lady was more evil than Indira.

Personally, I have some respect for Thatcher over her willingness to defend the natives of the Falklands against Argentine imperialism, for standing up for the Soviet Union, and for some of her economic reforms. On balance I still view her negatively, but that could just be because I see her as the British counterpart to our Gipper and I definitely have negative opinions of him.
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby Learned Nand » Tue Mar 17, 2015 3:08 am

What I've heard of Margaret Thatcher tends not to be good; privatization is hardly all it's cracked up to be, and Fry and Laurie mock her relentlessly:

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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby Marcuse » Tue Mar 17, 2015 3:47 pm

cmsellers wrote:Personally, I have some respect for Thatcher over her willingness to defend the natives of the Falklands against Argentine imperialism


Here's the funny thing about that, she was prepared to go to war to fight against Argentine Imperialism, but for all the junta is criticised for precipitating the war to shore up their flagging popularity, Thatcher did the exact same thing in the UK over this.

The response in the Falklands was so disjointed that the troop ships, which normally need to be pre-arranged so that the most relevant pieces of kit and materiel are deployed first, were just chucked out any old how, and it arguably led to more casualties than strictly necessary for an elite, first world force fighting against a broadly equal number of young conscripts.

Not saying that the war was wrong, but portraying it as a principled stand against Imperialism doesn't tell the whole story. I'm reasonably certain that a degree of nationalism was present in the decision to retake the islands, but it was also heavily influenced by the need to have an easy to win, far away war to rekindle some popularity for the government.

Aviel wrote:Fry and Laurie mock her relentlessly


They do, in fact, it's become a hobby horse of the left to rag on Thatcher for literally anything. One famous example is when she was (as education secretary) characterised as the "milk snatcher" for implementing a policy that removed free milk for primary school children. This helpfully left aside the fact that the decision had been made and signed off by her predecessor and she wouldn't have been able to not do it even if she'd wanted to. It later came out she was opposed to the policy and was very uncomfortable with doing it.

There is a nasty undercurrent in the left in the UK that likes to demonise Thatcher for what she did, rather than criticise. I'm all for difference of opinion, but when groups are trying to make "Ding dong the witch is dead" the number one record in the week she died, something's gone bad there. I get that there's a serious basis for that anger, but there comes a point where one is merely ridiculing an old senile woman for things she did decades ago.
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby SandTea » Sun Mar 22, 2015 4:51 am

"Thatcher...? I hardly know her"
said the visiting Hawaiian delegate
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby FieldMarshalFry » Sun Mar 22, 2015 7:10 pm

Matt the Czar wrote:Why does she get such bad press here? It seems like she was the devil of britain.

the Devil? mate, the Devil doesn't want anything to do with her, she's privatising Hell and has already shut down half its pits!
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as for the hate from the living... a lot of it is in the North of England, Scotland and Wales due to her shutting down almost all of the country's manufacturing base, entire counties were left devastated and haven't recovered to this day, as she believed that "the market would sort them out", and now those areas have high unemployment, drug and crime problems, imagine is a President brought in reforms that destroyed the economies of entire states and you'd start to understand how great an impact this had on the country. She deregulated The City that led to the rise of the finance sector (you know, the one that caused the Global Banking Crisis), ushered in the very American "socialism is bad" view into British politics, something we're still trying to get over to this day, ordered the sinking of the Belgrano, an World War Two Argentinian battleship that was sailing AWAY from the Falkland Islands and towards International Waters, she was a notorious homophobe, brining in Section 28, something very, very, similar to the homophobic legislation Russia recently brought in, the Trade Unions are a shadow of their former selves, children below the poverty line peaked at 30% during her government, and by 1997 it was the highest in Europe, she never won a landslide, those elections had very low voter turnout and she didn't even win half the votes, due a recent split in the Labour party splitting the left, she supported Apartheid, refused to so much as meet was Nelson Mandela, who she viewed as a "terrorist", yet was more than willing to have tea with various murderous military dictators, and last of all, two words: Poll Tax

though I will be nice to her this once and point out that Regan was shit scared of pissing her off during the illegal US invasion of Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth of Nations which recognises Elizabeth II as its Monarch.

plus she was loved by the Daily Mail, a "newspaper" so infamous and far right that many take being hated by it as a badge of pride http://www.isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/ oh and a lot of people were pissed that she was getting a State Funeral during a time of austerity when Clement Attlee never got one, plus there was a much better proposal

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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby FieldMarshalFry » Sun Mar 22, 2015 7:19 pm

and one thing you have to remember, is the left/right divide is very, very strong in Britain, far stronger than in the United Sates, or at least it is with the general public, and there is no "leader worshipping" like in the Abandoned Colonies, everyone is up for criticism, especially if said criticism is founded and based on their political beliefs and and policy, so yes, we do accuse Thatcher of being a heartless, soulless, unfeeling cow who has condemned over half the country to poverty, but even her harshest critics will not pull a "Fox "News"" and say that she hates Britain and wants to destroy it, and just plain make things up, that sort of thing is just disgusting
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Re: Margaret Thatcher

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Sun Mar 22, 2015 8:14 pm

And that's why one should never elect (or in this case elect someone to elect) someone with hyper-individualistic delusions.
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