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Margaret Thatcher Dies At 87
syngularyx writes "Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister who became one of the most influential global leaders of the postwar period, died on Monday, three decades after her championing of free-market economics and individual choice transformed Britain's economy and her vigorous foreign policy played a key role in the end of the Cold War."
She reigned long ago but I think Britain is still not over her.
-- Cheers!
The UK economy has grown massively since the 1980's, so apparently we're insourcing more than we're outsourcing.
Manufacturing was dead by the time she arrived, the unions did it to themselves. All she did was pull the plug to put them out of their misery.
I was young when you arrived a PM. This country was on its knees. It was backrupt, dead people were in the streets unburied and weeks of garbage strewn the streets from leftism gone mad. Labour and the Unions were in full wrecking ball mode.
Yes, you were a bitch, but the medicine we had, and it was not nice, was in the most part - needed.
You played a part in ending the cold war, in hauling down the wall, and in supporting Solidarity in Poland when you'd normally prefer to drive a stake through any other union's heart.
And you helped pull a wall down and break up the cold war.
Rest in Peace.
We`re all equal
She rescued Britain. UK was nearly bankrupt before her, a block of the unions were in charge. Three unions would all strike together and UK had electricity blackouts as a result, the Labour party then gave them pay rises (20%) and as each union got a huge raise, so another union would go on strike and demand more than the others. The debt became impossible and the IMF was called in. It was a disaster.
She came along and made a law that said you couldn't strike without a vote from union members, and no more than 6 people could picket a factory and no secondary picketing.
Arthur Scargill (mine workers) then held a strike without a vote, the mine workers had their funds seized, and strikers were sacked. It broke union control of the UK. UK still had unions, but the need to have a vote before a strike made them less militant. People wanting to work don't keep going on strike, but the union bosses get paid whether on strike or not, so they're far more militant than the union members.
Likewise the rent-a-mob shut down of factories ended.
After that closed shops were abolished (the rule that said to work at the company you had to be a member of union Z), and Britain really turned around. You no longer had to be a union member to work, you could vote for whether to strike, and blackouts and power cuts ended.
She was so successful, that she because a sort of hate figure for the left. Ineffective leaders (like John Major) are easily dismissed, not so the good ones. She was hard, and luckily came along at a time when that was needed.
Goodbye Mrs Thatcher.
To the contrary, she was one of the greatest politicians of the XX century. Together with Ronald Reagan and John Paul II she finished Soviet Union without going to war. That is why the Left hates her so much. She has proven how corrupt and dumb are leftist ideas. You sir are one of those usefull idiots that Moscow was using to cover their genocidal political system. Why don't you move to Cuba or North Korea, the last bastions of your belowed ideology ?
JAM
North Korea?
Because anybody except a brainwashed idiot who worships the "Right-wing ideology" would have recognized that North Korea doesn't even pretend to be Communist any more, since giving lip service to it doesn't get them any donations from Russia today. Instead they've adopted a nationalist stance with an aggressive military-first posture.
But no, don't let that get in the way of your empty rhetoric. You can keep on believing Reagan saved the world from the terror of the Soviet Union, but Reagan was just a patsy buying into the fabricated antagonism that was developed after WW2 when the wealthy industrialists needed something to keep the cash flowing into their coffers.
So others get the blame for the public being shortsighted and greedy and selling their shares?
Westboro Baptist does it, and they're disgusting, unfeeling monsters who should be eradicated from the face of the earth.
But a bunch of comfortably upper-middle-class white kids act like entitled cunts at someone's funeral, and they're heroes?
Fuck your double standard. I'm not a huge fan of Thatcher, and never have been, but I *am* a fan of behaving like a gentleman. And that includes not shitting on the grief of family and friends who've lost a loved one. Go protest at Parliament, you thick cunt - they're the ones making the laws now.
Contrary to you, sir, I lived in a communist country at that time and thank God I don't anymore. Sure it collapsed economically, like all stupid leftist ideas must. Reagan with Tatcher was instrumental to speed it up and avoid military disaster by projecting strength. You probably too young to remeber president Carter. Bumbling idiot who extended suffering of millions under communist rule by his stupid policy of appeasement. The usefull idiot name is not a name that I made up. It is a KGB name for leftist crowd, mainly young dumb students in the Western Europe who was brainwashed by their universities in support of the left ideology. The T shirts with the mass murdered Che Guevarra are example of how stupid the leftist crowd was and still is. The reason they called them idiots, was because they were basically working for Soviet propaganda completely for free. The Moscov is still succesfully using this mechanism currently in western green movements to protect Russian energy sector against western competition.
JAM
"Ever since she shut down the unions,"
All Scargill had to do was have a strike vote. She didn't shut down the union, she made the union bosses answerable to their members, and gave people a choice if they wanted to be a union member.
"CEO's wages have increased dramatically more than the median wage"
No doubt, but then she hasn't been in power since 1990 and most of that is post 1995. The unions, as I said, weren't shut down. They're still around and chose Ed Miliband as the leader of the Labour party. Despite the party members voting for his brother. If you think the unions are the fix for things, why not vote for Ed. His party didn't.
"No longer were employees empowered to demand a reasonable share of the profits of their endeavours"
Britain was bankrupt, what are these 'profits' you refer to? At one point they couldn't even pay the nurses their wages.
Nurses union wasn't as powerful as the miners+electricity workers unions.
This is really the problem you have with judging Thatcher.
On one hand you have people telling us she's the devil, modding troll and flamebait left and right because she kicked their puppy when they were young or whatever.
Then on the other you have facts and statistics showing that Labour previous to her actually shut down more mines, that manufacturing actually increased under her, that the economy very clearly improved under her, that British political clout on the world stage massively strengthened under her (which was no mean feat given that since World War II Britain's post-imperial influence had been in free-fall until she came along), and perhaps most importantly, she was elected 3 times which suggests that actually most people did prefer her to the alternative.
It's kind of hard to reconcile the two, but ultimately the former is subjective, and the latter is objective. I'd much rather put faith in objectivity than subjectivity.
Having savings or being able to risk them is not dependant on 'class'.
Only in America is "class" equated with wealth. Class is an indicator of your position - or lack of one - in an aristocratically structured society. Upper-class people are typically wealthier than their lower-class counterparts, but that has more with the fact than before "them that has the gold makes the rules" there was "them that makes the rules gets the gold".
Wealth, on the other hand is largely measured in terms of disposable income. If every cent you make goes immediately out for necessities, you don't have wealth. And wealth is what determines ones ability to invest, not class.