Slashdot Mirror
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 Conservative Party could fund itself forever by installing a pay toilet on her grave.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
at least the BBC have :
In quotes: Margaret Thatcher
Obituary: Margaret Thatcher
Video obituary
whatever the politics at least link to the BBC...
John Jones
As a German who grew up in Britain in the 80s, I'd like to say she was an awesome prime minister, although many of my countrymen and indeed many Brits will disagree. Sod them.
Germany would benefit *hugely* from someone like her. Sadly, there's absolutely no-one on the horizon.
It doesn't matter whether she goes to heaven or hell. She'll clear either place up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream
One important development in the 20th century was the introduction of soft ice cream. A chemical research team in Britain (of which a young Margaret Thatcher was a member)[21][22] discovered a method of doubling the amount of air in ice cream, which allowed manufacturers to use less ingredients, thereby reducing costs. It made possible the soft ice cream machine in which a cone is filled beneath a spigot on order. In the United States, Dairy Queen, Carvel, and Tastee-Freez pioneered in establishing chains of soft-serve ice cream outlets.
How's that not nerdy enough for you?
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
Not forgetting the great 80s selloff of British Gas/Petroleum/Telecom under the guise of "greater share ownership for all" - whereas in reality most people bought their allocation, sold at a profit 3 days later and spent the "free" money they got as a result on stuff... ...result? Most of the shares ended up with Zarquon-knows-who and they've been getting away with making vast profits at our expense ever since... profits that could have saved taxpayers having to pay untold billions extra from their hard-earned wages - all that was needed was to get some decent managers in to run the damn things properly...
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.
The unions killed manufacturing (as it was then). Thatcher killed the unions. The value of UK manufacturing increased since Thatcher was in power: http://tutor2u.net/economics/content/essentials/manufacturing_industry_in_uk_clip_image002_0000.gif
So others get the blame for the public being shortsighted and greedy and selling their shares?
re:
PS. How is this News for Nerds? Why isn't the story tagged "troll"?
Unusually these days for a politician she was originally a science graduate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher#Early_life_and_education ) rather than coming in as a career politician or purely legal background (although she did switch track and become a barrister)
Some of this showed through in her leadership style - trying to do the logical thing for the best long term results (at least in her analysis) rather than trying to win the popularity contest and appealing to the masses. Sometimes this worked out (surely everyone can at least agree that earning the nickname 'iron lady' is pretty cool? and my memories of the 80s are that most peoples standard of living improved significantly) but in other cases it contributed to her downfall - e.g. the per-person 'poll tax' vs. a property-based tax for local services (such as rubbish/refuse collection) surely makes some logical sense to many slashdot readers? but unfortunately it made a larger number of people pay more tax than those unaffected / getting a a tax reduction so it was a political disaster.
Britain voted her into power again and again. She was chosen by Brits to lead because she was a good leader.
Also, the coal strike fractured the coal miners union into two. A lot of miners resented the strike and wanted to work. They believed they'd win the a strike vote and prevent a strike. Scargill tried to shut them down using mob picketing of the Nottingham mines.
The '6 person picketing rule' meant the police came in. The mob would be kept on the other side of the street, only 6 were allowed at the gate.
Then we had the motorway killings, workers buses would be hit by bricks and railway sleepers, people died, that led to a further loss of support for Scargill.
She did other things too, she increase corporation tax to held reduce the debt, and reduced the top rate personal tax from 83% to 60%
(yes it really was that high! If your income came from sales, you'd pay 98% sales+income tax!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom
She raised taxes and cut spending.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/the-legend-of-margaret-thatcher/
It's difficult for the left to accept her success. Largely because they'd have to accept the 1970's labour governments were a disaster. But thats why Britain voted for her.
Mod points won't hide things. She was a good competent leader. Far better than the people dissing her now.
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.
This is geek news because she created the conditions where IT professionals could sell their skills at a decent price. If you were in commercial IT between 1985 and 2005 and you didn't even try to become self employed, then you should ask yourself whether you missed something.
I am aware that the deregulation of the financial market went too far. However, I maintain that if Mrs. Thatcher wouldn't have exercised her influence, the UK would not have thrived as it did.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
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.
That was a great one and was copied by the whole of Europe.
What happened was that a lot of infrastructure payed for by the tax payer was sold off. The countries held onto a couple of shares. The services became cheaper but so became the policies.
While a government run Telco had to guarantee service for even the remotest bits of the country the privately held ones only had to go after the juiciest bits and leave the scraps for the plebs who dared to live in the sticks.
Same goes for the German railway system. While the lion share of it is owned by the public it is run as a for profit company. In which time they allowed the infrastructure to deteriorate in order to run the company cheaply on order to go public with better looking books. The going public bit never really materialized and the railway network is now so bad that we daren't run our high-speed trains at high speed. Every once in a while there will be a breakdown, the whole mess returns to the news and a fortnight later it is forgotten again.
Essentials should always be run by the state or with lots of oversight to make sure said essentials are equally available to everyone. Why else bother with having a country? To fund a huge military as a masturbatory aid for backbench MPs? That hardly seems worth the bother.
20 minutes into the future
You're so out of touch with reality that it amazes me. Yeah, everybody can invest... except that some people, in fact, the majority of people has no money to do so after they paid their living costs. Some people, having more money than their living, and a few of them has far more than a country could spend on food, shelter, basic healthcare and education.
Everybody can invest, the law allow them to do so. But of course, people can also lawfully die in hunger in most of the countries on Earth.
I heard this tired argument so many times. Having a theoretical possibility by some abstract freedom does not translate at all widespread ability to use that freedom. There is a group in society who can afford to invest and thus own basically the entire economy.
There's an "investor class", but that is called more precisely the capitalist class. Because they run the show, they have massive assets at their disposal that produces enough dividend that they can re-invest and thus blocking the access to all newly created wealth. Sometimes there's some reshuffle of course, but socially the class division is untouched.
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.