Mrs Thatcher

Hi Queenie - if you're a library user borrow John Pilger's 'Tell Me No Lies' which contains "The secret war against miners" by Seumas Milane.

I'm not British so I didn't live through her rule but the above piece is enough for me to despise her and her ilk. Ideology above humanity.

One should certainly not hate her because she was a Tory . . . but saying things such as that she got the power back from the unions or that the miners had become too big a force sounds a good deal like Tory propaganda.

I'm not a citizen of the UK either, and although i lived through the era when Thatcher was PM (and John Major), i wasn't close enough to events to have a detailed opinion. Distance can be good for perspective, but you'd want someone who knows more of the detail than i do. In that respect, i'm with Hinge, i shouldn't really comment.

However, consider if you will that after 11 years of Thatcher, and seven years of John Major, Labour has been in power ever since, and the Tories look pretty damned moribund. Such things can change, though, and change quickly. No one ever thought that the Tories would win in again in Canada any time soon, until the sponsorship scandal broke--now the Tories are in power. It's a minority government, to be sure, but a Tory government nonetheless.

Maggie did a few things right and a few few things that got her booted. My perspective is one of looking in from the outside at a distance. She was a tool of Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, who was recently found guilty of fraud in the Hollinger International case in the Chicago courts. Murdoch is a right winger from Australia and Black a Canadian with a highly inflated sense of personal importance, obtained a lordship or some such title and gave up his Canadian citizenship. When found guilty he wanted back his Canadian privileges but no dice. These two bought up all the newspaper chains and shifted the political atmosphere far to the right with right wing columnists in Britain, Canada and Australia. The political left's economics with unions demanding yearly wage increases or threat of strikes and welfare to all others thus cornering the labor market, led the nations economies to inflation and stagnation. Businesses large and small could not satisfactorily meet those demands. Unions in the government sector were also demanding higher wages thus inflation. Then there was the national strike in Britain. Labor was viewed with differently as everybody suffered. Maggie got elected and she got all the public utilities out of union control but selling them off as shares to British citizens. British economy got better as production increased. Next, Ronald Reagan got elected as President. Reagan was a moderate Republican. Jimmy Carter as President was a disaster as he made a mess of things in Iran after the Iranian Revolution sparked by Ayatollah Khomeni, when he tried to rescue Americans trapped in Tehran which was a few hundred miles inland from the Persian Gulf. Helicopters were used and few of them crashed.

What got Maggie really popular was her toughness with the Soviet Union. She was referred to as the 'Iron Lady'. The Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands which were to them 'their Malvinas'. The successful prosecution of the Falklands War cemented her reputation as the'Iron Lady'. However, the euphoria from a successful war didn't last forever. She was too abrasive and was caught lying. She lied to the Reichman Brothers, who built the World Trade Twin Towers in New York City, about building a railway link to a new financial district outside of London to be called the Canary Wharf. The Reichmans built the financial district but the railway link was never built. Reichman Brothers lost a lot of money as well as those in the financial district. The financial district is the heart of all Tories and when they are hurt they get even so Maggie was replace by John Majors. Maggie was brilliant as she had degrees in Chemistry and Law. John Majors could not match her performance and he lost to the smooth Tony Blair.

Queen's paradise Indeed.
No Maharajas hell.
laugh a while please

They socialized a lot of the factors of production, only to hawk them to other countries later, so it's like 'here, lemme take your self determination and give it to foreigners'. Then council-housing and socialized medicine - gave rise to the whole skinhead, soccer rioter kindof thing - made people into squalid weekend warriors. I got to learn more about this too - there but for the grace of the LNC go we...

Indeed - I recommend seeing 'The Firm' starring Gary Oldman - just a movie, I know, but the units check out. You've got these middle-classers taught from the ground-up 'no self determination' - expect them to be good little lords and ladies, but tax them mercilessly for displacement in excess of 1.5 cubic-liters-displacement* you see. The mechanisms of behavior behind this are well understood, I forget the exact terminology, but bad reinforcement dynamics, neurological depression imitating sociopathy.

*I know liters are volume, added the cubic-displacement part to contrast with how cars, if left to be, become a personal affair of some importance.

Maggie was also given another nickname "Attila the Hen"