The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, Dies following a stroke

[vacs]

Shouldn't probably mention this on the day of her death, but she is widely blamed by economists to be one of the major reasons why the banking world is currently falling apart and the worldwide economy crisis is happening by relaxing the banking control mechanisms in the 80's, resulting in the now uncontrollable and exploding shadow banking sector, which will make the whole financial system as we know collapse, in most probably just a few years time.

[PGHammer]

This shows how much she was hated

http://www.isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/

Basically, she was hated for her DOMESTIC policy on mining; however, who opposed her policy in the House of Commons?

Was the policy of her opposition politically any different on the subject?

If so, why did she beat them? If not, then the issue was apparently no big deal to voters, as she got re-elected.

The Thatcher policy on industry (heavy industry in particular) was, in fact, a continuance of not merely existing UK policy, but Europe-wide domestic policy on heavy industry - the drift *green* didn't start with Iron Maggie - not even in the UK.

The Obama Policy on heavy industry is winning him few friends in mining states and regions (such as West Virginia or western Pennsylvania) - however, he is apparently willing to take the blows because of the political advantages of that policy elsewhere. Like it or not, that is how politics works. (A lot of European leaders like President Obama *because* he shares their views on the environment - not just because he is more dovish than Bush the Younger.)

Hating a politician over a single issue is pointless IF that issue doesn't resonate with the voters and apparently the miners' issues didn't.

[Detection]

Basically, she was hated for her DOMESTIC policy on mining; however, who opposed her policy in the House of Commons?

Was the policy of her opposition politically any different on the subject?

If so, why did she beat them? If not, then the issue was apparently no big deal to voters, as she got re-elected.

The Thatcher policy on industry (heavy industry in particular) was, in fact, a continuance of not merely existing UK policy, but Europe-wide domestic policy on heavy industry - the drift *green* didn't start with Iron Maggie - not even in the UK.

The Obama Policy on heavy industry is winning him few friends in mining states and regions (such as West Virginia or western Pennsylvania) - however, he is apparently willing to take the blows because of the political advantages of that policy elsewhere. Like it or not, that is how politics works. (A lot of European leaders like President Obama *because* he shares their views on the environment - not just because he is more dovish than Bush the Younger.)

Hating a politician over a single issue is pointless IF that issue doesn't resonate with the voters and apparently the miners' issues didn't.

I have 0 interest in politics or politicians, I don't pay any attention to any one of them, I have as much knowledge of politics as I do about football, none.

Living in the North I just know the majority hated her for numerous things she did that negatively impacted them, such as the mines being shut down.

Other than that, I don't want to know any thing more, to me, all politicians no matter which party they are from promise the world and deliver FA once they are elected.

[PGHammer]

Shouldn't probably mention this on the day of her death, but she is widely blamed by economists to be one of the major reasons why the banking world is currently falling apart and the worldwide economy crisis is happening by relaxing the banking control mechanisms in the 80's, resulting in the now uncontrollable and exploding shadow banking sector, which will make the whole financial system as we know collapse, in most probably just a few years time.

The shadow-banking sector has ALWAYS existed; if anything, the policies begun with Nixon and Ford (in the US) and Heath of the UK (anti-inflationary policies) resulted in the SBS becoming more obvious.

Thatcher's impact was more marked in terms of foreign and national-security policy - not domestic policy, or even banking policy; Reagan had a bigger impact on UK banking policy, it could be argued, than Thatcher did. (Who were the Chancellors of the Exchequer under Thatcher? Who were the Home Secretaries? It is these two positions that have the greatest impact on UK banking policy - who occupied them?)

I have 0 interest in politics or politicians, I don't pay any attention to any one of them, I have as much knowledge of politics as I do about football, none.

Living in the North I just know the majority hated her for numerous things she did that negatively impacted them, such as the mines being shut down.

Other than that, I don't want to know any thing more, to me, all politicians no matter which party they are from promise the world and deliver FA once they are elected.

Not caring about politics - or politicians - all the while griping and moaning about the same - means that you have pretty much forfeited your right to gripe and moan, doesn't it? If it really matters, you'd get educated and do something about it (by casting a vote) - otherwise, your opinion ALSO means FA as the politicians are free to dismiss it (because it doesn't show up at the ballot box).

[Detection]

Not caring about politics - or politicians - all the while griping and moaning about the same - means that you have pretty much forfeited your right to gripe and moan, doesn't it? If it really matters, you'd get educated and do something about it (by casting a vote) - otherwise, your opinion ALSO means FA as the politicians are free to dismiss it (because it doesn't show up at the ballot box).

Sorry what?

Griping and moaning? I posted one link, and explained to your essay that I have no interest in politics, I was not griping or moaning about anything.

I have better things to educate myself about other than a bunch of identical liars and cheats.

[Dick Montage]

If you have to post an article from the Guardian defending your right to slag off the dead, there's something very wrong with your ethics and how much class you act with.

[Growled Member]

R.I.P. to this fine lady and great leader.

[Shiranui]

RIP - you were the ultimate alternative-comedy villainess; thank you for the laughs during the 80s. :whistle:

[+Mirumir Subscriber¹]

For Canadian Conservatives, Thatcher was a ?saviour?

For Canada?s reigning Conservatives, Margaret Thatcher?s passing is like a death in the family.

Over seven years in office, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has tried to cast the Conservative Party of Canada in the Thatcher mould ? economically free market, socially traditional and avidly pro-military. This as opposed to embracing centrist Red Tories or Prairie populists such as John Diefenbaker and Preston Manning.

That makes Lady Thatcher, whose unapologetically right-wing policies transformed Britain in the 1980s, really a spiritual forebear to the Harper Conservatives today.

?The world has lost a giant among leaders,? Mr. Harper said in a statement Monday, adding of the former British prime minister that ?with the success of her economic policies, she defined contemporary conservatism itself.?

For Conservative cabinet ministers, many of whom came of political age as Lady Thatcher began her controversial tenure in office, the ?Iron Lady? ranks as a hero alongside U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

In their minds, the Cold Warrior who stared down communism also ended up rescuing conservatism ? and everything it represents.

?In the 1970s, conservatism was just a poor, pale imitation of liberalism. Why would anyone vote for it? And here was a woman who said, ?No, we stand for something very different,? ? said Tony Clement, the Harper government cabinet minister who is currently President of the Treasury Board.

Before Lady Thatcher took over, Mr. Clement said, ?you got the sense that for Western democracies, the wheels were coming off. And she was a saviour.?

...

Today, the Conservatives in Ottawa celebrate austerity budgets, preserving a big purse for military spending and shrinking the size and scope of the federal government, while holding out the promise of more tax cuts when the books are balanced.

Mr. Clement recalls how he felt as a young conservative in the late 1970s ? an era of big government and rising deficits, when the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was still fresh and the outcome of the Cold War uncertain. Lady Thatcher demonstrated that a conservative politician could reverse the expansion of government and still win re-election.

?We were still in the midst of Pierre Trudeau statism, and that was the consensus among the intellectual elites and political elites,? he said.

?Britain was on its knees. It was an economic basket case. It took a lot of contentious battles. But she managed to reverse all that.?

In the statement on Lady Thatcher?s death, Mr. Harper on Monday recalled his own meeting with her in London, shortly after he took office. ?New to my own duties as Prime Minister in 2006, she provided me wise and gracious counsel in London, the memory of which I will forever cherish.?

Sources familiar with the meeting say Lady Thatcher regaled Mr. Harper with stories of her years in power ? from the Falklands War with Argentina to the miners? strike that rocked Britain to her experience working with former prime minister Brian Mulroney and Mr. Reagan.

John Williamson, Conservative MP for New Brunswick Southwest, said Lady Thatcher helped set a conservative direction for governments when it came to the economic policies that Britain and other countries should pursue.

?What she did was permanently move the goalposts,? Mr. Williamson said.

Pierre Poilievre, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Transport, said Lady Thatcher?s impact on Canada stretches over decades ? and many of the policies she once defended in the face of great controversy are now routinely accepted.

?Canada has implemented Thatcherism gradually over the past quarter-century,? Mr. Poilievre said. It began, he explained, with Mr. Mulroney?s free-trade agreement with the United States. Then both federally and provincially, governments enacted huge cuts in spending over the 1990s. Both Jean Chr?tien?s Liberals and Mr. Harper?s Conservatives cut personal and business taxes for Canadians.

?Canada has privatized 30 bodies and agencies in the last 25 years,? Mr. Poilievre said. ?Not even political actors on the left are proposing to re-nationalize businesses that have been privatized.?

[simonlang]

anyone already mentioned how she tried to sabotate germanys reunion? :/

[DarkHorizons]

First Jimmy Saville, and now Margaret Thatcher. It's been a good 12 months for miners.

[dvb2000]

I personally agree with a lot of her politics, and it's easy to take them out of context. I know her policies hurt a lot of people financially, and understand the dislike.

Sounds like Julia Gillard in Australia. There will be huge celebrations here when she kicks the bucket.

[Elliot B.]

"David Cameron has just sent his official letter to the Thatcher residence.

It starts, "I regret to inform you that due to recent events, you now have too many bedrooms...""

The Brits'll get it :D

[MightyJordan]

Shouldn't probably mention this on the day of her death, but she is widely blamed by economists to be one of the major reasons why the banking world is currently falling apart and the worldwide economy crisis is happening by relaxing the banking control mechanisms in the 80's, resulting in the now uncontrollable and exploding shadow banking sector, which will make the whole financial system as we know collapse, in most probably just a few years time.

Indeed. (Y) Have to say it wasn't entirely her though; it was her on this side of the pond, but Reagan also did his part across the Atlantic. The last global recession can be traced back to deregulation enacted by those two.

I won't speak ill of her on here (people I follow from Twitter already took the words out of my mouth); instead, I'll point to something that she did get right during her premiership...

Margaret Thatcher: an unlikely green hero

Margaret Thatcher will be remembered for her short lived "green period" in the late 1980s when she helped put climate change (or global warming as it was then known), acid rain and pollution on to the mainstream political map. Tutored by Sir Crispin Tickell, British ambassador to the UN in New York, she made several dramatic environment speeches.

The first, to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988, galvanised the emerging green debate in Britain and helped swell the membership of groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. The ecological and scientific arguments she used were not new, but their impact was profound:

"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself."

The second, to the UN general assembly, in November 1989 was aimed at the international community. Thatcher had by then understood the environment's political importance in a globalising world and was the first major politician to hold out the prospect of international legislation. But the timing, was important at home too, because the Greens looked dangerous after securing 15% of the UK vote in the European elections only months before.

"What we are now doing to the world ? is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.

"The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not."

But her enthusiasm for green issues soon evaporated. She opened the Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research in 1990 but did not attend the Rio Earth summit, leaving her successor, John Major to formally sign up Britain to forest, climate and other agreements. In retirement she had nothing more to say about the environment until her 2002 memoirs, when she rejected Al Gore and what she called his "doomist" predictions.

Last year Jonathon Porritt, head of Friends of the Earth in the late 1980s, recalled the galvanising effect she had on the green debate:

"Thatcher ? did more than anyone in the last 60 years to put green issues on the national agenda. From 1987-88 when [she] started to talk about the ozone layer and acid rain and climate change, a lot of people who had said these issues were for the tree-hugging weirdos thought, 'ooh, it's Mrs Thatcher saying that, it must be serious'. She played a big part in the rise of green ideas by making it more accessible to large numbers of people".

But her environmental legacy continued long after she retired. The free market economics that her governments espoused dramatically changed the green face of Britain. In a series of controversial privatisations, her ministers encouraged urban sprawl by approving massive out-of-town supermarket developments, deregulated or privatised the bus services, spent billions of pounds on new roads but little on rail transport, and handed ownership of water and waste to global corporations. She balked only at the railways, saying it was "a privatisation too far".

The greatest outcry was when she privatised water and sewerage in 1987. Until then, water had been seen very much as a human right, to be owned by no one and made available by public bodies for as little money as possible. But 10 major new water companies were formed and sold off at a massive discount with their debts written off and a "green" dowry. Even the Daily Mail complained it was a giveaway. As predicted, the price of water prices increased 50% in the first four years and the most companies were heavily fined for pollution incidents. To this day, Britain is the only major country in the world to have fully privatised its water.

Thatcher's influence on the environment and development of third world countries was even more profound. Britain, with the US, led World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation moves throughout the 1980s to force more than 100 indebted countries to deregulate their industries, open up markets, privatise state-owned industries and prevent governments from managing basic services such as health, education or water. These now widely discredited "structural adjustment" programmes opened the way for global mining, farming and forestry companies to exploit natural resources in developing countries on a massive scale as well as to undermine local markets by dumping staples like rice and change diets. The result, say critics, was to swell the slums, increase poverty and greatly degrade environments.

Thatcher's 11 years in power (1979-1990) coincided with a decade of profound national and global environmental change. In that time the world increased its population by 800 million people, lost 150m hectares of primary forest, saw its slums grow bigger and its poverty increase dramatically. The political and financial system that Britain and others promoted in those years cannot possibly be held responsible for all the damage done, but history will show that it happened on her watch, and that she and her ministers played their part.

[theyarecomingforyou]

It's incredibly sad that anyone would celebrate her death. I didn't celebrate the death of Bin Laden, Hussein or Gaddafi?nor will I for war criminals like Bush, Blair or Obama?yet there is a small minority in the UK that clearly takes pleasure in Thatcher's death and that is deeply concerning. It's one thing not to respect her death; it's another entirely to celebrate it.

The reaction to Thatcher's death highlights serious issues with British society.

[Nothing Here]

My thoughts:

I don't get it. Someone passes away and people are ecstatic over it. What I'm posting now is going to tick some off my friends off. For that I apologize, But I am a little annoyed at how people are cheering over her death.

Rest in Peace Maggie! You will be missed by some.

[compl3x]

I love how conservatives are playing up the fact she was the first female prime minister when it is the outdated conservative views/ideology that kept women out of power in the first place.

Even a poor reading of history should illustrate why she isn't the hero the right makes her out to be. **** the sycophantic bull****: she was a heartless, miserable elitist. Let's hope we don't see more of them.

[theyarecomingforyou]

Even a poor reading of history should illustrate why she isn't the hero the right makes her out to be. **** the sycophantic bull****: she was a heartless, miserable elitist. Let's hope we don't see more of them.

Your penchant for profanity and personal attacks only serves to undermine the point you're trying to make. For better or worse she was a woman of conviction that transformed the UK - you should focus on what she did wrong rather than hyperbolic and emotional character attacks. Perhaps if you'd lived through her time as Prime Minister I could understand it but she was Prime Minister before you were born.

[Witt3439]

For the record, a stroke is caused by a blood clot in the brain. The blood clot can cause the heart to stop, and a heart attack can cause the brain to wind up with a blood clot.

(I know, I had a stroke this past October, and I was hit with 4 heart attacks in about 5 hours in 2 years ago with coming June. I'm now waiting on a new heart and live with an LVAD until then.)

[Detection]

For the record, a stroke is caused by a blood clot in the brain. The blood clot can cause the heart to stop, and a heart attack can cause the brain to wind up with a blood clot.

(I know, I had a stroke this past October, and I was hit with 4 heart attacks in about 5 hours in 2 years ago with coming June. I'm now waiting on a new heart and live with an LVAD until then.)

wow, I hope you get your transplant asap, you reminded me of this TED talk if you haven't seen it before

[compl3x]

Your penchant for profanity and personal attacks only serves to undermine the point you're trying to make. For better or worse she was a woman of conviction that transformed the UK - you should focus on what she did wrong rather than hyperbolic and emotional character attacks. Perhaps if you'd lived through her time as Prime Minister I could understand it but she was Prime Minister before you were born.

So one can only criticise a leader if they lived during their leadership? Or in the country in which they lead?

Why is using profanity all of a sudden unacceptable? Or is it only unacceptable if I use it to criticise a person you admire and respect? Perhaps if I was shouting down an American leader you be hitting the "Like This" button under my post? Nothing I said was hyperbolic. Her policies were heartless. The right is sycophantic about her. And she most certainly was elitist.

I could write mile long posts about her positions concerning apartheid, gay rights (she dismissed such a thing), describing feminism as poison etc. But why bother? Those who love her, will love her, those who don't, won't.

[theyarecomingforyou]

So one can only criticise a leader if they lived during their leadership? Or in the country in which they lead?

Of course not, but it is questionable as to why you are reacting so emotionally.

Why is using profanity all of a sudden unacceptable? Or is it only unacceptable if I use it to criticise a person you admire and respect?

It's not "unacceptable" - it just doesn't have any place in a mature discussion. I don't have any respect for Tony Blair or George W Bush but that doesn't mean I feel the need to resort to profanity when discussing them.

Perhaps if I was shouting down an American leader you be hitting the "Like This" button under my post?

Not with such use of profanity and character attacks, no.

I could write mile long posts about her positions concerning apartheid, gay rights (she dismissed such a thing), describing feminism as poison etc. But why bother? Those who love her, will love her, those who don't, won't.

I neither love her nor hate her - I admire her conviction but oppose her legacy of privatisation. I simply wish that people would be objective in their criticism of her.

[compl3x]

Of course not, but it is questionable as to why you are reacting so emotionally.

It's my view that she isn't anywhere near the great leader that her idolises make her out to be. It is evident she was on the wrong side of history on many issues. My earlier remarks were more a statement of frustration than anything else.

It's not "unacceptable" - it just doesn't have any place in a mature discussion. I don't have any respect for Tony Blair or George W Bush but that doesn't mean I feel the need to resort to profanity when discussing them.

Not with such use of profanity and character attacks, no.

I don't understand why all of a sudden you are opposing profanity. I always read, and at times agree with, your posts & I don't recall you raising such opposition to profanity in the past. I find it peculiar that in this topic, concerning this leader, you take issue with it.

If you don't want to use profanity, more power to you. If you wish to be verbose and blather on for an entire sentence for which one word, let's say bull****, would be entirely sufficient, you're welcome to.

I neither love her nor hate her - I admire her conviction but oppose her legacy of privatisation. I simply wish that people would be objective in their criticism of her.

Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were true to their convictions too. ( I am NOT comparing Thatcher to any of those leaders, I am simply attempting to demonstrating a principle) Do you admire any of those leaders because they stood by their convictions, despite the harm and misery they caused?

[Growled Member]

I don't get it. Someone passes away and people are ecstatic over it. What I'm posting now is going to tick some off my friends off. For that I apologize, But I am a little annoyed at how people are cheering over her death.

Because they are mean little buggers with no respect for human life. They sound like small children that needs a spanking.

[He's Dead Jim]

Thatcher, continues to divide and rule. Even in death.