Margaret Thatcher Options

[stewiegriffin]

Finally she is gone.

Understand I would virtually never celebrate the death of anyone, but I am struggling to feel bad about the passing of the woman who ruined the life prospects of millions of ordinary people in Britain.

How about you? Happy, sad or indifferent to todays news?

[Andy Capp]

Any chance that the people to really 'blame' for anything good or bad any prime minister has done, is themselves and the people around them.

"The public gets what the public wants."

[Simon Kirby]

Any chance that the people to really 'blame' for anything good or bad any prime minister has done, is themselves and the people around them.

"The public gets what the public wants."

I associate the 80's Zeitgeist of conspicuous consumption and greed with Thatcherism, mainly because of the images of champers-quaffing yuppies getting-rich-quick on the floatation of public assets and deregulated financial institutions. Thatcher was responsible for the privatisation, but I don't know how much she was responsible for the consumption and greed. I think that's more easily seen as a reaction to the naff dreary 70's, and quite possibly has more to do with Dallas on the TV than domestic politics.

For me Thatcher's legacy was the closure of the uncompetitive heavy and manufacturing industries without any replacement. British industry had virtually stood still since the Great War and certainly since the thirties, so while Europe and Asia had been modernising and reconstructing since 1945, Blighty went into the 70's still coming to terms with the loss of Empire. Thatcher defeated the unions who had dogged the decade, but she did nothing to reconstruct and modernise British manufacturing, and the social despair that created in Wales and the North is still an appalling legacy.

Britain has some of the best universities in the world and Brits have a long tradition of invention, innovation and imagination, yet we're still waiting for a government to embrace that and give us something more than call centres to work in, though again this is as much a problem of our class-bound society with chinless public school wonders assuming the reins of industry and government irrespective of their ability to lead. That was the promise of Thatcherism, a classless society and country of opportunity, but Conservatism reigns and we're sill a nation of Lions led by Donkeys.