Breaking news: Margaret Thatcher has died

[derspiess]

LOL, Morissey.  All sad, all the time.

My wife likes that fucker.

[CountDeMoney]

LOL, Morissey.  All sad, all the time.

My wife likes that fucker.

All naturalized citizens need to learn how sad sad can truly be in English.

[Duque de Bragança]

Jake: most of your defense of the wankishness on display over Thatcher's death has been related to directly affected communities like coal towns, but as someone else pointed out (I think Speesh) those don't seem to be the same people guzzling champagne in city squares.  They look more like hipster doofuses striking a pose.

If it's the UK, it may be real champagne. 

[Admiral Yi]

Not only miners were affected by her policies.

Definitely.  Are you suggesting that all those people celebrating are descendents of people affected by her policies?

[Viking]

Jake: most of your defense of the wankishness on display over Thatcher's death has been related to directly affected communities like coal towns, but as someone else pointed out (I think Speesh) those don't seem to be the same people guzzling champagne in city squares.  They look more like hipster doofuses striking a pose.

If it's the UK, it may be real champagne. 

I can't help but wonder if it hadn't been for Thatcher they would never have been able to afford real Champagne.

[Agelastus]

A total ramble, I'm afraid, without any real coherent argument or endpoint...

I sometimes think that the fact that I was certain that Bush Junior would find some way to go after Iraq even before 9:11 (because it was "unfinished business" of his father) was because I grew up in the Eighties in Britain.

It was a very "personal" decade, if you take my meaning. One wasn't a bystander, even as a child.

My family was, and is, relatively pro-Thatcher. My mother was an accountant, my uncle-by-marriage a man who'd left the insanities that seemed to govern British industry for teaching. My grandfather a man who'd risen through his company to become a factory manager who'd seen every effort he made to modernise his factory and product range scuppered either by higher management or the local unions (although that part I didn't learn until only a couple of years before he died.)

They were definitely supporters of a meritocratic society, as Thatcher clearly advocated at base despite the class-based rhetoric of British politics; they were also people who'd lived through the Seventies.

One of them, today, when I mentioned that most of the celebrators at the street parties didn't even look as if they'd been born when Thatcher was PM commented that that also meant they "hadn't experienced the alternative to her that was the Seventies".

There was, definitely, a post-War consensus in Britain on many issues (unwise as I think it was in many respects.) People seem to think that it was broken down by Thatcher. I personally think that it broke down in the Seventies, certainly by the middle of the decade. The poison in British politics that still bubbles up today was born in the Seventies, a decade when the Miners, for example, did successfully hold governments to ransom.

It was the poison built up in the Seventies that burst in the Eighties...and the Eighties pretty much exhausted all sides leading to twenty years of what may in the future be termed the Major-Blair consensus.

I think that people like Shielbh don't really understand how draining the Seventies were on the British psyche simply because they were born after it was over; I can barely get a sense of it myself due to my earliest memories and the hold it has on the previous generation of all my relatives, not just my immediate family. It was a decade when if it could go wrong it did go wrong, where Britain flailed about aimlessly, where the Unions sometimes seemed to run the country...where a generation that had grown up on tales of the War and the semi-dignified retreat from Empire faced the shame of their government needing to ask for the help of the IMF.

I've never hidden my pro-Thatcher tendencies. I have a great deal of trouble even comprehending how people like Tyr can think the way they do in general despite, in the specific, being able to agree with some of the points they make. Britain in the early Eighties was sick both economically and politically and something needed doing about it. Letting the country lurch on as it had been doing was simply not an option. The real question is if there was an alternative to Thatcher - could Geoffrey Howe, acknowledged as a very capable chancellor and certainly an individual who appears in history to be a more caring person than Thatcher, have done it? Was there a comparable figure on the Left with a compelling vision? Unfortunately, I don't think so.

Anyway, one last ramble...someone earlier in the thread pointed out that the Sixties and the Seventies had opened up education to the masses and that helped break the stranglehold of "the right people" on various fields and industries. Something that nearly made me choke on my drink given the exact converse is true. The rush to Comprehensives (for which Thatcher herself must take a chunk of the blame from her days as a minister), for example, promoted education to the lowest common denominator. Which is a major reason why we have lower social mobility now than we did fifty years ago during the age of the Grammar Schools. And why Public Schools have actually reinforced their hold on Oxbridge etc. places to the extent that heavy handed (and pointless) intervention is now deemed necessary.

Anyway, enough rambling for now...

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Incidentally, I don't think Thatcher would have wanted the kind of public funeral she's going to receive. I think she'd have been happier with a private service. Does anyone else agree?

[derspiess]

That is because, and this is my personal impression, deep down and excepting an extremely vocal fringe, you Yanks are largely speaking extremely reverential of your authority figures, and the president is the top dog amongst them. You may not like him, and despise government and bureaucracy, but damn, he's the motherfucking president.

I think you're confusing extreme reverence with a simple respect for the office.

[Viking]

Incidentally, I don't think Thatcher would have wanted the kind of public funeral she's going to receive. I think she'd have been happier with a private service. Does anyone else agree?

I think she thought this through some time ago before she started going senile. I think that if it were only for her own sake she wouldn't have wanted the public funeral. The thing is all PMs get some form of public funeral and not having one would have been just as much a public statement as having one. The size and pomp of the funeral is a manifestation of her (and her policies and stewardship) importance to the UK and the reverence in which her legacy is held.

I think in her mind the size of her funeral should be smaller than Churchill's but bigger than Atlees, Wilsons, Callaghans and Heaths.

[Viking]

That is because, and this is my personal impression, deep down and excepting an extremely vocal fringe, you Yanks are largely speaking extremely reverential of your authority figures, and the president is the top dog amongst them. You may not like him, and despise government and bureaucracy, but damn, he's the motherfucking president.

I think you're confusing extreme reverence with a simple respect for the office.

The thing with Prime Ministers is that there is no reverence for the office. The PM does NOT represent the nation or the people he/she/it merely is the temporary leader of the most powerful faction within politics. You should not respect the office, at all. The US equivalent is Eric Cantor, not President Obama.

[grumbler]

I can't think of any other Western leader who described a large chunk of their country as 'the enemy within'.

Obama.

I would have gone with the Clintons and their VRWC myself.

No, the VRWC was entirely different.  It was a reference to the other party's leadership and their media allies, not to "a large chink of the country."

[garbon]

but as someone else pointed out (I think Speesh) those don't seem to be the same people guzzling champagne in city squares.  They look more like hipster doofuses striking a pose.

Garbo gets the credit for that.

Oddly enough, I think mongers was the first one who said it.

[Jacob]

A total ramble, I'm afraid, without any real coherent argument or endpoint......

I thought it interesting

[garbon]

That is because, and this is my personal impression, deep down and excepting an extremely vocal fringe, you Yanks are largely speaking extremely reverential of your authority figures, and the president is the top dog amongst them. You may not like him, and despise government and bureaucracy, but damn, he's the motherfucking president.

I think you're confusing extreme reverence with a simple respect for the office.

Indeed. We talk a lot of shit about our presidents.

[Neil]

You're under the impression that the unions were rational actors, rather than groups that had ruled the country for the last two decades and who would react very badly indeed to anyone trying to weaken them.  And that's exactly what they did.

The unions != Scargill

The NUM had been the muscle of the British labour movement for years.  In a very real sense, Scargill was the most powerful man in the world of British labour.  You tend to think that history began in 1979.

[Admiral Yi]

The thing with Prime Ministers is that there is no reverence for the office. The PM does NOT represent the nation or the people he/she/it merely is the temporary leader of the most powerful faction within politics. You should not respect the office, at all. The US equivalent is Eric Cantor, not President Obama.

The issue as I see it is more one of democratic legitimacy rather than reverance for an office.  Part of being the citizen of a democracy IMO is accepting the will of the voting public when it goes against your own.  The people who are now saying fuck Maggie Thatcher are in effect saying fuck the people who voted her into office and kept her there for that long.