Mrs Thatcher once said something to the effect that Tony Blair was the legacy of which she was most proud. In short, she reckoned that she had successfully managed to make Labour look like a down market, pound shop imitation of herself and her Tories.
I suppose it beats her legacy of broken people, broken towns, broken lives, broken dreams… and the whole wealth of the UK being centred on her beloved London. But it was a sad day for the noble Labour movement which had achieved so much for us (especially through the work of the post war government of Clement Atlee, without whom I suspect we would still be living in the 1930s).
I suspect Mrs Thatcher would have been decidedly less proud to know that she had inspired the political career of Nicola Sturgeon.
So, I guess that would explain why, to me, Nicola is a bit of a hero.
In a way, Nicola’s statement makes it worth the inordinate cost of the state funeral Thatcher got when she finally left us in peace.
If she left us a broken country, at least she inspired someone who can fix it if we’ll let her.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
I have such painful memories of that time… yet in many ways we were freer then than we are now. I say that despite Thatcher’s anti-gay legislation, and regulations that meant I could never hold a serious post in the Civil Service because I was a “security risk”. So Thatcher as one major factor in my deciding that I could not stay in the UK and pursue my career at the sort of level I wanted. State funeral? I spit on their State funeral.
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I’m with Frankie.
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I’d have done my share of the digging.
There was only a small section of society that she didn;t hurt. Basically, that would be her husband’s friends.
Ironically, the only “friend” she seems to have had outside politics, was Saville. I’ve always thought that she used him to make it look as if she were human (turns out she misjudged that too), and he used her because, with friends like her (and Charlie), he was untouchable.
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Yes – Saville. And on the international scene, that dictator’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Like Thatcher’s mini-me May holding hands with the Mango Mussolini in the White House, and her assignations with that bulwark of respectability in Ankara, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I hesitate to mention those lovely Wahhabites she’s in bed with in Saudi, because I think maybe she’s doing it on a purely economic basis. A few thousand dead DWP sanctions victims don’t bother her at all, or the fate of a few thousand child refugees in Calais, or the thousands of other who disappear along the way or drown in the Med, so it’s just plain silly to expect the deaths of Yemeni women, children and other non-combatants to trouble her conscience in the slightest.
Behold the true face of compassionate conservatism.
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Look at all the money they have lavished on Buckingham Palace and Westminster… and the way they have looked after Tory MPs that lost their seats, making them aristocrats and all…
No lack of compassion in the Tories… it’s just not for ordinary human beings.
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That was wickedness, Ed.
And as for the funeral…
That Cameron should even have suggested it was a travesty. That the queen agreed to it, elevating her to that kind of status, is beyond credulity.
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A silver lining, to a very large and dark cloud.
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True, but in this place you have to be grateful for the smallest of mercies.
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The main reason that Thatcher was elected to power was to confront the trade unions who were perceived by many as the tail wagging the dog.
The culture in the UK of confrontation between capital and labour never allowed any sort of partnership as exists in Scandinavia and Germany.
Her policies of Englishman’s home being his castle,complete with moat and drawbridge,went down well in Middle England which allowed her to get away with most of her other nasty ones,especially if it was far away in a country known as Scotland.
A very very nasty piece of work whose evil has lived long after her departure.
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Yes. I think it wold be fair to say that the unions had become very powerful, and that there was no one competent in management to sort out the problems.
Many of the people who struck in the 60s and 70s, had been in the war; many had suffered years of deprivation fighting for their “green and pleasant land”.
They found that when they came back after a jolly “thank you chaps” (and to be fair a health service and welfare state) nothing much had changed. Beck to work now men… cop chop…
The modernisation that happened in much of Europe passed the UK by as the money was spent on rearming and research into the “atomic bomb”, lest Britain be left behind in its ability to kill people, or, worse still, not included at the top table with the big boys.
Conditions in factories remained dreadful and pre-war. No wonder the unions got out of hand, striking over the quality of the toilet paper, etc. Workers on the continent weren’t expected to tug forelocks in the same way and bow to profit before everything. Try that with the French Syndicats de métiers!!.
But largely she was, and still is, hated with passion here for shutting everything down. No matter how much Colonel Ruth thinks we’ve forgotten her, because Ruth was barely a private at the time, she still evokes incredible hatred in many Scottish people.
I’m not by nature a vindictive person, but I thought that it was fitting that in her last years she suffered badly from ill-health, physical and mental. I’d probably not have wished it on her, I’m not that kind of person, but I certainly lost no sleep over the story that her repulsive daughter told about the fact that they had to keep reminding her that Dennis was dead because she kept forgetting. She relived it every day.
Maybe just a little taste of what it was to loose everything, which is what she made sure happened to so many ordinary people not of her class…or the class she aspired to be.
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I had a relative who kept asking where her dead husband was. My wife made a photo album up of portraits of the family, with one of her husband on the front page with the date of his death and where he was buried in large print. She’d always say “Aye that’s right, he’s ower yon dyke isn’t he” pointing with her thumb at the window. (She’d lived next to a cemetery for forty years.)
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I wonder if the odious Carole thought of doing something like that…
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Tris, let’s not forget the other guy in all this, who seems to have written out of history. I refer of course to that bastard MacGregor.
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I’d completely forgotten about him… and there were others. Michael Edwards, Keith Joseph… et al.
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Shame your true loyalty lies
With the Thatcherites ‘Unions too powerful getting out of hand ! The fact is tris you are a capitalist roadster
Who imagines if only the bosses/ rulers/slave masters
Treated people more humanely everything would be fine.
You and the other nats have
only got the freedom you have due to organised workers ,
Still no doubt in an Independent Scotland you will be happy to kiss your master erse .
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Auch away and no be so stupid Niko. That is SOOOO wrong.
As far as I’m concerned I’d have been happy if they had brought down the British state. Lock stock and barrel.
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That’s not our mindset, Niko, it’s the Thatcherite one. The adversarial relationship between Capital and Labour and the neo-liberal consensus have no fans here at Schloß Freeman-am-Tay, also known as the Dundee People’s Socialist Independentist Collective when I’m feeling particularly pissed off and annoyed with some Blairite Trade Union bugger expressing slavish devotion to the British State, and I am reminded of the missing verse of the Red Flag bout Trade Union officials, the one they never used to sing at Labour Party conferences:
“The working class can kiss my arse
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”.
Well, no, maybe not People’s Socialist Collective; I’m more of a fan of the Nordic social democratic partnership model which – and this would make me rub my hands with glee – pretty much demands the abolition of the aristocracy, and even if you decide to hang on to a monarch as a non-executive Head of State, they’re cut down to size and have to take the tram like everyone else.
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I’m all for that.
Can you imagine Princess Beatrix on the underground in London with one of her stupid hats on, in the crush?
It brings a smile to my face.
I wonder if these women even know what the underground is…
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I worked in 3 factories in the 70s and nobody in any of them wanted to go on strike. It was always a last resort, people had bills to pay etc… Some firms were so down at the heel I think they saved money when every body was out but by and large striking was not desired by the workforce.
To hear the tabloids and the BBC of course, folk were striking at the drop of a hat for all sorts of trivial shit and the workers were being ruled by left wing revolutionary types. They were bringing Great Britain down and a hero was sought, to rise from the chaos so we got Thatcher.
Yes there were more of us with communist leanings back then and yes we weren’t predisposed to take the shit they preferred to dish out but there were lies told aplenty by the propaganda machine.
It’s not that different from the lies they’re telling about us now come to think of it
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The thing is though, that British workers weren’t treated the same way the many continental workers were treated.
I was interviewing a bloke a few years ago for a job as a welder. He had all the certification etc, and when I told him the wage he nearly fainted.
He had been working in the Netherlands. He described the conditions and told me the wage. There was no way that the company I was recruiting for could begin to match either.
He was a nice guy and after the formal interview, when he had indicated that he wouldn’t touch the job, I asked him why he had come back to Scotland. He said that he and his Scottish girl friend wanted to live together.
You can get by in the Netherlands (at least in the cities) without speaking a word of Dutch, if, as he did, you work in a factory. She however was an office worker. And you can;t get an office job without speaking Dutch.
They, like a lot of Brits, simply wouldn’t learn a second language… so, he had to come back here and work at a vastly reduced income in comparatively bad conditions.
British management can’t get past the class thing. And back then it was worse, I guess. Know your place.
Tabloid press, and that’s nearly all of it these days, owned by super rich people who don;t live here, spews out largely right wing propaganda. Cleverly it does it such a way that “ordinary” people take it on board as gospel.
The BBC isn’t a lot better.
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This is possibly the first disagreement I have had whilst an afficionado of your blogs – unlike Niko.
I worked with the Dutch for a number of years, abroad and in The Netherlands.
Whist in the home office of my employer I never had to resort to speaking Dutch due their consideration that my skill in that area was extremely limited whereas their language skills and witty sense of humour (in many respects very Scottish) was second to none. There were an extremely few Boer-types who would be reluctant ‘spreke Engels’ but still politely did so.
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I think what the guy meant was that his girlfriend couldn’t deal with phone calls or personal enquiries from members of the public.
What he seemed to be saying was that the Dutch seemed to feel that, in their own country, they had the right to speak their own language. However, I base all that on, as I said, one conversation with one bloke who I interviewed.
That is a limited experience if ever there was one, and of course he could have been lying through his teeth. People do at interviews.
Maybe he was a crap welder and the Dutch told him to go home and do crap welding in Scotland! 🙂
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Thé German Nationalists (Nazis) used to say the unions were too powerful . UKIP says the same as do the Conservatives even Tony bliar agreed as do the USA republicans
Your in with a nice bunch of people there !
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I didn’t say they were too powerful. On occasions they abused their power.. you know over toilet paper etc, but the point I was trying to make was that the British state was too stupid to manage trades unions that were only trying to get eh same kind of deals as workers in Germany and Scandinavia got automatically.
No criticsm of them intended.
I say more power to their elbow, but the British government, with great support from the people, saw unions diminished and then Thatcher closed everything down and opened a money knocking shop in London.
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The torys did then what they’re doing now, they blamed people. Backed up by the media they blamed the unions for the state of the economy and enough of the population believed it so they could be voted in and change the laws. Once the population were convinced, union power was harked back to in successive years as a bad thing, laws were changed and we are left with the employee rights (or lack of) that we have now.
They are blaming people again but this time it’s the poor, the vulnerable etc.. and have imposed austerity. I’m not going to say anymore about that because it’s been discussed at length on Munguin.
What we had in the 70s and 80s was a mini class war that the state won. They diverted attention from government mismanagement onto the trade unions and sold the British people a pup.
The only place I ever heard about TU abuse of power was in the media. As I said in my earlier post, it was not what I directly experienced.
Striking over toilet paper, I’ll take a bit of convincing that actually happened.
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greig
Bit like the eu bent banana just a load of lies
The problem is like the over powerful unions
Enough believed it to be true.
The indisputable fact is we’ll organise unionised
Work places have the highest wages the most holidays
The best pensions and sick pay,,
No wonder the bosses and thier stooges
Hate and attack organised working people .
It’s the working class people who agree with
The bosses to thier own detriment .
Which I have ever found amazing
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I heard that the straight banana story was invented by Boris Johnson, a young reporter, on a boring day in Brussels.
He would be their foreign secretary and senior diplomat now. Nothing can ever hurt him. If he is sacked he has enough to live for in the Bahamas or BVI for the rest of his life without thinking of ever doing another hands turn.
People with that kind of freedom from need to earn, are dangerous.
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The infamously fragrant BoJo has been sacked before. Here’s a shortened link to a story in the Indy, “Why are we so surprised that Boris Johnson lied when he’s been sacked for lying twice before?”, which I remembered and finally tracked down at great personal cost after much effort and frantic goog[Shut it. The people are not in the least impressed.-Ed.] http://tinyurl.com/yavyrky5.
Highlights:
“… During his time as Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, a former colleague recalled that ‘Johnson’s half-truths created a new reality … correspondents witnessed Johnson shaping the narrative that morphed into our present-day populist Euroscepticism.'”
“In 1988 the young Johnson was sacked from The Times for fabricating a quote in an article, and in 2004 he was ‘relieved of his duties’ as shadow arts minister of the Tory Party for allegedly lying about an extra-marital affair.” The person he lied to about his affaire du coeur, or possibly his affaire de la verge, how would I know, was Michael Howard, who I think was Chief Whip for the Tories at the time. Another very fragrant individual.
Actually, I couldn’t care less about what the man does or has done with his dick, but he is completely lacking in principle and honesty. Not to mention tact, diplomacy and gravitas, what the French call “le sérieux”. So make him Foreign Secretary, why doncha…
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LOL.
Good old Bomber Howard.
I read it somewhere that Mrs May chose the most awful ministers possible to be in charge of Brexit because she wanted it to fail.
Personally I don’t believe that because even she couldn’t be stupid enough to think that it wouldn’t reflect on her that she’d chosen the wrong people for the job.
We should always remember that May has no ministerial history of success. She was a terrible Home Secretary…full stop.
Her failure to control borders is legend and she was responsible for a string of appointments of judges looking into child abuse, that were so inappropriate that it leaves you open mouthed.
I can’t think of one thing that she succeeded at.
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An evil bastard that was directly responsible for thousands of deaths through her policies. I grew up with folk she killed.
I was thrown out of a pub for cheering, when ‘get on your bike’ was handed down on a stretcher in his striped pyjamas from his room in the Brighton Hotel.
Fuck her. I hope she was still alive when they buried her.
And fuck all those that still want us to be part of her rotten, corrupt state.
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They were all pretty inhuman.
I think that they are exceptions when it comes to treating people with human dignity.
The showed no compassion. Many people feel none for them.
As ye sew… so shall ye reap, sort of thing.
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Tris, I think I can say a couple of good things about Margaret Thatcher. One, she’s dead. Two…well, maybe not two good things. By the way, I’m surprised you managed to find such a flattering picture of her for the one at the start of your post. seriously, Thatcher did leave us one lasting, important legacy – she showed us how selfish and inhumane a large proportion of the U.K. are: she finally put the lie to all the pish about the decent, upstanding, polite, considerate British “chap”.
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Aye two was a kinda ambitious target to set yourself on such a hard subject.
She made greed and nationalism respectable. She was all about the flag and the greatness of Britain. And she was all about personal greed and “loadsamoney”.
I think that British values were always dubious, but she made people proud to be greedy, selfish and heartless.
Looking back I can’t think of any one good things she did. Even Blair did a few things right.
She was simply repugnant and all her friends were too….especially Saville… but many others like him for whom she covered up.
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Only in America
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/08/09/little-legs-are-dangling-out-the-bag-mom-charged-after-her-baby-was-rescued-from-the-trash/?utm_term=.ad3f00e20588
At first, Karen Seals thought the sounds coming from her neighbor’s garbage bag were from an animal trapped inside. Wary, she and her sister grabbed a stick and went to investigate.
According to The Washington Post’s Ben Guarino, in 1999, Texas governor George W. Bush signed the first safe-haven bill into law after 13 dead infants were found in trash bins in Houston.
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Jeeeeeez…
That’s so incredibly horrible.
But we have monsters too.
Do you remember the story of Little Brandon Muir in Dundee.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/exclusive-brandon-muir-uncared-for-in-life-1012445
I’d like 10 minutes with each of the adults that were responsible for the wee lad.
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