That link is to a story about 80 kilos of coke being found in Chelmsford...Uzique The Lesser wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22057928
amusing read on 4 cultures: US, canada, UK, france.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-08 06:59:26)
Last edited by Spark (2013-04-08 07:01:17)
she was a huge shift towards neo-liberalist trade policies and privitizing a ton of shit and riding reagans dick like no tomorrow.Spark wrote:
i've always been interested - why is/was she so single-mindedly despised by huge swathes of the population? were her policies that starkly offensive to those on the left or union types that i see people celebrating today?
likewise. id like to hear from zique why theres such huge discontent for her. i guess shes like the ronald reagan of the UK, you either love her or hate her.Spark wrote:
so that's why so many hate her? just because of that? i have heard about maggie's 3 mill etc but there's gotta be something more than that. just fascinated, that's all
she turned britain away from a socialist big-society project haven and prostituted it wholesale to reaganite neo-liberal guff (that's the extremists view, anyway). why does everyone hate her? well she tried to raise several ridiculous taxes on poor people, instituted widespread economic disenfranchisement and unemployment, killed off britain's manufacturing and secondary industry, concentrating all wealth and power in the tertiary london-based elites... oh, and was one of the biggest arms-dealers in british political history. she gave her beloved son lots of illegal-nepotistic arms deals off the back of all her foreign dealings. they both become multi-millionaires. he eventually got arrested for trying to stage a military coup somewhere.Spark wrote:
i've always been interested - why is/was she so single-mindedly despised by huge swathes of the population? were her policies that starkly offensive to those on the left or union types that i see people celebrating today?
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-08 07:18:55)
Last edited by Spark (2013-04-08 07:23:04)
and you talk as if "20 years after leaving office" is so long that it's ancient history. are you dense? neo-liberal fiscal policy led directly to the recent economic crash.Spark wrote:
to what extent was the deindustrialisation/deunionisation necessary, though (and to what extent was it an ideological crusade)? iirc britain's economy was in pretty bad shape through the 70s.
i genuinely don't know, i'm just sort of stunned by the polarisation she still seems, twenty years after leaving office.
It was a quite extraordinary end, but it was in keeping with everything important that had gone before. There was a continuity, not only in the texture of these events but in the circumstances of her long life and swift demise. Just as her triumphs were often rooted in her zest for combat, her refusal to listen to advice and her unwillingness to admit that she could be wrong, so were these the sources of her last predicament. Until yesterday, when all three habits were finally broken.
It is a shocking way to go. Having lost no vote either in the Commons or in the country, she was yet disposed of by the unaccountable will of fewer than 400 politicians. There has been nothing like it in the democratic era: no verdict apparently so perverse and unprovoked delivered by a governing party against a leader upon whom it had fawned and under whom it had grown fat for so many years. Many Conservatives will be thunderstruck by what they accomplished yeterday some, even among those who did the deed, will be ashamed. For the first time in her prime ministership she provoked, while not requesting it, the human sympathy reserved for a helpless creature at bay.
The symmetry between the life and the death was nonetheless compelling. She was a leader of lurid style and risky habits, especially in the field of personal relations. Aggressive to a fault, she spent years scorning not only consensual policies but the consensual demeanour. With nerveless indifference, she was prepared to see the larger portion of her friends as well as enemies in high places depart the scene as a direct result of her behaviour. A kind of rough justice therefore now prevails, its chemistry precipitated by the most enduring victim of these gross habits, Geoffrey Howe. She who lived by fire and insult cannot wholly complain when the ultimate insult repays her.
[...]
The first was the Falklands War. It was a prime example of ignorance lending pellucid clarity to her judgment. Surrounded by ministers who knew what war was and dithered at its prospect, she understood what the soldiers wanted and shirked neither the military consequences not the huge political risk. This quality of leadership was justly rewarded. She was, in fact, especially decisive in war. But for her it is also certain that American bombers would not have been allowed to bomb Libya from British bases in April 1986.
Second, the conduct of economic policy in the early Eighties owed almost everything to her moral fibre. It may have been a failed policy, but it was hers. She was committed to an economic theory and committed against caring about unemployment. When Lord Hailsham told her, in July 1981, that she would destroy the Conservative Party as surely as Herbert Hoover led the Republicans to oblivion in 1932, she spat in his eye. Blood on the streets did not alarm her, any more than the self-starvation of Irish republicans. She worried not about the jobless masses but the looted shopkeepers: a priority which, nine years later, no longer seems odd.
Third, and for similar reasons, the dethroning of trade union power would have taken a different course without her. She acted out with utmost seriousness the anti-union prejudice which most other Tories shared but which many of them had not dared to deploy. Public sector strife, culminating with the 1984 coal strike, was permitted to drag out as ministers watched with almost sadistic fascination. But without the gimlet eye of their leader upon them, their record suggests that they would have lost their nerve well before the desired 'demonstration effect', which always mattered more than the money, was achieved.
