'Which Prime Minister would you resurrect?' poll

hudois

Oh I forgot to mention, I too lived through the Thatcher era, and I can't think of anything good to say about it. 1979, the year the rot set in! Everything up for grabs! Finer points of life?? Community spirit?? Society?? What were they?? I've completely forgotten. Real quality of life?? what was that?

Torry_Quine

I am shocked that Margaret Thatcher is so in the lead. Have people really forgotten how she decimated British industry?

derglyn

I find it incredible that so many people have voted for Thatcher. Have they forgotton who fostered and encouraged the "greed is good" mentality which sowed the seeds for the banking fiasco which got us ALL in to this mess?

runaroundpauper

Sold the council houses to try and brake the unions if you have a mortgage less likely to strike
Broke up the glass steagle act that was put in place after the great depression this act stopped people over spending
Shut the coal mines and bring the coal from abroad brown and Blair have played there part in the downfall of this country but thatcher laid the foundation stones
:mad:

runaroundpauper

tescobabe69 wrote: »

What a shame John Smith didnt live longer, I truly believe UK would be in a different place now.

John smith the greatest prime minister we never had :beer:. RIP:beer:

RicoOS

etruscanshades wrote: »

Very sad that the two with the highest number of votes (Thatcher and Blair) are the ones who contributed most to the mess!

There is no-one on the list who is capable of sorting it out. We need someone who can ignore the vested interests of big business, banks and newspapers; who can sort out the bribery and corruption in politics; who can pump prime the economy with public works; nationalise utilities, banks and public service; take business out of education and health services; then and only then start reducing the public debt.

It'll never happen. We'll all suffer for many years; the rich will get richer and the poor get poorer.

Not quite sure how you think Maggie is responsible for the mess, unless you mean capitalism? I don't remember any large levels of public debt under Maggie, I don't remember public sector workers being allowed to hold the country to ransom, like the current lot are over their pensions.

What i remember is a woman with huge conviction, who tried to and succeeded in turning this country round, who brought it back from the brink of disaster and being the laughing stock of Europe, and who created the conditions that have allowed most people to enjoy a much higher standard of living for the last 30 years.

That Blair and Brown, then took that legacy of economic prosperity and built an idealogical (but utterly insane) way of moving the country forward, relying on massive levels of debt, that required the economy to carry on growing by at least 4%pa for the debt to be in anyway sustainable, is beyond doubt.

To blame Maggie for our current predicament, is to avoid looking in the mirror, to avoid acknowledging, that we not only spent vastly more than we earned in the last 15 years, but that we also kept voting back in a government, who lied, who raised taxes, whilst already recieving record tax revenues, who still borrowed vast sums of money to be able to overinflate the public sector (who mostly vote Labour), to not reform social security and allow hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to leach off the rest of us.

I'm very curious, how exactly do you think Maggie is responsible for our own stupidity?

RicoOS

runaroundpauper wrote: »

Sold the council houses to try and brake the unions if you have a mortgage less likely to strike
Broke up the glass steagle act that was put in place after the great depression this act stopped people over spending
Shut the coal mines and bring the coal from abroad brown and Blair have played there part in the downfall of this country but thatcher laid the foundation stones
:mad:

I dont think Maggie did eveything right, but you certainly have the blinkers on there.

Maggie may have shut the mines, but its was the NUM and Arthur Scargill who caused them to be shut. When the strike started, there were only a handful of un-economic mines due to be closed. Arthur Scargill, thought he could bring the country to its knees, and insist that we keep subsidising mines that were massively unproductive.

The trouble was that the NUM's intransigence, and inability to accept the reality of the situation meant that by the time the strike ended, virtually all of the mines were un-economic. that was not Maggie's fault in any way shape of form, try blaming the person responsible, Arthur Scargill.

Selling council houses, possibly not such a daft idea, but only if you allow more to be built, so I will agree that she got that wrong.

Yes she dramatically reduced the power of the unions, but if you think the unions were doing the country any good at all in the 1970's, then you need to take a long hard look at what was going on and take off the rose tinted specs.

Maggie wasn't some genius, she wasn't always right, however.

She always tried to do what she thought was the right thing (can any politician these says say that?). She refused to have us cow tow to europe and dramatically turned the economy of this country round.

Yes it was painful, but change always is, the difficult things that have to be done, are frequently going to be unpopular in the short term, that doesn't make them less the right thing to do.

Whats wrong with the country at the moment, is far too difficult to explain here in a few sentences. However most of whats wrong (not all) but most, can be squarely and firmly put at the feet of Mr Blair, and Mr Brown. They racked up the debt, they allowed millions to sit on their bums and do nothing, they introduced mass imigration and the human rights act, they signed us deeper and further into Europe after promising a referendum to get us to vote for them, and then refusing.

Gordon Brown is the man who can probably be said to be the single most responsible person for creating the conditions that allowed the credit crunch to occur, and we all carried on spending vastly more than we earned, with never a thought about, well this is going to be painful when we have to repay it.

The "growth" achieved in the economy from about 2000 through to 2007, was achieved by using debt, so in reality it simply didn't happen, and now, the world is starting to realise this, a correction is not only in-evitable, but neccessary.

We have lived with our heads in the sand and taken no responsibility for 15 years, and now we have no choice but to accept it, we are complaining... who voted them in? us, therefore who is responsible?

DebJC

Whatever you might feel about Maggie, she was totally committed to 'UK Limited'. She got us huge concessions from the EU that saved us billions.
Had bigger b***s than any of the others listed....!

Fran

RicoOS wrote: »

I don't remember public sector workers being allowed to hold the country to ransom, like the current lot are over their pensions.

Do you remember the Poll Tax riots?

Poll Tax

redux

RicoOS wrote: »

Maggie may have shut the mines, but its was the NUM and Arthur Scargill who caused them to be shut. When the strike started, there were only a handful of un-economic mines due to be closed. Arthur Scargill, thought he could bring the country to its knees, and insist that we keep subsidising mines that were massively unproductive.

The trouble was that the NUM's intransigence, and inability to accept the reality of the situation meant that by the time the strike ended, virtually all of the mines were un-economic. that was not Maggie's fault in any way shape of form, try blaming the person responsible, Arthur Scargill.

Coal mining had been subsidised just about forever, in almost every country it occurs, and in many was still subsidised for years to come, for overall strategic reasons, the growth of the rest of the economy.

There was 300 years worth of coal still in the ground, and even people who had voted Conservative all their lives were saying that she'd gone too far and it was ludicrous to close it all down, when investing in new methods would keep some of it going for many years more.

But no, the policy was informed most of all by Thatcher's sheer hatred of the miners, based on previous strikes, and her will to rub their noses in it, whatever the economic points for or against.

If it's so unconscionable to subsidise energy generation, why is that exactly what is happening at the moment with other methods?