Margaret Thatcher dies of a stroke.

[tonyh29]

Has any party, ever, got over 50% of the votes in a GE?

 

 

 

Edited April 11, 2013 by tonyh29

[LondonLax]

Yesterday's shenanigans in the Houses has cost us the taxpayer an additional £2m quid !!! Un ber **** lievable

Imagine how many snow leopards could have been saved with that money

 

WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE SNOW LEOPARDS!?

 

 

[Awol]

In summary:

 

 

[peterms]

David (two brains; neither functional) Willetts adds his voice to the eulogies for his esteemed former heroine:

 

Battling for individual freedom, however heroic, was not all there was to her politics. I remember mentioning to her that we were following a policy of laissez faire. She was wary. “No,” she said. “Ordered liberty.” Perhaps she objected just because it was French but there was a deeper objection too. She knew that rampant individualism was shallow and unsatisfactory. Those entrepreneurs she loved often used their wealth for outstanding acts of charity — which she expected to grow as taxes were cut.

Her Christian beliefs were an important part of this. Although she became an active member of the Church of England she had been brought up a Methodist (though it was “rather boring” she told me once). She brought the moral seriousness of the provincial dissenting tradition into the heart of modern Conservatism. For her the free market meant personal moral responsibility too.

And back in the land of truth and sordid reality, Mehdi Hasan gives a more factual account of her real-life actions with regard to freedom:

 

The reactions and tributes to Margaret Thatcher's death have, perhaps above all else, illustrated the way in which modern conservatives have emptied the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' of all meaning and import.

 

"The world has lost a true champion of freedom and democracy," declaimed Nancy Reagan.

"She believed in the power of liberty, individual freedom and the rule of law," argued former Tory minister Virginia Bottomley.

"The freedom of the individual stood at the core of her beliefs," claimed Germany's very own Iron Lady, Angela Merkel, while Poland's foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, called Thatcher a "fearless champion of liberty".

The Economist magazine hailed the late Tory leader's "willingness to stand up to tyranny" and "bet on freedom".

 

And it wasn't just card-carrying conservatives who lined up to laud Thatcher as an unflinching defender and promoter of democracy; self-professed liberals joined in with the encomiums too. Echoing Nancy Reagan, US president Barack Obama, for instance, described Britain's Iron Lady as "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty".

 

I suspect, however, that the citizens of countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iraq, South Africa and Chile might disagree. The inconvenient truth for Thatcher fans is that the freedom-loving, democracy-defending British premier was a close friend and admirer of the thugs, thieves, despots and racists who ruled over those nations in the 1980s.

"In Pakistan, Margaret Thatcher was best known for supporting General Zia ul Haq's military dictatorship," tweeted Time magazine's Pakistan correspondent Omar Waraich yesterday, referring to the Iron Lady's anticommunist alliance with the country's vicious, Islamist dictator. In a speech at a banquet hosted by Zia in 1981, Thatcher praised the general's "courage and skill" and toasted "the health and happiness of His Excellency". She made no reference to the need for democracy or elections in the self-styled 'Islamic Republic".

Consider also the case of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Remember the infamous Al Yamamah arms deal with the corrupt and totalitarian Saudis, signed by the Thatcher government in the mid-eighties and described by the Campaign Against The Arms Trade (CAAT) as "the largest ever UK arms contract with a foreign customer" and by the Financial Times as "the biggest %5BUK%5D sale ever of anything to anyone"? Well, she was just batting for British business, right? Wrong. Thatcher shamelessly praised the Saudi regime, an absolute monarchy and exporter of Islamist terror, as "a strong force for moderation and stability" at a Chatham House conference in 1993, three years after leaving office. "I am a great admirer of Saudi Arabia," she proclaimed, adding: "I have no intention of meddling in that country's internal affairs." How the repressed women of Saudi Arabia, denied not just the right to vote but the right to drive, must have cheered this supposed feminist icon back in 1993.

How about General Suharto of Indonesia, whose 32-year dictatorship was rightly described by the New York Times as "one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century"? Suharto's military coup in 1965 was followed by the torture and killing of around 500,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia; his invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975 resulted in the deaths of around 250,000 men, women and children on the island - yet the liberty-loving Thatcher later celebrated this blood-soaked Indonesian tyrant as "one of our very best and most valuable friends".

 

How about the bloodiest dictator of them all, Saddam Hussein? According to investigative reporters David Leigh and Rob Evans, it was on Thatcher's watch that "£1bn of Whitehall money was thrown away in propping up Saddam Hussein's regime and doing favours for arms firms".

In fact, we now know that the Thatcher government began selling arms - sorry, "non-lethal equipment" that just happened to include spare parts for tanks and fighter jets - to Iraq as early as 1981. A letter from junior minister Thomas Trenchard to the PM in that same year explained how a meeting with Saddam would represent "a significant step forward in establishing a working relationship with Iraq which ... should produce both political and major commercial benefits". Thatcher's response? "Very pleased" she scribbled by hand at the top of Trenchard's letter.

Seven years later, after the Baathist dictator deployed chemical weapons in his now-notorious attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, Thatcher did not merely turn a blind eye to the atrocity; she and her ministers actively played down reports that the Iraqi regime had used poison gas against its own people. "Within a month of the Halabja attack," wrote US investigative journalist Barry Lando in his book on Iraq, 'Web of Deceit', "Thatcher's trade secretary, Tony Newton, was in Baghdad to offer Saddam 340 million pounds of British export credits."

This, I guess, is how liberty is championed and freedom is secured.

 

Then there's apartheid South Africa, where millions of black people were denied the most basic of liberties - and yet this British champion of liberty had little to offer them by way of support. "Thatcher resisted global efforts to isolate apartheid-era South Africa, including by vetoing sanctions," wrote the Washington Post's foreign affairs blogger Max Fisher yesterday. "Though she opposed apartheid as a policy, she still supported the government that implemented it..."

In fact, in 1984, Thatcher defied tens of thousands of anti-apartheid demonstrators and invited P.W. Botha to Chequers: the first South African premier to visit the UK since his country's departure from the Commonwealth in 1961.

Oh, and who can forget her despicable description of Nelson Mandela's ANC as a "typical terrorist organisation"? Is it any wonder then that Dali Tambo, son of the former ANC president Oliver Tambo, told the Guardian that "it's quite likely that when Margaret Thatcher reaches the pearly gates, the ANC will boycott the occasion". It's a shame, he noted, "that we could never call her one of the champions of the liberation struggle".

Apologists for the Iron Lady tend to excuse such shameful and anti-democratic behaviour by their heroine by invoking realpolitik and citing the backdrop of the Cold War and the struggle against Soviet communism.

Such arguments are both disingenuous and unconvincing. They don't, for a start, explain Thatcher's close, personal friendship with Augusto Pinochet, which continued long after the Cold War had ended and long after both leaders had left office? The Chilean general presided over a 17-year reign of terror in which a minimum of 3,000 people were killed or 'disappeared', tens of thousands were imprisoned and tortured and hundreds of thousands were forced into exile.

Yet in 1999, when Pinochet was arrested and detained in London on a Spanish warrant, Thatcher - who, in the words of Virginia Bottomley, believed in "the power of liberty" and "the rule of law" - visited Pinochet at the former dictator's rented Surrey mansion to thank him for "bringing democracy to Chile" and to denounce his arrest as "unjust and callous". There was no mention of the 'desaparecidos' (disappeared) from our former prime minister on that particular occasion.

"She recognised... the benefits of the military government," declared retired Chilean general and Pinochet underling Guillermo Garin yesterday, adding: "President Pinochet always had tremendous admiration for her, they had a very close relationship highlighted by the visit she made to his place of detention in London."

Forget the row over who gets credit for the fall of the Soviet Union - Mikhail Gorbachev or Reagan and Thatcher. If (wo)man is judged by the company (s)he keeps, then Thatcher - self-professed friend to generals Pinochet, Suharto and Zia, ally of Saddam Hussein, admirer of the Saudi royals, soft on apartheid - must be judged a champion of despotism and dictatorship, not of freedom or liberty. The historical record is so clear and indisputable that to believe otherwise is wilful blindness.

[blandy]

 

In answer to both Peters posts ...people will stick to almost any line as long as its the line of their party, whether deep down they really believe it or not...

Just for clarity, Adam, "Labour/New labour/One nation labour" or whatever they want to be this week is not "my party", I'm not and don't write down my thoughts based on any allegiance to any party, as I have none.

[bickster]

Because Thatcher was on the same scale as a rapist or a paedophile. Always find it funny when people use paedophiles as well, in an argument. Most people don't even know what one is.

 

She was evil on a much greater scale than any paedophile I can think of (Oh hang on, what was the Roman emperor before Caligula again?), but perhaps not to the same degree.

 

Again with this word paedophile. Do you even know what that means?

Wonder if the Witch knew the meaning of that word, she had Britain's biggest one round for xmas dinner every year after all, not to mention the aide that was allegedly mixed up in the North Wales Childrens home scandal that was covered up by….

[bickster]

blandy, on 11 Apr 2013 - 12:53, said:

Houlston, on 10 Apr 2013 - 21:16, said:

In answer to both Peters posts ...people will stick to almost any line as long as its the line of their party, whether deep down they really believe it or not...

Just for clarity, Adam, "Labour/New labour/One nation labour" or whatever they want to be this week is not "my party", I'm not and don't write down my thoughts based on any allegiance to any party, as I have none.

Yes, yet another they must be Labour post

[Rodders]

In summary:

Just realised I dont think i know any Jews personally. Shall make a note not to have any more empathy and anger on their behalf with regards the holocaust.

[Mantis]

Now people are comparing Thatcher's premiership to the Holocaust? Jesus **** Christ.

[Rodders]

My point is regarding the ridiculous claim that lack of personal connection = not allowed to have empathy withother people is frankly offensively absurd. There are victims of events great and small contemporary and historical to whom I have no personal link at all except a general vested interest in words removed being called to account and sympathy / empathy for those who merit it.

[peterms]

In answer to both Peters posts ...people will stick to almost any line as long as its the line of their party, whether deep down they really believe it or not...

Just for clarity, Adam, "Labour/New labour/One nation labour" or whatever they want to be this week is not "my party", I'm not and don't write down my thoughts based on any allegiance to any party, as I have none.

 

And for further clarity, I'm not a Labour voter either.

 

I've voted for them in the past - in fact I've voted for five different parties in general elections.  So I also reject this "party line" categorisation of my views.  It's inaccurate, intellectually lazy, and no more than a means of dismissing an opposing view without engaging with it.

[Awol]

In summary:

Just realised I dont think i know any Jews personally. Shall make a note not to have any more empathy and anger on their behalf with regards the holocaust.

Perhaps first ask a Jew in their early 20's how their lives have been personally affected by the holocaust. That should make for an interesting conversation.

[Awol]

Now people are comparing Thatcher's premiership to the Holocaust? Jesus **** Christ.

Indeed. To demean genocide in such a way is utterly pathetic and offensive - but sadly predictable, particularly on this thread.

[Awol]

Even a Guardian conducted poll found a majority in favour overall of Thatcher's legacy.

 

[Richard]

Does that count though as its not over 50%

[Jon]

Since when is 50% a majority?

[StefanAVFC]

Again with this word paedophile. Do you even know what that means?

 

I think so.

 

It's a menace to society comparison.

 

You bought scale into it, that's where Thatch wins hands down.

 

That's not a definition of what a paedophile is. Just for the record, there's a difference between a paedophile and a child molester.

[colhint]

Couldn't you do it like the whiskas adverts

 

59% of cat owners who expressed at preference

[StefanAVFC]

In summary:

Just realised I dont think i know any Jews personally. Shall make a note not to have any more empathy and anger on their behalf with regards the holocaust.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

 

[CI]

Cameron has really gone down in my estimation this last 48 hrs