Baroness Thatcher stable - hospital

[Morris Onions]

Baroness Thatcher remained in a stable condition overnight in St Thomas' Hospital, in central London, the hospital said.

The 82-year-old former Prime Minister was admitted to the hospital on Friday night and was said to be undergoing medical checks.

On Saturday morning a spokeswoman for the hospital said: "Baroness Thatcher has remained stable overnight and we have nothing further to add at this stage."

...


http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5ih0reJlfBiagKuYrAwReFhegJqAA

[Mr Creosote]

1. So if she croaks

will there be, like there was with Reagan (and even on here), and outburst of "she wasn't as bad as everyone said", or will we jump for joy.:woohoo: :applause:

[non sociopath skin]

2. The former, I suspect.

As all three major parties now broadly subscribe to her ghastly world-view, it will be difficult for any party or any newspaper or periodical which has ever supported them to bad-mouth La Thatcha.

The Skin

[moggie]

3. Sod them

I'm getting my dancing shoes ready!

[Anarcho-Socialist]

8. I'll be looking for a copy of The Morning Star on that day

[LeftishBrit]

5. She'll never really die; her spirit will live on in others - including many Labourites.

According to the old song, Joe Hill never died as 'where working men defend their rights/ It's there you'll find Joe Hill'. One could write a bitter parody of that song:

"From Major down to Blair and Brown;
From London to D.C.;
Where goverments still crush the poor,
You'll there find Maggie T.!"

Anyway, as I said in another post, iron takes a long time to rust, especially when it's so careful to avoid anything Wet!

[non sociopath skin]

7. Looks like the process has started already ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/09/nthatcher209.xml

"Kindly little old lady" my arse!

I wouldn't reckon on her surviving the barrage of bread-rolls should Moore next treat her in a restaurant in Newcastle or Sunderland!

The Skin

[Donald Ian Rankin]

12. I hope neither; I suspect both.

Baroness Thatcher was the worst Prime Minister Britain has had for a century.

Nevertheless, when she dies we should respect her memory, and remain quiet for a time.

She was undeniably a woman of great ability, vision and dedication, who worked very hard indeed to do what she thought Britain needed, bestrode the politics of her age like a colossus, and changed the country more than any politician since Atlee; it's just a shame that her ideas of what Britain needed were so catastrophically wrong.

But by all means criticise her to your heart's content now, while she's still alive.


Actually, though, her death will cause renewed warfare between her supporters and her critics.

[mr blur]

4. She won't die - she's too mean,

to give people what they want.

[fedsron2us]

6. I am dreading her death

because on one side there is going to be a lot of sanctimonious mourning from her supposed political heirs in all the major parties while on the other there is going to be a lot of pointless celebration along the lines of the 'wicked witch is dead' (none of which will undo a single thing she did). What we wont get is much serious thought about here real role in British history. In particular many people will make the mistake of assuming that Thatcherism was somehow an ideology that she invented, and that might magically disappear when she died. In fact she was groomed for office by sectional interest groups who already had the nuts and bolts of Thatcherite ideology in place. She was essentially an agent of the process not its originator and when it was convenient she was replaced by others who continued to adhere to the same strategy.

I think the great irony of history will turn out to be that Thatcherism and its Reagonomic counterpart in the US will be destroyed by the financial institutions and the unfettered speculative capitalism it did so much to promote not by any act of the political left. In fact the best revenge for those who despise Thatcher is to wish her a long life so that she will still be around to watch the edifice she helped build collapse onto its rotten foundations. Given the current state of the credit market this implosion may well be sooner than many realise.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

9. Good post

The nuts and blots of Thatcherism were there in the Heath years, with the lessening of regulation in the credit industry and attempts to soften union influence in the economy. The political environment was of course different then and the Tory right had not yet secured overall dominance in the party.

We should also not forget that monetarist policies were introduced under Callaghan as part of the arrangement with the IMF and its loan. Those monetarist policies led to wage freezes and union militancy which brought Thatcher to power (who blamed the unions for faltering growth and unemployment, when the blame lay with the very monetarist policies that Callaghan had adopted) only for her to extend monetarism and use the apparatus of state to clamp down on trade unionism.

Thatcher was probably the luckiest Prime Minister in the 20th Century and Callaghan was one of the unluckiest. If Callaghan had used state finance to keep demand in the economy until North Sea oil started flowing (and rejected the IMF's terms), then public finances could have been stable and still provided for a social democratic system. It turned out that Thatcher's government would be the one to benefit from North Sea oil revenues, which she managed to squander on upper-rate tax cuts, and a massive increase in individual unemployment payments due to an enforced recession.

[LeftishBrit]

10. Good points

IMO, as you state, a lot of the rot started in 1976 with the IMF demanding that Britain follow more monetarist policies as a condition for their lending us money. And Callaghan was indeed fairly right-wing in comparison with previous Labour PMs.

However, I do think Thatcher and her powerful personality made a difference. I think that if she had not been PM, or had only served for 4 or 5 years instead of 11 (as might have happened if not for Galtieri), then the 'sado-montetarist' reforms might not have gone so deep; the industrial and trade-union base of our country might not have been so totally destroyed; and the change in social attitudes might not have been so profound. And the Tories might have been replaced by at worst another Callaghan instead of a Blair.

Very much a combination of existing forces, and a powerful and opinionated individual, who treated RW economics not just as necessary but morally virtuous, and got too many of the population to agree with her. Just the wrong person at the wrong time.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

11. I agree

The longevity of that era did enforce such a cultural change and embracing of the 'me generation.' ('sado-monetarist' I am so stealing that term!)

The Falklands War is a typical example of how lucky she was. Government incompetence had led to the Argentinian Junta believing that the UK would not resist a takeover. In any case, a lot of luck went the British Armed Forces' way during the conflict. A defeated campaign would have led to a Thatcher resignation I imagine.

Even so in the run up to 1997 and after, New Labour invented the '18 years of Tory rule' myth which they blamed the woes of the country on (only part of the equation, but yet they adopted those hitherto Tory policies later). They ignored the Callaghan monetarist period and how disastrous it was. 'The Boys From the Blackstuff' a social realist piece on economic woe and isolation in the working class was held up as an example of Thatcher's Britain, but yet it was written in the late 1970s when the Callaghan government was tightening spending with monetarist screws. I do agree that Thatcher's personality, her impassioned classical liberalism, the anti-communal Randian individualism did drive things further than what otherwise could have occurred with a different PM.