UK's Thatcher, rot in hell . . .

I'm not sure what your point is dronester, but but mine is that singing a ding dong the witch is dead at a funeral is disgusting behaviour but is slightly less revolting than personally shouting "rot in hell you bitch."If you don't know why, you're probably the sort of person that would do it.Secondly, Thatcher did a lot of things that needed to be done here in the UK in the 70s and, like most leaders, she was hated by some for doing them.Equally she did a lot of things that I disagreed with. But that's just politics - the same has been said about Churchill.And don't get overexcited about Pinochet either - I obviously meant to say that she brought down the nasty military junta in Argentina under Galtieri. Pinochet provided the UK with a lot of help with the Falklands and she stayed pretty loyal to the turd thereafter. Politics and war is not a clean business.

It seems I don't have to try, but no, I realise I'm dealing with an adolescent so I'm mostly ignoring your poor behaviour.

Pretty much, yes. I'm not particularly interested in your 'factS', it's your rabid hatred for someone that you have no personal knowledge of and your demonstration of it that's the issue here.You know, the "rot in hell, bitch" thing.

Most of us on the liberal left are capable of a more nuanced approach than simply hating a democratically elected political leader and behaving like a badly bought up child when she dies. That sort of thing is reserved for the extremes of all parties.

Well, they did vote her in 3 times and is the longest serving Prime Minister in the 20th century. That takes some explaining.

It's a democracy; it appears that those that wanted her out couldn't persuade enough others to do anything about it.If she really was that awful, it's odd that so many didn't care enough to vote her out.The first time may have been put down to a mistake, the second absentmindedness, but a third? A simpler conclusion is that she was what the country wanted - regardless of our opinions, the war and the voting system. People rarely elect leaders for their humility and certainly not Thatcher, you can't claim she was falsely representing herself - not three times and not her - she was wiziwig.

That's a rather difficult point argue, given that they voted her in three times. She found herself in that position three times. People knew what she was but they either liked it or didn't care enough to vote the other way. Careless of the electorate but surely no surprise?

If we're going to be picky, I think it's more accurate to use advertising weasel words, something like 'of those people that expressed a preference, Margaret Thatcher had the majority vote.'When used in the '9 out of 10 cats, that expressed a preference preferred Shitallot' TV advert, we can assume that a large number of cats just eat anything they were given and were perfectly happy to be given it.If those that didn't express a preference didn't want her to be Prime Minister, it's fair to assume that they would have voted for someone else and not simply gulped down the Shitalot after having three chances to ask for a nice bit of fish.

In short, no.She had a majority, she gets to do what she campaigned on - plus a few surprises. If people don't like it in sufficient numbers, they vote her out and she doesn't get to do it anymore.Asking the winning party to moderate itself ain't much of a strategy for the losers.

Well, as you know, that's how the game is played in the UK and they all play to the same rules. Absolutely no party is ever goiing to hang back because of arithmetic. A win is a win. The real issue is that not enough people cared enough to vote at all, let alone vote her out. Three times. That's really hard to get around. The cliche is that all political careers end in failure of course - it's the nature of the fight and the nature of those that get into the ring. The beauty of democracy is that our leaders CAN be kicked out. There are few Prime Ministers that retire gracefully without a murmur.The only one I can think of off-hand is that slimy git of a closet Catholic and hidden conservative, Blair who's a bigger toerag by a mile than Thatcher - at least with Thatcher she didn't hide the knife and stabbed you full in the chest.

I think we're labouring this somewhat. Thatcher would say that conservatives won more parliamentary seats than any other party, therefore Conservatives get to do their thing and they don't need to concern themselves about whether the majority of the population wants them or not -they won fair and square and have a mandate to do what they said they'd do if they won.(It's just a function of their being more than 2 parties to vote for - if there are other parties strong enough to split the vote, acheiving 51% of the vote is unlikely.)But I find myself defending Thatcher, which is not a position I'm comfortable with, so I'm going to stop now.

Ok, I know i said I'd had enough of defending Thatcher who isn't someone I voted for or ever would but...I don't know how many people didn't vote at all in the three elections her party won, but their non-votes are as important as the votes. If those people that didn't vote thought she was ruining the country they would have voted. The simple fact is that they didn't and enough people did to re-elect her.But as I said much earlier, you had to be here at the time to actually understand what was going on. The trade unions were in charge of the country without a vote at all. I was employed by what was then the Post Office, which was a branch of the Government and contained both HM's Mail and Telecommunications. It was a closed shop - i was forced to be a member of its trade union or be fired. The trade union held a block vote at the Labour Conferenece and simply dictated what policies Labour would run with.There were loads of mad and egocentric trade union leaders around at the time - one of them virtually closed Liverpool. Newspapers couldn't modernise and working practices had been hi-jacked.Those policies had bankrupted and ruined Britain - we were a basket case with massive inefficiencies that had killed our major industries. Manufacturing was a joke - a British built car was a pile of loose rust that no-one wanted to buy. There was a three day week, rubbish piled in the streets and we had routine blackouts as strike after strike ground everything to a halt.There was no way anybody but a Thatcher could change that - it had to be almost despotic and brutal, no middle way, coalition minded liberal democracy could have done what needed to be done - it had to be broken into such small pieces that it couldn't be put back together again. Then, when the nasty job had been done, she needed to be taken out and shot.The first past the post system works well if you need to make major changes because you can elect someone, get the job done, then kick them out. We've seen only this week that Obama couldn't get some relatively non-controversial policies on gun control passed because another part of government didn't want it. That's not 'pure' democracy either - but I digress.Thatcher was a massive figure in world politics and she admired and hated with equal love and venom - because she changed things, permanaently. And like Churchill, we dropped her like a hot brick as soon as the dirty job was done.I never voted for her, her politics are an anathema to me and many of the things she did in her later years were just stupid and awful, but I do admire her for turning our country around. Without that we'd be in a bigger mess than Greece.[I bumped into her - almost literally - a couple of years ago in Parliament. She was walking up some stairs I was walking down. She gave me the most amazing withering look "what the fuck are you doing on these stairs, can't you see I'm using them" kind of look. She was decrepit and looked tragic, but she still had steel in her. I almost felt sorry for her Cabinet Ministers, she could kill with that look.]