the question borns because our president has this woman as idol. How is she remembered in his own country? Did she do anything good?
by sandwichdemilanga
the question borns because our president has this woman as idol. How is she remembered in his own country? Did she do anything good?
by sandwichdemilanga
32 comments
I’m southern and mid-30s, but I understand why the northerners in this country hate her so much. What she did in Liverpool in particular and the mines were outrageous. Deep dive into what they got up to while she was in power. Not nice reading for working class people.
Then again, the current day Tories haven’t been much better either, so it’s no surprise she didn’t give a fuck about the public during her time as well.
She sold our future for a quick buck.
She introduced the right-to-buy scheme which meant people would have a right to buy their state-subsidised housing. On paper, this sounds great, but it left us with a chronic shortage of social housing as no effort was taken to replace the vast quantities of houses sold with new builds.
I cant really comment on the miners strikes, as a soft southerner born in the 80s I’m not familiar with a lot of the finer points.
Pure evil.
She took so much and funneled into the pockets of her lunatic friends and snuggled up to a man with severe dementia because they hated the same people.
She lead the Right-wing and ultimately returned Britain to a monarchy ruled by Australian billionaires.
She’s burning in hell right now, along with every Tory that followed her.
She’s the one that sold off everything in order to give tax breaks without any thought of what will happen in 10, 20, 30 or more years down the line and those privatised companies just paid their executives and shareholders instead of investing in their infrastructure.
She‘s also the one that stole the milk from the children.
Horrible person. And left a legacy of selling off housing stick while forbidding councils to borrow to replenish. Selling off water and utilities to for profit (foreign) entities without guardrails. Smashing towns and communities. For what? ‘Greed is good’. No thanks.
I’m biased, I grew up with Orgreave on my doorstep and us Yorkshirefolk know how to hold a grudge.
Frankie Boyle did a joke about giving every Scottish person a shovel to deliver her to the devil himself, but I’m fairly sure people from my area of a certain age would rake the dirt away with their bare hands at twice the speed.
She was a strong leader who got things done which to some maybe admirable. However, most of her policies were catastrophic for working class and low income people especially those in the North of England, Wales and Scotland. Her absolute belief in free markets and privatisation has had lasting catastrophic consequences on public services. Although she is still highly regarded by many more wealthy and conservative people for sorting out the stagflation of the 70’s there has been an increasing revisionism around her legacy amongst the wider public as wealth has failed to “trickle down” and privatised public services continue to crumble. I think the only thing most people in Britain still hold in high regard over is the Falklands war. She is a very decisive figure though, so someone else could easily give an entirely different view to this.
Awful. Ruined and demolished social and council housing, fucked the uk economy to make it more ‘service based’ so now we rely fully on china and the us because we make nothing as a country thanks to her. she also caused the down fall of so many northern towns by abolishing all their industries and not putting anything in place for all those lost jobs. She fed the rich and treated the working class like animals. I don’t know how you can support her tbh.
I am conflicted about her
She was politically Mike’s away from where I am
I dislike significant portions of the decisions she made in power.
However I do believe she was acting in the way she thought best for the uk.
She also did the right thing in the Falkland Islands.
She is hated and rightly so by lots of people
But on balance I can’t manage more than dislike
She more or less pulled Britain out of its own local version of economic troubles that were being felt across the developed world. She likely only got the chance to take it to fruition because Argentina invaded the Falklands and we won that war, mind you. She wasn’t popular at all before that.
She’s also one of the main authors of many of the country’s current problems. She set a trend of liberalisation and privatisation that none have deviated from since. She started a process that has ultimately sold virtually all the social housing, and now housing costs are the highest they’ve been in over a century. She destroyed unions and now the likes of Amazon and Evri run amok. She’d have a lot to answer for if she was still around.
She was a massive ideologue that some have the balls to paint as a pragmatist. Fuck her and every politician that apes her, imo.
She was the one that started the UK down the road to Privatised everything and loss of service.
Her and Reagan championed capitalism saying that the profits would ‘trickle down’.
Has this happened ?
Has it hell!
The millionaires became billionaires.
I think she was awful. Her policies were awful. Mind you, she wasn’t awful in the same way that Boris Johnson was awful. I think she believed that her mindset was right for the country but she had no empathy and no capacity to put herself in other people’s shoes.
I’m also quite suspicious about the amount of time she spent with Jimmy Savile and the way she clearly liked him. That’s weird. Everyone who was anyone knew what he was doing.
I hate her with a vengeance and if the fires of hell exist she is enjoying her torment. Growing up in the 70s and 80s l knew that things had to change but to destroy the society and culture of our once great country with no sensible plan those fires will never be hot enough
If you were a blue collar worker you were basically scum to her. She wanted the UK to be a fully white collar country and she wanted London to be the financial centre of Europe.
So the northern working classes had no voice at all and were treated like animals. This is still plainly visible in 2025 when you see post-industrial shithole towns up north now with high unemployment. You can still see her damage.
Or with the internal leak at the time of putting Liverpool into “managed decline”.
Just a vile woman and I say that as a Londoner.
She was an elitist who forced thousands of people into poverty rather than use tariffs on coal
Specifically because the coal mining unions were strong at that time, she is hated by the poor and loved by the rich
Hated her with a vengeance. I used to turn off the TV or radio when she came on. I couldn’t stand the sound of her voice. But at least she was a conviction politician rather than a politician with convictions.
As a northerner my grandparents and parents hated her. If I would have said anything positive about her I would legitimately be disowned. There were particular argument when she had a state funeral. She did a lot of damage and destroyed many communities especially among the miners.
She can get fucked. Absolutely fucked up the north and the country too in the long run
Hope her Alzheimer’s riddled arse suffered as she died
Her only lasting achievement was that she introduced the worlds first public toilet – her grave
Scumbag bitch had kids hiding under tables in the north for years. All the jobs fucked off, the trains and everything else that got privatised went to shit because of her ideals. Get pissed up with the fellas on her anniversary every year
The brooch is a little too far to the right of the lapel for me. While the earrings are also maybe too conservative to my taste. The pearl necklace offers a very royal and strong look; which even by today’s continuation of similar trends, might divide opinion. The steely iron glare in the eyes personifies this, I think. However the heir of this woman is undoubtedly a travesty.
Terrible Prime Minister and terrible ‘leader’.
A smart person would have said, look, we need to move away from coal but we can’t do it overnight. We need to put in place alternative employment opportunities and be proactive here, before we close the pits.
A smart person would have said, we need to in place plans to replenish affordable housing stock before we start selling it off.
A smart person would have let the nationalised water industry keep investing in replacing the infrastructure instead of preventing it from doing so, so the figures look good when you go to sell it.
The trouble was she didn’t lead. She had ideas and imposed them without having consultations, listening to others, adapting, etc.
One of the things I remember was the first state opening of Parliament after she’d gone. John Major and Kinnock walking to the Lords through the lobby, chatting to each other in a friendly manner, and the commentators remaking how different that was to the Thatcher era.
Putting my personal politics to the side for a moment, there have been Conservative leaders that I think I could have a beer with in the pub, have a polite friendly debate with them, and walk away afterwards thinking, I may not like their politics but they seem like a decent person: Major, Sunak, Heath, May, Hague, all spring to mind.
Thatcher, like Truss, Johnson, Howard, Duncan-Smith, are all in the wouldn’t go near them with a barge pole category.
As for Cameron. Not sure. I get the feeling he’s two-faced (just not very good at it, or not as good at it as Johnson).
By the way, there are some Labour politicians I would be very wary of as well. Fortunately none of them are in a position of power at the moment.
Together, her and Ronald Reagan did irreparable damage to the working class and the planet at large. The reason everyone is unable to buy a house and billionaires have 95% of the wealth while everyone else gets none is becuase of what these two did
She changed a country that’s for sure. Your geographical proximity to London and the Home Counties and being middle class determine somewhat whether you like her. A grest deal of Northerners, Midlanders and left wing Southerners dislike her greatly.
She represents the final nail in the coffin of British Industrial Might though not just the cause.
If there is anything nice to say about her, it’s that she believed in a better future for her country, which any senior government leader and politician who followed her has failed to project
Come and visit the poorer parts of Northeast England sometime. Look around really hard. The devastation, the impoverishment. The closing of mines left vast swaths of people without income and selling off our shipbuilding when we were amongst the biggest shipbuilders in the world crushed us. She drained us of life’s blood. She created a legacy of generational benefits families that we have never gotten past. We should have pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps, but then she took away our children’s milk, and hearts broke and bones became brittle (metaphorically).
Now, for full disclosure, I wasn’t born here, but I’ve grown to love the scruffy beauty of this place. When I learnt the history of how things used to be and the legacy of poverty and downtroddenness Thatcher placed upon it, I sat by the side of the River Wear and wept.
She was (still is) seen as an icon in my home country (the US). I grew up listening to her accolades being sung. And then I moved here and learnt the truth from the people who lived it. Eyes open.
I look at that photo and see a ruthless woman who sold those least able to defend themselves for nothing worth the cost.
Absolutely ruined the area I grew up in and it never ever recovered. Did the sort of permanent damage that trump is doing to America right now it doesn’t ever get fixed.
That said I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that she did a good job on the Falklands by allowing the professionals to do their jobs and not micro managing them, which a lot of leaders can’t do and haven’t done historically.
Shes a divisive figure in England. Loved by most right wingers, but her policies were disastrous for working class folks & the negative effects of them are still felt to this day. Most people will agree she ‘got stuff done’ or was a ‘strong leader’, regardless of whether they think the stuff that got done & the leadership was good or bad.
There’s a lot of obviously biased responses here. You have to review her with the context of the times.
The UK, before her, had incredibly high inflation and very little Economic Growth. Inflation is sticky- left unchecked it rises and rises. You end up in the situation Argentina has been in.
Unproductive sectors, which would have slowly faded over time, were being kept up with subsidies. The Government was paying companies, such as coal mines, money to produce goods people didn’t want.
British GDP per head had been overtaken by most of Western Europe. This needs to be contrasted with the legacy of being the wealthiest major European power in only 40 years before. Britain was dubbed the Sick Man of Europe, but it was not in the short term interests of many to fix it.
A lot of the band aids were ripped off. Particularly sectors struggled fast and collapsed. The problem was that particular areas, such as Mid Wales and North England had areas dominated by those sectors left to fail on market terms. This led to local collapse and resentment.
However, one must largely blame the Government who continued to subsidise those areas previously. They had no time to adjust to the changes of the times. Indeed, if she hadn’t done it, do you really think we’d be subsidising our coal mines in 2025?
I’m mixed about her.
On one hand, she wasn’t afraid to state what she believed in. She was one of the first major world leaders to speak publicly about climate change and its effects on the environment. She also negotiated the UK into the European Union with several exceptions that the nation benefited from while maintaining EU perks, I don’t believe many “rejoin EU” supporters know that its unlikely that the UK will secure what exceptions it had pre-brexit (the two most notable being staying out of the Shengen Area and the Eurozone). Finally, her efforts in the Falklands are respectable. She made it clear that the nation wasn’t going to tolerate unprovoked attacks like this. No wonder she was called the “Iron Lady”.
On the other hand….her internal policies were silly at best and disastrous at worse. Closing several northern industries for simply being unprofitable was absolutely ridiculous, and the treatment of miners (and their unions) was unacceptable. Her privatisation of a lot of sectors in the UK too was something I greatly disagree with. While it may have helped short term, it effectively sent the nation several steps closer into being a corporate playground, favouring companies over the people. The UK is one of few European nations that still has privately owned nessestities, water for instance being a pretty controversial one. Her effects on the economy arguably can still be felt today.
Overall, she left her mark in more ways than one.
Her privatisation fetish has been a disaster, as has her prioritising of services over manufacturing, as has her concentration of the nations wealth in the SE.
In fact her legacy is one of social division, increased inequality and failure.
She was a symptom of the greed and cruelty that has been allowed to grow in this country for many decades. She had no compassion for anyone but the rich. I have nothing good to say about her, but imagining she alone is the issue lets the system off the hook.
As a scouser I absolutely despise this woman. Blamed the Hillsborough disaster on the Liverpool fans, closed down all the factories in the north, and said she would happily let Liverpool go on a decline after the Toxteth riots, when there were also riots in many other major cities
She would have been voted out if The Falklands war hadn’t kicked off.
According to Mori opinion polls in the Autumn of 1981 Thatcher was the least popular Prime Minister since records began. She was less popular than Micheal Foot, the Labour Party leader who was very much like Jeremy Corbyn!
Some of her notable actions amongst many:
She made it more difficult for Teachers to protest. They were only allowed to protest about pay, which made them look stingy.
She destroyed whole communities.
She privatised as much as she could.
She thought ‘trickle down economics’ was a valid economic strategy.
She sold off lots of council houses.
She introduced poll tax.
She was anti-feminist.
She was homophobic.
She stopped milk going to schools.
Most people despised her as she made the majority of people’s lives more difficult.
Her own party and cabinet were constantly trying to oust her.
Only Tories really like her and have turned her into an icon through revisionism.
Tories are selfish, cruel and often corrupt creatures, who once they get their hands on power inevitably wreck the country.
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