RIP Sir Patrick Moore

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Have you considered getting counselling for your obsessive adulation of a a politician a generation gone?

[polygonum]

Don't put your hand in cold water...

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Huge writes

She forced through changes in housing benefit which made me homeless at the age of 17. That's why I can't wait for the evil old bitch to pop her clogs.

[Huge]

You allow your bigotry to blind you. She was just another politician. Self serving, hypocritical, egotistical. Not significantly different to B'Liar. What I find sad and pathetic about you Thatcher obsessives is that she's been gone 22 years now, and yet you're *still* whining on about her. You're no better than those plonkers in Northern Ireland, still going on about a battle that happened 322 years ago.

[Huge]

Have you considered growing up and getting on with your life? No matter what happens, your 17 y/o self is never going to get his housing benefit back. And given that all politicians have their hands in your pocket, expending time and energy on one who's been gone 22 years is singularly pointless.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

Oh, I did, thanks. As you well know.

You weren't made homeless at 17, were you?

I don't bear grudges, but I'll make an exception in that woman's case.

[Tim Streater]

I was effectively homeless at 19 when my father died. Does that count?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Really.

As well as many others, she ruined my industry and perhaps more to the point caused me to loose a job I loved. Not because that industry was 'inefficient' or losing money, but so she could give the profits to her pals who supported the Tory party in the form of large donations.

In just about your every post, you only seem to think of self interest. So allow me the privilege of doing the same this once.

[Tim Streater]

Which industry was that then?

[charles]

she also didn't understand the phrase "public service", which is why the BBC is what it is today.

[harry]

Why is that more important than any other temperature?

[harry]

Didn't your parents love you enough to keep you at home? I was with my parents until I was 26.

[PeterC]

no need for the mantissa - the bp of water is rather variable for any practical use.

[Java Jive]

I can remember Panoramas about homeless people living in cardboard boxes in Thatcher's Britain. THAT's when it began, Labour didn't do anything much to improve matters - which from their political persuasions they ought to have, and nothing can absolve them from blame for that - but they didn't START or CREATE the sort of uncaring society that we have now. That was entirely down to Thatcher's period in Office.

Consider some of the slang that originated at the time ...

YUppy Young and upwardly mobile, 'on the make' Wrinkly Old person Crusty Down and out person NIMBY Not in my back yard

... Doesn't sound like a caring, sharing society does it?

Then consider who they cynically targeted besides their political opponents ...

Unemployed Travellers Hippies Environmental campaigners

... All people who are politically weak and easy to look strong against.

Then consider the utterly cynical double-speak, for example the advertising campaign that first got her elected ...

"Is this the queue for the cinema?" "No, it's the queue for the dole!"

... and then look what happened to unemployment after she came to power!

And then there was the poll tax, which was so unfair that no less than

6 million people refused to pay it, including myself. At the time it came in, my wife and I were both only in part-time employment, and really struggling, yet by a stroke of a Parliamentary pen were suddenly expected to pay to local government 4x as much as we had been. Meanwhile, there was a rich woman in a large house in Hereford who was paying less than her gardner. I knew a shopkeeping couple who were local activists in the Tory party, had been for years, and they both resigned their membership over it.

Then there was the cynical control of the media ...

I used to roll out of bed at six o'clock to take B to a bus stop in a neighbouring village, so that she could wend her way up hill and down dale to work many miles away, to accomplish which I was woken every morning by Radio 4. One day therefrom I vaguely heard news of an anti poll-tax demo somewhere big and important, Birmingham IMS, but was too sleepy to catch any real sense of it. I dozed on, thinking: "I must listen out for that later!" But by later bulletins, the item had completely disappeared, without apparently having been displaced by anything more important. I have always believed the BBC were leant on and buckled.

Someone filmed an APT demo in the sleepy, peaceful town of Leominster. They rang up the local TV station to see if they wanted to use the film: "Was there any disturbance or violence?" "Of course not! This is Leominster!" "Then we'd have no use for it."

I attended an entirely peaceful APT demo in Cheltenham, when the Tory Party Conference were in town. We were kept away from the Town Hall where the conference was, but we wended our way peacefully enough through various suburbs, finally to be addressed by some speakers in some public gardens. While we were filing into this space, there were some disreputable looking characters who hadn't been on the march urging us to go down to the Town Hall, but I didn't see anyone follow them. After the speech, we all got back into our transport and departed as peacefully as we had come.

That night I watched the news. There was about one minute on the demo, of which about 5 secs were about the march, and 55 secs about violence down at the Town Hall.

Then there was the Spycatcher fiasco, wherein we in Britain were not allowed to read what the rest of the world could read. I had a copy of the book brought in by a colleague at work visiting the US.

I am in my sixties, and never have I felt more like I was living in George Orwell's 1984 than when that very year came round.

Well, there you have a large part of the problem.

[charles]

[Snip]

how so? Unless she wasn't really rich.

I resigned my membership before that - over the Falklands invasion.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , charles writes

Did the single person not receive an education or benefit from the education of others? I believe Quakers acted very bravely helping wounded soldiers during WW1, perhaps pacifists should elect their share to some worthy cause. I don't see the relevance of Social Security and poll tax.

I can understand your resentment at being asked to contribute towards what had hitherto been funded by others.

[polygonum]

One of the difficulties that private health care has is when the failure to provide resources comes back to bite.

For example, leaving tuberculosis sufferers untreated can result in more cases among those who would otherwise be regarded as low risk. I believe this happened in New York where it was demonstrated that self-interest would be a good reason to fund treatment. But that is very much not paying for what you get/use.

Similarly, our lack of smallpox as a risk is not something that could have been achieved by the sufferers paying.

Even our half-way decent sewerage system results in benefits to all - even if paying for it falls disproportionately.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

They were responsible for the same collapse in much of the rest of the world too?

How long have you had your head in the sand?

And how long will this present lot blame the last lot - while things continue to get worse?

[tony sayer]

I remember in those good old days my first wife who was a nurse and an excellent old school one at that.

However the hospital workers were on strike and wouldn't let her past their line to get into the hospital to tend to her patients...

So if Thatcher or a Tory government didn't come to power what do you think would have happened to the UK?..

[Steve Firth]

The Brown/Balls economic illiteracy was responsible for Britain's recession being deeper and longer than it should have been. They spent money hand over fist, gave tax concessions at the wrong point in the economic cycle and, in the most disgraceful of incidents, sold the UK's gold reserves when the price of gold was at an all time low.

Are you speaking to yourself at this point?

As long as they have to impose financial constraints caused by the mismanagement of the last lot, one supposes. Labour doing what they always do, spend, spend, spend then spin around when the money is gone, run away and let someone else make themselves unpopular by cleaning up Labour's mess.

At least this time is has been a coalition that has had to do the clean up, showing that whoever gets in after Labour has a task of Augean proportions.

Must be terrible for the left not having Thatcher to whine about.