Maggie Maggie Maggie!

One or two people who are too young to remember have asked me what all the fuss is about Margaret Thatcher...

Well, here's my tuppennyworth...

These are the things I remember most about Maggie.

• Awful patronising tone when talking to anyone at all
• Support for Apartheid South Africa
• Using the police to stop people legitimately using roads in coalfield areas during the miners strike (they'd arrest everyone who wouldn't turn back at road blocks and the courts would declare it illegal and let them go - then it'd happen again and again and again)
• Related to the above, using the police as a political tool
• Presiding over the conversion of the economy from manufacturing to 'services' which seems to mean moving money around from screen to screen and pocketing massive profits without actually doing anything useful (until it all went wrong)
• Her 'Victorian values' - not so much civic pride or public sewer building but a general prejudice against gay people and foreigners  
• The massive and deliberate shift of power away from trade unions and their members to multinational corporations
• Complete lack of sympathy bordering on contempt for workers, Northerners, working northerners and the unemployed (and more I'm sure)
• Social values based on promoting and rewarding selfishness and greed
• Holes in the road
• Selling Council houses off with no intention of building any new ones
• Oh yes, there's the massive hypocrisy of that Francis of Assisi quote about harmony!

The Thatcher government was the only time I can remember when the government seemed to actually be out to get me.  Not the same as not representing me or representing other interests - but actually out to get me personally for not toeing the line.

The sad fact is that she did win - greatest legacy being New Labour and the myth that only private enterprise works.  I give you German Railways as a quick example.  And British ones as another!

That's enough Thatcher...