How would Thatcher have handled all this?
Discussion
said:
Every day that I wake up, watch the news, read the papers, or generally survey my surroundings, and wonder how much better a place this country might have been if Margaret Thatcher had chosen a career other than politics is a day too many. The all-pervading mentality of craven, me-me-me self-interest and an almost spiteful disregard for one's fellow human beings, dressed up as a belief in the rights of 'the individual', is something she and all of her cheerleaders helped to legitimise. The irony being that, even as it continues to throttle the life out of this country, they're now the 
s who complain about it the loudest.
They moan about chavs, single mothers, gangs of feral kids, and the under-educated/uneducated (non) working classes, yet they never seem to consider that there might be some connection between the rise of the terminally feckless and the decision by Thatcher's government to let an entire generation essentially rot on a point of ideology.
You see, all these chavs/single mothers/feral kids/thick proles who are now the focus of so much hatred are the sons and daughters of the people she put out of work; people who measured themselves by what they did for a living, who were abruptly told they had little or no further value to society (which didn't exist, remember), and who consequently, in many cases, didn't pass on any sense of social responsibility to their kids.
After all, most of them had grown up seeing their parents or grandparents do little else other than get pissed and sign on, so it wasn't as if there was anything to aspire to. And if we hadn't spent the last thirty years watching the governments of just about every major industrialised nation in the world pursuing economic policies that are Thatcherite in all but name, considerably fewer of us might have spent last few Christmases peering into the economic abyss.
There might also have been fewer people going into politics, not out of any sense of public duty, but as a means to a non-executive directorship at an arms manufacturer, or as a sideline to their career as a property developer.
People might be more inclined to think of decent levels of education, healthcare and public transport as things which make life more bearable, and which are therefore worth spending money on, rather than as simply a source of profit for whichever cowboy outfit that puts in the lowest tender. For 'trickle-down economics', read 'trickle-up morality'. You fking know I could go on.
All these things were brought to you, either directly or indirectly, by Thatcher. She made this country what it is. Praise and give thanks.
s who complain about it the loudest. They moan about chavs, single mothers, gangs of feral kids, and the under-educated/uneducated (non) working classes, yet they never seem to consider that there might be some connection between the rise of the terminally feckless and the decision by Thatcher's government to let an entire generation essentially rot on a point of ideology.
You see, all these chavs/single mothers/feral kids/thick proles who are now the focus of so much hatred are the sons and daughters of the people she put out of work; people who measured themselves by what they did for a living, who were abruptly told they had little or no further value to society (which didn't exist, remember), and who consequently, in many cases, didn't pass on any sense of social responsibility to their kids.
After all, most of them had grown up seeing their parents or grandparents do little else other than get pissed and sign on, so it wasn't as if there was anything to aspire to. And if we hadn't spent the last thirty years watching the governments of just about every major industrialised nation in the world pursuing economic policies that are Thatcherite in all but name, considerably fewer of us might have spent last few Christmases peering into the economic abyss.
There might also have been fewer people going into politics, not out of any sense of public duty, but as a means to a non-executive directorship at an arms manufacturer, or as a sideline to their career as a property developer.
People might be more inclined to think of decent levels of education, healthcare and public transport as things which make life more bearable, and which are therefore worth spending money on, rather than as simply a source of profit for whichever cowboy outfit that puts in the lowest tender. For 'trickle-down economics', read 'trickle-up morality'. You f
king know I could go on. All these things were brought to you, either directly or indirectly, by Thatcher. She made this country what it is. Praise and give thanks.
said:
Cameron bleated on about the ‘Big Society’ – a cheap poorly thought out soap box agenda to please middle England village dwellers – get together and put things right, but more importantly a subtle abdication of governmental responsibility.
What about the deep urban city dwellers? The overlooked societies and smaller communities left almost to fend on their own? Estates over run by gun toting drug gangs – viciously and unremittingly violent.
13/14/15 year old boys brought up on the myth of LA rap gang culture posting macho man posturing on social networks – re-inventing the myth that it is a deadly thing to ‘diss’ a young man’s honour. Until we hear of young teenagers murdered, lying dying in the streets crying for their Mothers – blood and piss mingling amongst the stench of wasted promise and opportunity.
What about the marketeers and the salesmen? Disseminating the youth culture and beyond, giving everything its bracket and niche – milking the pound after pound after pound.
A consumerist machine that plies its trade hard on a person’s life being lacking for not owning – an iphone or a laptop or a training shoe or a handbag or an Australian suede boot or insert your own electronic weakness here.
The baby boomers’ kids had kids and the lack of a moral centre was apparent then – and we are reaping what we’ve sown since the heady days of Margaret Thatcher and the implied policy of ‘I’m alright Jack’. The well embedded FHM, NUTS culture promoting deeply destructive sexual discrimination and sexist stereotypes on young naive men under the banner of fresh, vibrant, equality driven sexual liberation.
The global network giving you what you need and when you need it 24 hours a day – removing the need for social responsibility and replacing it with corporate allegiance – ignoring the moral and social vacuum already well formed aided and abetted by their vacuous parents.
This is the 24 hour, be all you can be, pop star in a heartbeat, live, live, live for the expensive moment – don’t be told you can’t do anything world of the emotionally bereft.
The world of Pay day loans and cheque cashing and cash converters and 50% apr credit cards and General George and four car families.
This is the world that we live in.
There’s a lot of truth in this quote from Eric Anderson – “The most insidious influence on the young is not violence, drugs, tobacco, drink or sexual perversion, but our pursuit of the trivial and our tolerance of the third rate.”
At the very least I think society has allowed a lot of our inner city youth to embrace the third rate.
It’s allowed a swathe of socially immature boys and girls to take their video games into the streets, and once again the papers are selling – selling moral indignation and peddling by-lines meant to promote the fear that the big bad world is out there are going to get us all in our sleep.
Sorry folks, but there’s a lot more to this than just criminality.
What about the deep urban city dwellers? The overlooked societies and smaller communities left almost to fend on their own? Estates over run by gun toting drug gangs – viciously and unremittingly violent.
13/14/15 year old boys brought up on the myth of LA rap gang culture posting macho man posturing on social networks – re-inventing the myth that it is a deadly thing to ‘diss’ a young man’s honour. Until we hear of young teenagers murdered, lying dying in the streets crying for their Mothers – blood and piss mingling amongst the stench of wasted promise and opportunity.
What about the marketeers and the salesmen? Disseminating the youth culture and beyond, giving everything its bracket and niche – milking the pound after pound after pound.
A consumerist machine that plies its trade hard on a person’s life being lacking for not owning – an iphone or a laptop or a training shoe or a handbag or an Australian suede boot or insert your own electronic weakness here.
The baby boomers’ kids had kids and the lack of a moral centre was apparent then – and we are reaping what we’ve sown since the heady days of Margaret Thatcher and the implied policy of ‘I’m alright Jack’. The well embedded FHM, NUTS culture promoting deeply destructive sexual discrimination and sexist stereotypes on young naive men under the banner of fresh, vibrant, equality driven sexual liberation.
The global network giving you what you need and when you need it 24 hours a day – removing the need for social responsibility and replacing it with corporate allegiance – ignoring the moral and social vacuum already well formed aided and abetted by their vacuous parents.
This is the 24 hour, be all you can be, pop star in a heartbeat, live, live, live for the expensive moment – don’t be told you can’t do anything world of the emotionally bereft.
The world of Pay day loans and cheque cashing and cash converters and 50% apr credit cards and General George and four car families.
This is the world that we live in.
There’s a lot of truth in this quote from Eric Anderson – “The most insidious influence on the young is not violence, drugs, tobacco, drink or sexual perversion, but our pursuit of the trivial and our tolerance of the third rate.”
At the very least I think society has allowed a lot of our inner city youth to embrace the third rate.
It’s allowed a swathe of socially immature boys and girls to take their video games into the streets, and once again the papers are selling – selling moral indignation and peddling by-lines meant to promote the fear that the big bad world is out there are going to get us all in our sleep.
Sorry folks, but there’s a lot more to this than just criminality.
.......Poll Tax anybody.Well she did fk all in Bristol in 1980, when the officers were using milk crates as shields, and had no riot helmets.
Remember the 'clip on ' visor for a Custodian helmet anyone? That was an idea of the Thatcher era, as was 'trudging and wedging'
The idea that things were better in the old days, is, as usual, deeply flawed.
I can remember being petrol bombed in the 80's and no politician having the guts to authorise the use of plastic bullets. Sound familiar?
k all in Bristol in 1980, when the officers were using milk crates as shields, and had no riot helmets.Remember the 'clip on ' visor for a Custodian helmet anyone? That was an idea of the Thatcher era, as was 'trudging and wedging'
The idea that things were better in the old days, is, as usual, deeply flawed.
I can remember being petrol bombed in the 80's and no politician having the guts to authorise the use of plastic bullets. Sound familiar?
davepoth said:
If Thatcher had been in charge there would have been charges by the police with their truncheons. A few caved in skulls would quieten this down pretty quickly.
Yup, thats how the striking miners were dealt with in the 1980's, and remember they were simply men who were about to lose their living not quite in the same mode of criminality as the current problems. Also your suggestion, although clearly just provocative, would only inflame further violence, these kids have guns now.Benjaminpalma said:
Better, I suspect.
in the absence of the compo culture, you tube and twitter and the G20 kettling debacle the police wouldn't have had to bother the politicians they would have just got stuck in with shield and horse charges or the vehicle charges would have been less pedestrian .... whether any mainland CC has the stomach to deploy baton rounds is yet to be seen... for once i don't blame Tony Bliar, instead this time it's the wide mouth frog mrs Bliar and her cronies
crankedup said:
Yup, thats how the striking miners were dealt with in the 1980's, and remember they were simply men who were about to lose their living not quite in the same mode of criminality as the current problems. Also your suggestion, although clearly just provocative, would only inflame further violence, these kids have guns now.
No, the gangsters have guns. These little scrotes like to pretend they have guns. London is on fire, and there was only one gun related incident over the weekend. While I don't want to comment on the Miner's strike (this isn't the place and I know I'm not in full possession of the facts) what we can glean from it is that Thatcher would have authorised the police to administer beatings. Their parents should be doing that really, but someone should.
said:
Every day that I wake up, watch the news, read the papers, or generally survey my surroundings, and wonder how much better a place this country might have been if Margaret Thatcher had chosen a career other than politics is a day too many. The all-pervading mentality of craven, me-me-me self-interest and an almost spiteful disregard for one's fellow human beings, dressed up as a belief in the rights of 'the individual', is something she and all of her cheerleaders helped to legitimise. The irony being that, even as it continues to throttle the life out of this country, they're now the s who complain about it the loudest.
They moan about chavs, single mothers, gangs of feral kids, and the under-educated/uneducated (non) working classes, yet they never seem to consider that there might be some connection between the rise of the terminally feckless and the decision by Thatcher's government to let an entire generation essentially rot on a point of ideology.
You see, all these chavs/single mothers/feral kids/thick proles who are now the focus of so much hatred are the sons and daughters of the people she put out of work; people who measured themselves by what they did for a living, who were abruptly told they had little or no further value to society (which didn't exist, remember), and who consequently, in many cases, didn't pass on any sense of social responsibility to their kids.
After all, most of them had grown up seeing their parents or grandparents do little else other than get pissed and sign on, so it wasn't as if there was anything to aspire to. And if we hadn't spent the last thirty years watching the governments of just about every major industrialised nation in the world pursuing economic policies that are Thatcherite in all but name, considerably fewer of us might have spent last few Christmases peering into the economic abyss.
There might also have been fewer people going into politics, not out of any sense of public duty, but as a means to a non-executive directorship at an arms manufacturer, or as a sideline to their career as a property developer.
People might be more inclined to think of decent levels of education, healthcare and public transport as things which make life more bearable, and which are therefore worth spending money on, rather than as simply a source of profit for whichever cowboy outfit that puts in the lowest tender. For 'trickle-down economics', read 'trickle-up morality'. You fking know I could go on.
All these things were brought to you, either directly or indirectly, by Thatcher. She made this country what it is. Praise and give thanks.
Yep look after No.1 and greed is good, plus forget all else in your pursuit of this. She has done so much damage to this country.
Every day that I wake up, watch the news, read the papers, or generally survey my surroundings, and wonder how much better a place this country might have been if Margaret Thatcher had chosen a career other than politics is a day too many. The all-pervading mentality of craven, me-me-me self-interest and an almost spiteful disregard for one's fellow human beings, dressed up as a belief in the rights of 'the individual', is something she and all of her cheerleaders helped to legitimise. The irony being that, even as it continues to throttle the life out of this country, they're now the s who complain about it the loudest.
They moan about chavs, single mothers, gangs of feral kids, and the under-educated/uneducated (non) working classes, yet they never seem to consider that there might be some connection between the rise of the terminally feckless and the decision by Thatcher's government to let an entire generation essentially rot on a point of ideology.
You see, all these chavs/single mothers/feral kids/thick proles who are now the focus of so much hatred are the sons and daughters of the people she put out of work; people who measured themselves by what they did for a living, who were abruptly told they had little or no further value to society (which didn't exist, remember), and who consequently, in many cases, didn't pass on any sense of social responsibility to their kids.
After all, most of them had grown up seeing their parents or grandparents do little else other than get pissed and sign on, so it wasn't as if there was anything to aspire to. And if we hadn't spent the last thirty years watching the governments of just about every major industrialised nation in the world pursuing economic policies that are Thatcherite in all but name, considerably fewer of us might have spent last few Christmases peering into the economic abyss.
There might also have been fewer people going into politics, not out of any sense of public duty, but as a means to a non-executive directorship at an arms manufacturer, or as a sideline to their career as a property developer.
People might be more inclined to think of decent levels of education, healthcare and public transport as things which make life more bearable, and which are therefore worth spending money on, rather than as simply a source of profit for whichever cowboy outfit that puts in the lowest tender. For 'trickle-down economics', read 'trickle-up morality'. You fking know I could go on.
All these things were brought to you, either directly or indirectly, by Thatcher. She made this country what it is. Praise and give thanks.
Yep look after No.1 and greed is good, plus forget all else in your pursuit of this. She has done so much damage to this country.
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