Ex-Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher dies

Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has died at 87 following a stroke, her spokesman has said.

Lord Bell said: "It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning."

Baroness Thatcher was Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990.

She was the first woman to hold the post. Her family is expected to make a further statement later.

Source:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22067155

RIP Margaret Thatcher
A huge character in British History

Sad news.

She was a great leader,
the best.

RIP

Falklands - good (although it now seems that she wobbled more than was once thought)
Miners' strike - good
Sale of council houses - debatable. On the whole, bad.
Privatisation of utilities - bad
Poll tax - barking mad.

I did not and do not agree with the destruction of the grammar schools - which she was mainly responsible for, although it had cross party support - when both parties quietly agree on a policy - as recently with Press regulation - the result is never, ever, good.

But, beyond doubt, the Britain that we live in now is her creation.

And what about the skool kids milk. She had a lot to answer for.....

Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher.

One of the things that she never failed to do was to divide the nation. Let us ensure she does not divide this place.

Margaret Thatcher - Speech to Citibank in Manila - 22 Jan 1996

I couldn't agree more. Well said sir.

You're quite right that the following Labour government point-blank refused to repeal ANY of those policies still held against her.
Times change and people change, difficult to see how the policies of 30 years still get blamed.

She was a conviction politician and she faced the most extreme of union leadership.
Yes, many still despise her for that but it's very widely acknowledged that the union leadership of those day got it completely wrong time after time. That was their eventual downfall. It just didn't have to be that way from any side.

She passed away a very old lady who gave her best.
Rather better than todays batch of career ********'s who are only interested in short term gains for election wins

I speak as a political neutral. And simply say that once the family silver had been sold off, how on earth was the Labour party supposed to find the money to go out and buy the family silver back again?

On Maggie Thatcher. I saw both good and not good in her time as Prime Minister, not just one or the other.

Or was it the Milton Keynes school of Economics?

Yeah. Just jesting there. Messing with words. I recall John Maynard Keynes thinking preceeded Friedman's in the world of economics, until Friedman came along. I kind of went with the ideas of monetarism as that's what I learnt in school and kept waiting for Thatchers monetary policy to work in the way that the theory suggested but became disilluisioned eventually.

Thatcher seemingly rid Britain of the title of "sick man of Europe" but compared to those before her, she had the benefit of North Sea oil revenues to help her.....

"Did North Sea oil make Thatcherism possible?
Some commentators think so. The money that flowed into the Treasury’s coffers was crucial to enabling the Government to bear the cost of rising unemployment. Some economists believe that, without North Sea oil, the Thatcher Government might have been forced to abandon the strict monetarist economic policies that caused interest rates to rise to punitive levels in the early 1980s, and to scale back Thatcher’s confrontation with the unions and privatisation programme, both of which contributed to soaring unemployment. On the other hand, Thatcher herself appears to attach very little significance to the role of North Sea oil in underwriting her economic reforms - in her autobiography, North Sea oil and gas merit just six passing references."

"Indeed, Jim Callaghan, prime minister in the late 1970s, claimed that whoever won the 1979 general election was likely to remain in power for many years, thanks to the windfall from North Sea oil and gas receipts."

http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/commodities/learning-to-live-without-north-sea-oil

"To her detractors, Thatcher is the prime minister who wiped out more than 15% of Britain's industrial base with her dogmatic monetarism, squandered the once-in-a-lifetime windfall of North Sea oil on unemployment pay and tax cuts, and made the UK the unbalanced, unequal country it is today."

One way at looking at Maggie Thatchers time as PM.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-transform-britain-economy