Mark, you are quite correct. Who said making money was so terrible? Maybe earning it is terrible to some, but I suppose those who inherit can claim to have 'clean hands'? I don't know, but then again I never did understand it.
French people would certainly like someone who is clearing away with a moot social system but they would not want to participate in shaping it and that is why there is only a "blond angel of revenge" of the little people. This is much more dangerous then Mrs T.
I suspect that most of us want to be able to provide for our ourselves and our family and take care of ourselves in our old age as far as we can given the horrendous cost of care homes should, God forbid, we need one.
People who run businesses provide jobs for those who do not want to take the chance and are happy earning a salary.
We are all investors through our pension funds.
Brian you must admit that you are one of the extreme left and that most of us are not. Neither are we extreme right, we are mostly in the middle ground and that is where the battle for votes is taking place.
Unfortuately, this does not make for exciting politics, but I really would like to see politics based on common sense, as I see it of course!
Norman, there I was from a leftwing Labour background and off I went to Cambridge. It might have gone otherwise there. Firstly, my college was old and establishment and I was excluded from lots of things. Much of what I was excluded from I was told was good, great or whatever, except that half of the people preaching that ideology would have happily welcomed Herr Schicklgruber as head of state a bit before my time. I found my own place there and went from being Labour educated left to somebody who took socialism apart and reassembled it before I touched it with anybody's. As far as I was concerned I took Messrs Marx, Engels, Lenin and a good few others to pieces before I drew my own conclusions. On this planet thus far I have found two countries in which citizens are happy with their lot, both socialist countries who have had a hard time being what they are. So Norman, I am nobody's glove puppet however the way during Thatcher and then accelerating under Blair, the way the people of the UK have been served by politicians appalls me. The ones in office now are the pits. I make no illusion that Miliband might be any better. I am actually one of the people who found his father's work pretentious rubbish, a so-called Marxist. It is just as bad as people calling this man Hollande a communist when in fact he is as much a marionette of a capitalist system that has only disdain for people. The difference, I suspect, is that Thatcher actually believed herself whereas none of the present crop could imaginably do so. Not one of them is politically credible. People are suffering because politics has nowhere to go to make lives better because large corporations and some very rich individuals have taken control of everything with any potential and pull the strings that make those politicians jerk.
Why is a desire to aquire wealth seen as a henious crime ? You do that by working, surely. Wealth is perhaps the wrong term. We all need money to live. Encouraging us to earn money can only be a good thing. It stops us relying on others to pay for our needs. In post Thatcher years the wish to improve one's life is smacked down by a small but loud minority. More & more comfort is expected to be paid for by the government. University education, a desirable but not vital add on to basic schooling, is demanded as a freebee despite the fact that it can give the attendee a crack at a better paid job should they decide to use it. Those poor, hard done by workers who Thatcher gave the right to buy, at a very low price, their previously subsidised council houses were able to sell a little later, in Thatcher's free market economy, for a much higher one. Living conditions after the War improved beyond measure. We have a virtually free health service, a standardised education system & EVERYBODIES lifestyle has improved.
As a "middle class" product I grew up in a household that had to balance a limited budget which depended on how far & how hard the wage earners were prepared to work. We were "too rich" to benefit from all the grants & hand outs the "poor" had. The house we lived in was paid for out of my father's income in it's entirety.
Nowadays when we look at the news & are shown into the homes of "suffering" people who might lose some benefits I see consumer items that I know I cannot afford like a 50 inch plasma TV. Who paid for that? If it was a gift then the giver could have offered help in a bit more of a practical manner.
Many may criticise Thatcher but she was voted in by the majority THREE times. If her policies were so bad how come the following Labour administations did not change them back?
Why do anti Thatcher types still insist in trying to tell us that she is having a state funeral? Is it because, like most BS, if enough people keep telling us that it is true we will eventually believe it?
Let her go - she went years ago, after all - She was no worse than most of our modern PMs & in some respects, better.
Sorry again Brian. In 1969 I was struggling Under the concrete ceiling that you couldn't even look through, and Maggie to me, broke through it and gave us lower-class détritus a sight of what could be and not what had to be. Yes she thrust on us the Yuppies and all that, she made massive errors, but when you come to talk about the changes you obviously come at things from a different direction than mine.
We, (brother and me) were the wartime babies, were the yobs and even the Teddy Boys others refer too, but we were stuck in the 'merde' with not the slightest sign we could get out of it or were worth less than tuppence in the existing society.
We were the ones weaned in the street markets from about ten-years old, we were the factory fodder and regarded as something people had stepped in, we were the ones leaving school at 15, and having done ten years work whilst others were just leaving University.
Yes, I was a 'bastard' when that term meant something - and always nasty. I never forgot or foragve the system in Britain at that time that crushed us poor sods down and gave us nothing to look forward to- until Maggie at least gave us the sense that maybe we didn't have to be the garbage of society.
Yes, it was just a glimpse, but it was an awakening. However to believe the British class system and prejudice against us would really change was illusory, but at least she let us look at ourselves in a different light. She wasn't a God(dess), but she did illuminate a way for those who wanted to see it. Many didn't and were content to stay in the gutters.
For me, it was a vision, but I had the sense to realise that it was never going to happen for me in Britain, and about the time you, Brian were taking the first vote, I was on a boat to Australia as a £10 migrant (although I left from Malta).
My life opened up because of HER vision of what could be, not what HAD to be. I respected her for that alone. No-one else of my generation gave that vision, and I will never forget that.
Britain didn't change overnight, but many walls were broken down. For me I remember her as a lady of iron-will who refused to just accept the status-quo simply because that it what it was. Amazing too, that it took a woman to point it out and do something about it, and many women posting here antipathetically should remember, or at least note that.
I have just read the utter vindictive tripe dished out by yet another harridan - Glenda Jackson, who to me was so bitterly envious of Maggie and the fact that that she never came close to her ability that she has blinkers one, and like others is totally incapable of rational and realistic appraisal. Yes, the accusation can be directed towards me, but I won't change my view.
Just to make the point I never voted Conservative in my life in Britain - even for Maggie, but it has taken years to appreciate her value, but in comparing her to the dross we have around the world now in politics, I think her values are seriously missing - agree with her or not.
End of rant (I hope?)
I too have memories. Firstly the war damaged centre of Cologne where my German friends and I occasionally found a piece of ordnance that had my father and his colleagues out disarming a vast piece of dangerous RAF detritus. That was followed by a purpose built image of Never Had It So Good that in reality became a slum in an easily measurable amount of time. To this day I have little time for morality bought with great wealth, the show of which for a funeral but using that taken from those who DO pay, thus not the avoiding classes who thrived on the backs of others. For me, having gained my vote as a 21 year old in 1969, I had the full exposure to the years that some people are so fondly recalling now. They are best behind us, either forgotten or consigned to nostalgic works of fiction. Let the iron be forgot, as you say, rust in peace.