Quote:
Originally Posted by Gordon Booth
I thought this was one! What a sad outpouring of venom and bile.
This was the woman who persuaded Regan to talk to Gorbachev about ending MAD. She persuaded Gorbachev to talk to Regan about ending MAD. It worked. Lucky for us that's how much they respected her.
She did with the Falklands something no PM or opposition leader since would have had the guts to do.
She had the guts to tell the Union barons they didn't and wouldn't run the UK- Parliament would. When Scargill took her on she couldn't afford to lose, if she had we might as well dismissed Parliament forever. The price the miners paid was horrific and she went too far in changeing our energy policy after Scargill was beaten- that bordered on the vindictive.
When she got it right she was very right. When she got it wrong she could be very wrong. But she tried and she had conviction- she was bold, a leader of the calibre we haven't seen since.And we could certainly do with a bold leader with conviction now.
When she said something you knew she meant it and believed it, even if you violently disagreed with it. Can you say that of any of our politicians now?
Towards the end the power went to her head- power corrupts eventually. But she and her party were put in power for 11 years by the UK voters, 3 elections, so she was more popular in her time than you would think from reading some of the outpourings on this thread.
I didn't always agree with her but I sure as hell respected her as a person of commitment, drive and conviction. Rare qualities in politics these days.
A Leader- a dead one now. No need for the extremes of opinion being aired on here.
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I have the utmost sympathy for the ordinary miners who quite frankly were used as a tool by a Marxist fanatic who had a communist father.
I'd just like to say something about the UK's energy. People forget that a previous government had put in place the "Clean air Act" which put a stop to the smog we had endured due to the "mucky" coal we were using. Even after that was put in place you'd still find the laundry on your washing line was covered in black smuts. France had already introduced nuclear energy and unfortunately for the miners this new technology was seen as the way to go forward.
I wasn't too happy about going nuclear and was horrified a few decades later when it was discovered that scrap nuclear rods we'd dropped into the ocean were affecting marine life.