Tag Archives: Margaret Thatcher

Keir Starmer’s latest betrayal of Labour voters is praise for MARGARET THATCHER!

If Keir Starmer is trying to confuse us into voting for him, he’s doing a very bad job.

In yesterday’s (December 3, 2023) Sunday Telegraph, he published an article claiming (as you can see below) that “Labour is once again the party of working people” (which is highly questionable since he took over) – that includes praise for the late Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who absolutely hammered the workers and destroyed the UK’s industrial base.

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Here’s what he had to say about his own article:

And here’s what his article said about Thatcher:

“Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.” Let’s have a look at that…

So Starmer has attacked his own illustrious forbears as Labour leader, saying that they had put the UK into a “stupor”. Charming! And what did Thatcher do?

On his own account, some say Starmer is talking a good fight:

But he is approaching his stated target from the wrong angle:

He does have supporters – but they are being selective with their facts, as This Writer was moved to point out:

Some Labour MPs have moved to distance themselves from the sentiments in the article…

… with questionable degrees of success:

People at ground-level have formed their own opinions – which are overwhelmingly negative. This leads to the further question: is it worthwhile, in any way, for traditional Labour supporters to support Starmer?

We are left to conclude that Starmer has shot himself in the foot – again.

And that leaves us with one final question:

What will you do?


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Lord Steel quits over failure to report child sex abuse claims. Is that really enough? [POLL]

Cyril Smith and David Steel: The paedophile and the accessory to his crimes?

Lord Steel has resigned his membership of the Liberal Democrats and announced his intention to resign as a Lord after damning criticism by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

In a 190-page report, the inquiry accused Steel of “abdication of responsibility” after he failed to act on allegations about the late MP Sir Cyril Smith’s sexual interest in children.

Smith, who died in 2010, was investigated by police in 1969 over claims he sexually abused teenage boys at a hostel in Rochdale – and admitted he had acted as the boys claimed. But police decided not to prosecute, and we are left to question that decision.

Steel told the inquiry last year that he failed to pass on allegations against Smith even though he believed them to be true, because it was “past history”. He even recommended Smith for a knighthood later.

This is just one example of a political culture in the 1970s, 80s and even later that the inquiry described as valuing politicians’ reputations “higher than the fate of children”.

Those are chilling words, and anybody reading them should be shocked and disgusted at the behaviour, not just of those who abused children, but of those who went out of their way to protect the abusers.

They are accessories in some of the most serious sexual crimes.

As such, do you think a mere resignation by Lord Steel is enough? Shouldn’t the police be considering prosecution? Didn’t he aid and abet a sex criminal? Didn’t he pervert the course of justice in doing so?

What about Baroness Thatcher? She is implicated in the case of late Tory MP (have you noticed how the perpetrators all seem to have died, now the evidence is coming to light?) Sir Peter Morrison who “had a penchant for small boys” and was allegedly caught by police in 1989, molesting a 15-year-old boy on a train in Crewe.

The following year, he became Mrs Thatcher’s top aide, and he was knighted in 1991.

The report said it was unclear whether she had been told he was gay or that he was a paedophile – but this rings false. If her party whips knew, then as leader she should have known. It was her business to know.

Consider the recent scandal of the dossier that Tory whips have kept on recent – and, presumably, current – MPs’ sexual activities. It seems incredible to expect a prime minister not to have information about such – potentially hugely damaging – behaviour by members of their team.

The report said people in positions of public prominence had been given deference that meant their crimes had been ignored.

That is unacceptable.

Nobody engaging in criminal activity of any kind should be above the law – as Cyril Smith, Peter Morrison and – yes – Lord Steel and Baroness Thatcher seem to have been.

Those who have died should be stripped of any titles they had and any historical record of them should show that they disgraced their positions in the worst possible way.

And those who are alive should pay a heavy penalty, as described by the law – including those who knew what was happening but didn’t raise the alarm.

But that’s just my opinion. What do you think?

[polldaddy poll=10511087]

Source: Lord Steel quits after inquiry slams his failure to report child sex abuse claims – Mirror Online

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Turing beats Thatcher (and others) to be the new face on the back of the £50 note

Yes! A victory for good sense at last!

Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing will feature on the new design of the Bank of England’s £50 note.

He is celebrated for his code-cracking work that proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.

The final decision was made by Bank of England governor Mark Carney. He said:

“Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today.

“As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as a war hero, Alan Turing’s contributions were far ranging and path breaking. Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand.”

Among the other suggestions was former prime minister and bete noir of recent UK history, Margaret Thatcher, who was included in a shortlist of scientists for her work helping devise a way to inject air into ice cream, to make it seem there’s more of it than there actually is.

As I wrote a few months ago, “she used science to create a commercial cheat that would induce people to pay more for less.”

What a relief that Mr Carney ignored the easy political choice and instead lionised a man who was treated appallingly by the nation he helped save.

Convicted of homosexuality (it was a crime in those days), Alan Turing was ordered to take drugs that dulled his mind. The mental torment thise generated drove him to commit suicide.

We will never know what advances the UK lost as a result of the unreasonable prejudice and hatred of those primitive times. But at least this gesture goes some way towards acknowledging the debt we owe this late genius.

Source: New face of the Bank of England’s £50 note is revealed – BBC News

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Margaret Thatcher defended a colleague accused of child abuse, MI5 files reveal

Links: The Conservative Party’s connection with paedophiles goes back a long way – here’s a photo of former prime minister (and later baroness) Margaret Thatcher with Jimmy Savile.

It’s not proof positive that the Conservative Party supports paedophilia; more like proof that the Tories are historically indifferent to child abuse by their colleagues.

Mrs Thatcher has long been known to have enjoyed the company of at least one high-profile paedophile – Jimmy Savile – so this revelation about her is just more evidence supporting a trend.

However:

There are questions about the current Conservative Party; about members who have been convicted of child abuse offences yet have not been expelled.

The issue is that the Conservatives simply don’t care if children are sexually abused – and that they never have cared. That they are happy to harbour abusers – and to defend them from justice.

Remember the 114 files on alleged paedophiles that Theresa May claimed to have “lost” while she was Home Secretary? This puts that into a whole new context. Doesn’t it?

MI5 files have revealed for the first time what many suspected. Margaret Thatcher was aware of alleged sexual offences by her Private Parliamentary Secretary Sir Peter Morrison yet chose to defend him.

Testimony as well as documents MI5 have handed to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) suggest a rallying behind the Conservative minister despite concerns laid out about Morrison’s “interest in small boys”.

Source: MI5 files reveal Thatcher supported key ally over child sex abuse claims


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Would YOU accept a £50 note with Margaret Thatcher’s face on it? [POLL]

Horror: An artist’s impression of how a Thatcher-themed £50 note might appear.

It seems the competition to be the face on the back of the new £50 note has come down to contenders including Stephen Hawking and Margaret Thatcher.

According to the Bank of England, the intention is for the space to be occupied by a scientist.

The late Professor Hawking certainly qualifies.

But you could be forgiven for wondering what Mrs Thatcher’s contribution may have been.

Curious: It seems Facebook won’t accept the image at the top of this article for use in links to it. Will it accept this one?

I’ll tell you: She was part of a team who devised a way of injecting air into ice cream to make it look like there is more of it than there actually is – she used science to create a commercial cheat that would induce people to pay more for less.

I recall Alan Turing was in the running for this honour at one point. Why has a cheat like Mrs Thatcher been shortlisted, while a man who (arguably) shortened World War II by several years has not?

It seems strange reasoning by the Bank of England.

And I wonder how many people would want to use a banknote with the former – and much-hated – Conservative prime minister on it? Some might consider her image to be defacing the currency.

What do you think?

[polldaddy poll=10200019]

Personally, I wouldn’t have such an item in my house.

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Whose face do you want on the back of the £50 note: Alan Turing? Or Margaret Thatcher?

Alan Turing or Margaret Thatcher: One deserves recognition and commemoration and the other doesn’t. Which is which?

One was a war hero; the other started a war to keep herself in power.

Now both are in contention to be the face on the back of the new £50 note.

Who would you prefer to see there – Alan Turing or Margaret Thatcher?

How about some information to help you decide?

Alan Turing, often hailed as the grandfather of modern computing, was a mathematical genius who cracked the German Enigma coding machine while working at Bletchley Park during World War II.

He is widely believed to have been responsible for ending the war years earlier than would otherwise have been the case and it would be right, therefore, to consider him one of that conflict’s greatest heroes.

But he was gay in a time when homosexuality was outlawed. Convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952, he was chemically castrated, barred from working for GCHQ, and driven to suicide.

It wasn’t until December 2013 – nearly 60 years since his death – that the UK government saw fit to pardon him for the injustice he suffered under the primitive and barbaric regime that was the UK in the 1950s.

If Turing was famous for helping end a war, Margaret Thatcher is best known for starting them.

It is widely believed that she stoked hostilities with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in order to start a conflict that might boost her popularity with the voting public and earn her a second term as prime minister.

During that term, she persecuted mine workers into a year-long strike, in which she used police as weapons against defenceless people who were standing up for their livelihoods against an uncaring and barbaric regime:

In her spare time she used the threat of AIDS to persecute lesbians and gay people.

Oh, but wait! She was a scientist too! Apparently the Bank of England has decided that a scientist will go on the back of the £50 note, and the late Baroness Thatcher qualifies.

Want to know what her contribution was?

Typical Tory – she used science to create a commercial cheat that would induce people to pay more for less.

So the choice is between a member of a persecuted minority who created modern computing while trying to end a war, and a principle persecutor of that minority who perverted science to make money and started wars for her own selfish reasons.

Who do you think will get the gig?

The choice will speak volumes about the priorities of the country’s leaders.

Of course, there’s still a chance that a random choice will win…

https://twitter.com/BrexitRaab/status/1067173803556569088

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Margaret Thatcher could be the new backside of the £50 note

Appropriate: Wouldn’t it be fitting if the Spitting Image dummy of Margaret Thatcher became the model for her appearance on the £50 note – if she ends up winning the vote?

In a way it might be considered reasonable to put Margaret Thatcher on money.

She always wanted to be staring out of our currency – but most of us thought her preference would be to replace the Queen on the front.

If she has to be on a note, it is much more appropriate for her to be staring out of its rear end.

And, considering what certain members of her own party have been said to do with £50 notes, one might even consider it poetic justice.

Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher is among a list of names being considered as the face of the new £50 note.

Baroness Thatcher, who was born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, occupied 10 Downing Street as Conservative leader between 1979 and 1990, making her the UK’s longest-serving leader of the 20th century.

She was also Britain’s first female prime minister.

She died in 2013 but remains a controversial figure of British politics.

Source: Margaret Thatcher could be the face of the new £50 note | Central – ITV News

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Biggest rise in poverty recorded since Thatcher was in power – iNews

This is something to remember, next time a Tory minister gets up and says the economy is doing well and people are enjoying a higher standard of living.

Declining incomes for the poorest families, government austerity and Brexit have led to the biggest rise in UK poverty since Margaret Thatcher was in power, according to new projections from the Resolution Foundation.

The think tank’s predictions suggest real incomes for the poorest third of the working-age population fell by between £50 and £150 in 2017-18.

Inflation rose above three per cent last year, while Tory cuts to tax credits and benefits affected the nation’s poorest.

And all of this has led to the official poverty rate rising from 22.1 per cent to 23.2 per cent, according to Resolution Foundation calculations.

This 1.1 per cent jump would be the biggest since 1988.

Source: Biggest rise in poverty recorded since Thatcher was in power – iNews

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Oh bloody hell, here’s Tony Blair

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Westminster for a comeback? (With apologies to Yeats.)

Tony Blair praised Theresa May as a ‘very solid, sensible person’. [Image: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images].

Tony Blair praised Theresa May as a ‘very solid, sensible person’. So much for his left-wing credentials!  [Image: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images].

It’s Tony Blair. How godawfully depressing.

Here’s a man whose ‘Third Way’ ruined the Labour Party, driving voters away in their millions, turning socialism into a dirty word (by association – there were precious few socialists in a Blair cabinet), and eventually turfing the party out of office for more than six years – so far.

He talks about the Progressive Left but he’s as much a product of the Reactionary Right as, for example, David Cameron, who worked very hard to follow the Blairite model of neoliberal economic policies leavened with social reform.

The philosophy seemed to be, “Give ’em gay marriage and they’ll sell themselves into slavery”, and it seems to have been correct.

Margaret Thatcher, whose project during the 1980s was entirely geared towards the destruction of the UK’s industrial base and erosion of its trade unions, in order to destroy the economic leverage enjoyed by working people in the 1970s, considered Mr Blair’s New Labour to be her greatest achievement.

And now he’s back, claiming that the country needs him because Jeremy Corbyn – the most popular Labour leader, possibly in 50 years – is… not a “nutter”, as Mr Blair insists he has been misquoted as saying, but at least “mistaken”.

He says Labour has been “captured by the far left for the first time in the party’s history”. What utter drivel.

Jeremy Corbyn is a centre-left politician. If he were of the far left, he would be demanding the nationalisation of all industry and the UK’s reduction to single-party state status. He isn’t.

Clem Attlee was more left-wing than Mr Corbyn and his government gave us the National Health Service that everybody claims they love. Wilson and Callaghan were closer to Communism.

But Mr Blair needs to position himself and he wants the “centre left” label that belongs to Mr Corbyn.

Otherwise he would have to admit that he is a right wing politician – and that would play very poorly with his target audience.

But he gives himself away with his admission that he thinks Theresa May is “a very solid, sensible person” – she isn’t. She is a weak leader, from a line of weak Tory leaders, who cannot stand up for a single policy if a business leader opposes it.

Still, her politics is clearly the kind Mr Blair prefers and, after all, Margaret Thatcher liked him and David Cameron copied him. So why doesn’t he clear off and join the Conservative Party instead of haunting Labour?

To sum up, Tony Blair is not a representative of the Progressive Left or Centre-Left. That space is occupied by Jeremy Corbyn. Blair belongs to the reactionary, regressive Right and is trying to hoodwink us all into believing otherwise.

About the only thing he has said that anyone in Labour could support is that the party “has a historic duty to try to represent people in this country who need our representation desperately”.

But look at the choice of topic with which he has decided to re-enter politics: He has opted to take a view of Brexit that is deliberately antagonistic to the established Labour Party position.

Mr Corbyn has said that the referendum result will bind the Labour Party and its duty now is to work for the best possible parting from the European Union; Mr Blair wants people to think there is still a chance the split could be halted.

But look at what he says and you’ll see it’s all bluster. He doesn’t offer any guidance on how the people are to register their change of heart.

He says: “It can be stopped if the British people decide that, having seen what it means, the pain-gain, cost-benefit analysis doesn’t stack up… Either you get maximum access to the single market, in which case you’ll end up accepting a significant number of the rules on immigration, on payment into the budget, on the European court’s jurisdiction. People may then say, ‘Well, hang on, why are we leaving then?’

“Or alternatively, you’ll be out of the single market and the economic pain may be very great because, beyond doubt, if you do that you’ll have years, maybe a decade, of economic restructuring,” so even ‘Leave’ voters “would eventually “look at this in a practical way, not an ideological way”.

And what would they do next?

There is no mechanism for the people to register any desire to change their collective mind if the politicians in Westminster choose not to allow it – and Westminster has said there will be no further referendum.

Why should there be?

We know most of the people were cheated, one way or another, by snake-oil salesmen like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who promised untold riches and are delivering debt.

But plenty of us were saying this at the time and those who voted in ignorance should know that it is no excuse.

Ultimately, Mr Blair has nothing to say that hasn’t been said already – by Conservatives and by Liberal Democrats.

If anybody wants a real alternative, it is offered by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour.

Source: Tony Blair: Brexit could be stopped if Britons change their minds | Politics | The Guardian

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Proven: The Thatcher project aimed to kill industry and create unemployment. It succeeded

zde-industrialisation-destitution

There can be no doubt any more: From Margaret Thatcher onwards, the Conservative Party has deliberately worked to plunge most of the UK into poverty.

The Jobs, Welfare and Austerity report links very well with a paper published a couple of years ago, The Impact of Thatcherism on Health and Well-Being in Britain, published by Durham University, stated that Margaret Thatcher, along with other leading Tory neoliberals of the 1970s like Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley, decided that they needed to end full employment.

The paper states: “In the years between 1975 and 1979, those around Thatcher—in particular, Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley—developed detailed proposals for government. Their view was that defeat of the movement that had forced Heath’s U-turn [from neoliberalism to Keynesianism – it prompted the famous statement, “The lady’s not for turning”] would require, not simply the disengagement of the state from industry, but the substantial destruction of Britain’s remaining industrial base.

“The full employment that had been sustained across most of the post-war period was seen, together with the broader security offered by the welfare state, to be at the root of an unprecedented self-confidence among working-class communities.

“In particular, large-scale manufacturing and extraction industries, generally strongly unionized and often linked to the large-scale provision of social housing at subsidized rents by local government, were seen to underpin a working-class solidarity that gave this confidence a potent political expression.”

So they killed those industries, ended full employment and parked millions of people on incapacity (now sickness and/or disability benefits). Here’s the proof of that claim:

161107-incapacity-benefit-claimants

You see, when Tories say Labour is responsible for the high number of sickness and/or disability benefit claimants, they are lying.

Marry this information with the new data from Sheffield Hallam University and you can see that the Conservative Party has deliberately de-industrialised the UK – in order to ensure a high rate of unemployment – and is now deliberately cutting off access to benefit payments – in order to render working-class people destitute.

They knew the result would be a high budget deficit; this was to be used as an excuse for the cuts that would plunge working-class people into poverty.

Make no mistake: This was a deliberate, pre-meditated plan, and anybody who voted ‘Conservative’ between 1979 and 2015 has actively supported it, whether they were aware of it or not.

The enduring impact of closing factories and shutting coalmines in the 1980s has been revealed in new research showing that the drain on the exchequer from former industrial areas is responsible for up to half the government’s £55bn budget deficit.

In the first comprehensive analysis of the cost to the state of the de-industrialisation that began three decades ago, Sheffield Hallam University said the annual bill was at least £20bn and was perhaps as high as £30bn.

The report found that the cumulative legacy of the hollowing-out of manufacturing and the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-85 was a far heavier concentration of people claiming incapacity benefits than in the richer parts of Britain and a more widespread use of tax credits to top up the wages of those in low-paid jobs.

The report’s co-author, Prof Steve Fothergill, said: “The long-term effect of job destruction in older industrial Britain has been to park vast numbers out of the labour market on incapacity benefits, these days employment and support allowance (ESA). The cost to the Treasury is immense, especially if all the top-up benefits are included.

“Added to this, low wages in these weaker local economies have jacked up spending on in-work benefits such as tax credits and reduced income tax revenue. None of these impacts have diminished over the years, despite the recent upturn and efforts to cut claimant numbers.

“We estimate that the ongoing cost to the exchequer, in extra benefit spending and lost tax revenue, is at least £20bn a year, and possibly nearer £30bn. To put this another way, approaching half the current budget deficit is the result of job destruction in Britain’s older industrial areas.”

The report – Jobs, Welfare and Austerity – said there was a continuous thread linking what happened to British industry in the 1980s to the welfare cuts being borne by communities in the north, Scotland and Wales today.

Source: Half UK budget deficit ‘is down to job destruction in older industrial areas’ | Business | The Guardian

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