“If only she'd been equally clever in replacing the houses she used to buy votes with we'd be in a better situation today.”
“But the refusal to allow Councils to use the money raised, to build replacement homes was a grave mistake…”
The idea was to remove from the taxpayer the burden of providing “social” housing. There would not have been much point if one lot of subsidised accommodation had simply been replaced by another.
“As well as this high rate of unemployment, her fiscal policies resulted in mortgage rates of 17% in the early 80's !....I know as my monthly mortgage payments resulted in nearly 60% of my take home pay.
But all these consequences are carefully forgotten about by her supporters,…”
They are not forgotten by me, Mikey. I suffered similarly and they were regrettable. But instead of looking at it in isolation you need to examine the cause. This was principally that in the previous decade or two the trade unions had held the nation to ransom by making ridiculous demands, most of which were met. This led to the situation where, at the end of the 1970s, the country was financially broke and many vital services were all but impossible to manage.
To argue whether the Falklands affair was a conflict or a war is fatuous and regrettable. I’m quite sure it didn’t cross the minds of Balders and his mates when they set off for the South Atlantic to rid a British Overseas Territory of foreign invaders. It is unsurprising that they were easily invaded. They are 8,000 miles from the UK, had no military defences to speak of and had a mainly civilian population of under 3,000. The fact is that had somebody other than Mrs T been PM it is highly likely that the Falklands would have been sacrificed. To give an illustration, only yesterday Mr Corbyn suggested he would only defend the Falklands “as a last resort”. I'm not too sure what he means by that because Mrs Thatcher’s decision to defend them was a “last resort” as the Argentinians had no intention of leaving. The difference is she was immediately loyal to the 3,000 souls that lived there whereas I cannot imagine many other politicians (either past or present) who could be similarly relied upon.
Mrs T’s statue is well deserved, long overdue and in fact should be placed permanently on the “fourth plinth” instead of the mish-mash of assorted rubbish that has been placed there in recent years.