More Tory MPs criticise "nauseating" and hypocritical Brown for Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street meeting

There is widespread coverage in this morning's newspapers of yesterday's ConservativeHome article by Robert Wilson MP.  Mr Wilson had suggested that Mr Brown could be accused of behaving in a "shallow, self-serving and unscrupulous way" towards the "elderly", "frail" and "lonely" Margaret Thatcher, who "has difficulty with her memory". 

A spokesman for Baroness Thatcher told the Daily Mail that Mr Wilson's argument was "a silly one."  The spokesman continued:

"She has been to No. 10 to see every one of her successors. It was very gracious for the Prime Minister to invite her.  It would have been unheard of for her not to accept. I don't think these comments are helpful to anybody."

A source close to Mr Brown urged David Cameron to discipline Mr Wilson: "She does not deserve to be treated in this way by Conservative MPs. David Cameron should sack him from the front bench."

Another Conservative MP, Gerald Howarth, a close friend of Baroness Thatcher, attempted to plough a middle course.  He accused Mr Brown of "nauseating" behaviour and of "trying to cash in on the public affection for Lady Thatcher" but said that it was "inconceivable" that she could have turned the PM's invitation down.

Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, said: "He claims to be the person who doesn't believe in spin and yet he cosies up to Lady Thatcher despite opposing everything she did when she was Prime Minister."

Philip Davies is certainly right about that.  The Independent has listed some of the things Gordon Brown had previously said about Margaret Thatcher's time as PM:

"Britain's first woman prime minister has done conspicuously little for Britain's women."

"Britain can no longer survive, far less prosper, on the simplicities of Margaret Thatcher's capitalism."

"Poverty does not concern Mrs Thatcher."

"The Thatcher government has not only failed to prepare our economy for the 1990s but failed to advance our quality of life in the 1980s."

"She plans to eradicate the right to education and the health and social services as we know them."

"As support for Mrs Thatcher's policies of social division dwindles she will discover that there are simply not enough City speculators without a conscience to keep her in power."

I'll give the final word to The Sun: "Lady Thatcher was certainly up to monkey business yesterday — visiting a gorilla attraction at London Zoo."  LOL!

PS The Telegraph has a picture of Lady Thatcher's zoo visit.

Comments

[dog biter]

Might I suggest that the reason all these Tory MPs are so upset about the Brown-Thatcher meeting because it suggests, quite rightly, that Brown is far closer to Thatcher in terms of gravitas and statesmanship than Cameron ever will be.

[Simon Denis]

Lady Thatcher as a former PM has a perfect right to visit her successor. She is no longer a player in current party politics. Speculations as to her intentions or her state of health are offensive nonsense. As for whether or not she's given up on Cameron, one trip to Downing Street is hardly likely to influence his fate. For the record, I suspect the lady has given up on Cameron. In all honesty, haven't we all? You can argue with your own supporters if and only if you are ruthless, smoothly efficient and ahead in the polls. In DC's case, for "ruthless" read petulant and occasionally spiteful. For "smoothly efficient" think of stretches of complacency diversified by outbreaks of mass panic. As for ahead in the polls...

[TomTom]

Pathetic. Truly pathetic. Ring the little bell and Pavlov's dogs salivate.

[Traditional Tory]

This guy Wilson has a nerve. It is up to Lady Thatcher and her advisers to decide where she goes and whom she meets. It has nothing whatsover to do with him.

Looking up Wilson on the web (I had never heard of him before) I see he unsuccessfully stood for election to the local council as an SDP candidate before deciding that the Conservitives might give his career more of a boost.

He has a majority of 475.

[Cllr Adam Tugwell]

So Brown loves Thatcher; so did Blair. Perhaps they believe the only way that they will successfully retain power is to be more like her - you know, the old 'guilt by association' routine.

Brown may consider himself to be on terms with the Iron Lady, but we all know and understand the truth of his attempt to elivate himself to the heights of political and governmnetal leadership that he will never achieve.

Who knows, perhaps Lady T just likes to go in from time to time and check that the cobwebs are being kept clear from the Cabinet Room. Don't you know that hot air creates the ideal ecosystem for the propogation of insects?

[Richard]

Don't forget Mr Brown's authorship of 'Where There's Greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain's Future' (1989). Which, if it is ever reprinted, has just got a great new cover photo!

[Tapestry]

Two male primates visited in 24 hours. nothing wrong with a bit of mutual grooming.

[D Roberts]

Rob Wilson's immaturity showed with his childish comment piece. A former PM meeting the current PM......er so what, and of course why shouldn't she.

[Nick]

Mr Wilson is right - the PM is trying once again to unsettle the Tories. Ignore it, and move on - that's my view.

[Graeme Archer]

I agree it was nauseating but I don't see how the Tory interest is served by (Conservative MPs) going on about it. TomTom's phrase is right. Brown doesn't even have to be a towering political genius to get the parliamentary party jerking on his strings, just savvy enough to use the tricks of any playground bully. Note to MPs for the next time Brown tries a grandstanding trick: make like your leader, and ignore it. Also, and this is probably the least popular sentence to write on a Tory website: perhaps if a faction of the parliamentary party hadn't elevated Mrs T to the sainthood, they would be able to interpret the comings and goings of current and former PMs with something closer to sanity.

[David Lindsay]

Oh, do get a grip! What, exactly, was “Thatcherism”? What did she ever actually do? Well, she gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, and the destruction of paternal authority within working-class families and communities through the destruction of that authority’s economic basis in the stockades of working-class male employment.

No Prime Minister, ever, has done more in any one, never mind all, of the causes of European federalism, Irish Republicanism, sheer economic incompetence, Police inefficiency and ineffectiveness, collapsing educational standards, and everything that underlies or follows from the destruction of paternal authority.

Meanwhile (indeed, thereby), the middle classes were transformed from people like her father into people like her son. She told us that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Correspondingly, she misdefined liberty as the “freedom” to behave in absolutely any way that one saw fit. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said it was, even though, before her, it never actually had been.

Specifically, she sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector (forty per cent of the economy) to an unprecedented level of central government dirigisme. She presided over the rise of Political Correctness, that most 1980s of phenomena, and so much of piece with that decade’s massively increased welfare dependency and its moral chaos, both fully sponsored by the government, and especially by the Prime Minister, of the day.

Hers was the war against the unions, which cannot have had anything to do with monetarism, since the unions have never controlled the money supply. For good or ill, but against all her stated principles, hers was the refusal (thank goodness, but then I am no “Thatcherite”) to privatise the Post Office, as her ostensible ideology would have required.

And hers were the continuing public subsidies to fee-paying schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three (then as now) would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then.

You know this from experience if that experience extends to any one or more of fee-paying schools, agriculture (or, at least, land ownership), nuclear power, and mortgage holding. The issue is not whether these are good or bad things in themselves. It is whether “Thatcherism”, as ordinarily and noisily proclaimed (or derided), was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, as it simply is not.

Hers was the ludicrous pretence to have brought down the Soviet Union merely because she happened to be in office when that Union happened to collapse, as it would have done anyway, in accordance with the predictions of (among other people) Enoch Powell. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, precisely by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa. I condemn the former as I condemn Castro, and I condemn the latter as I condemn Mugabe (or Ian Smith, for that matter). No doubt you do, too. But she did not, as she still does not.

And hers was what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the (starved) Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day.

There are many other aspects of any “Thatcherism” properly so called, and they all present her in about as positive a light. None of them, nor any of the above, was unwitting, forced on her by any sort of bullying, or whatever else her apologists might insist was the case. Rather, they were exactly what she intended.

Other than the subsidies to agriculture (then as now) and to nuclear power (now, if not necessarily then), I deplore and despise every aspect of her above record and legacy, for unashamedly Old Labour reasons. Indeed, the definition of New Labour is to support and to celebrate that record and legacy, because it did exactly as it was intended to do, entrenching, in and through the economic sphere, the social revolution of the 1960s. You should not so support or celebrate unless you wish to be considered New Labour.

But then again, who cares these days? Or, rather, who really ought to care? When the next General Election is upon us, people will have the vote who were not born when she was removed from office in order to restore the public order that had broken down because of what, in her allegedly paradigmatic United States, would have been her unconstitutional Poll Tax. At that Election, post-Thatcher teenagers will first enter Parliament in some numbers, a few being already there. And by the time of the Election after that, she will be dead.

Get over her!

[Radical Tory]

Rob Wilson has shown a lack of judgement and has been very insulting to Lady Thatcher. He should be sacked from the frontbench and deselected.

With such a tiny majority I imagine a 'true blue tory' candidate could cause some damage...

You've made alot of enemies within the party Mr Wilson and for what?

[Yet Another Anon]

Evidently the meeting is causing a lot of pointless wrangling, in the end it appears if anyone benefits from it it may be Menzies Campbell. The publicity over it probably will have a small impact on the Labour vote, but in creating a wrangle in the Conservative Party appears to make David Cameron look insignificant and makes those suggesting that Margaret Thatcher has been used appear patronising towards her and so it may have some impact on Conservative support too.

Naturally she is hoping still to have an influence on her successors, whichever party they are of and of the general political debate in the country.

[jorgen]

No need to panic. Cameron will invite Blair to tea; that is more in the style of the "Heir to Blair's Conservatives".

[Michael Davidson]

Why do Tory MP's keep banging on about it? Baroness Thatcher can do what she likes and considering she is a former PM, she's perfectly entitled to visit Number 10.

She probably doesn't like Cameron one bit and I don't blame her.

[Effie]

I absolutely detested the woman, I would go as far as to say with a vengeance.
I am not even prepeared to debate the issue of my above statement with anybody as I would forget my manners.
Having said that , there is NO WAY I would exploit this elderly Lady's forgetfulness, her lonliness or her frailty and I do not for one minute believe Gordon Brown would stoop to that level either, neither would his wife or the Chancellor and his wife.
I think Mr Brown has been observing good practice and good manners.
Lady Thatcher has every right to visit Downing Street as the guest of the PM and his wife, she earned that right and privilidge.
I do not think that she is too old or frail to understand the implications of this visit by either of the participants.
I think it is her way of letting Mr Cameron know just what she really thinks of hi9m and the way he is taking her beloved party.

[SimonHerrington]

Don’t worry about Rob Wilson – he’s a lightweight of restricted intellect. He only got on to the frontbench cos Boris resigned to go for the London Mayor. At least two other MPs were considered but declined as not everyone wants to go immediately on to the front bench. Wilson of course didn’t give it a moment’s thought but since his appointment has made limited original impact. Wilson is a sad reflection of the lack of talent on the Tory backbenches. He won’t be sacked – there are very few MPs willing to replace him at this stage. In Lady Thatcher’s heyday he may have made PPS to a junior Minister. Lord help us where he may get to with the current deficit of talent.

[Richard Tyndall]

It is amusing to read David Lindsay's partial and completely inaccurate revisionism. It says far more about the bigotries lack of coherent thought of the author than it does about the subject. On every matter of substance his interpretation is wrong.

Thankfully his views on the matter are both irrelevant and not shared by anyone else who actually knows anything about Lady Thatcher's term in office.

[Oberon Houston]

Here is one more Broon quote the Indy missed....

Sunday 6 September 1992

“There are those, like Lady Thatcher, who believe that Britain should devalue and turn its back on Europe and the ERM, with all the harsh consequences that would ensue.”

- Gordon Brown, Sunday Express.

Mr Prudence, my ar....

[GADFLY]

As a lifelong conservative it is so embarassing to see how easily Gordon Brown rattles the the Tory leaderships cage.They appear to have no idea how to outwit him.It would help if they stuck to subjects that affected most of the people of this country.We have had years of being lectured by people with no proper job experience.As a group they were called NuLabour.

[Gordon Hetherington]

I really do think all this is a storm in a tea cup if you forgive the pun. The invite I understand took place after Lady Thatcher congratulated the Prime Minister on his appointment. Do we really have to get so hung up on this trivia, is it any wonder why we are not making more progress!

[Jim Hamilton]

Well, as little as I like either of the persons involved, this pique that Brown met Thatcher strikes me as being some of the Tory "Old Guard" doing their best to damn any chances of a conservative government in the near future...

[Effie]

Oberon Houston | September 15, 2007 at 17:51

This is politics, they all say terrible things about each other while in office but that does not mean that he personally meant her any harm.
Just look at the way CMD used to go on about GB at the dispatch box when TB was PM, the difference being Brown could not answer back, during 1992 Lady T could and quite frequently did.
You cannot compare like for like, the thread is all about whether or not Lady T was exploited, not who said what to whom years ago.
In 1992 she was fair game, she accepted that so should we now.

[Oberon Houston]

Fair point Effie, I inserted the quote not quite as a direct rebuttal of the exploitation charge, but as an addition to the Independants list on the original post. The temptation was huge as Brown constantly tells the electorate that we mucked up over the ERM, conveniently forgetting that he would have made the same mistake. Kinnock's mad rant in Sheffield on the eve of the election was the hairline difference between the Tories getting saddled with that fiasco and Labour being responsible. Oh the hand of fate move's in such ways. etc. etc.

[Effie]

Oberon, as I remember things Brown did think that joining the ERM was a good thing, however he also said that the Conservatives entered it at the wrong time, they left things far too late, they did not enter when the time was right.
Brown being the cautious cat he is would have taken no chances.
As for Kinnocks speech, I do not think that was what cost Labour the election. I think it was Neil Kinnock full stop, he was not PM material.
I also truly believe (if the editor forgives me for going off thread and allows it) that Cameron is doing now what Kinnock done for Blair.
Cameron will do the ground work to try to take the Conservatives to the centre ground and his successor will take the prize.
That is if Brown does not destroy the Conservatives at the next election. Read GADFLY | September 15, 2007 at 18:02
This person has hit the nail on the head, just watch how many statements Brown comes out with during your Party Conference to grab the headlines.
Cameron certainly had Brown underestimated big time and CMD is another who.....
"Has never had a proper job"
Brown is also ruthless and my honest opinion is he will crush Cameron.
I expect a good many to disagree with my last paragraph, I am really not interested, as like me they only have one vote and my opinion like my vote is of the same value as everybody else's.

[Malcolm Dunn]

I suspect Rob Wilson was entirely right, I notice that his views were echoed by Gerald Howarth who I always thought was a close friend of Lady T.
I also suspect that if Lady Thatcher had wished to send a message of any description to David Cameron she would do so,loudly and clearly and would have no need to use a visit to no.10 as cover.
Fortunately,I think this story has not benefitted Gordon Brown,he's taking a load of flak from from his own side who still hate Lady Thatcher and it seems the media are siding with Rob Wilsons view rather than that of the rabble of anonymous posters on this blog.

[Terry]

Brown, made the ridiculous comment that he admired her because, like him, she was a 'conviction politician'. Well, Hitler was a conviction politician; so is Osama bin Laden. There is no virtue in having strong convictions. The key is the nature those convictions and how are they implemented.
Does he believe she shares his convictions on the new EU treaty/constitution or the growth in the public sector or the damage done to private pension schemes or the vast increase in public spending for a less than proportionate improvement in outcomes?
I could have accepted his action as a gracious invitation to an ex-PM if he had not milked the resulting publicity and spun the meeting in a partisan manner. He really is shallow. The veil was lifted for me during one of his recent Budgets when he reduced the basic tax rate but forgot to mention that this was paid for by removing the 10% band. The truth soon came out but the omission was a trick to wrongfoot Cameron when he came to make his reply immediately afterwards. This sort of subterfuge would have embarassed a sixth form debating society. At an age when Cameron was out enjoying himself, Brown was playing student politics. He's never grown out of it. Intrigue, deception, doing down opponents, chicanery, every action callibrated for its political impact are key parts of his make-up. No wonder so many close colleagues have never trusted him.

[Effie]

COMMENT OVERWRITTEN.

PLEASE STOP CRITICISING EACH OTHER IN PERSONAL WAYS!

[Oberon Houston]

Effie: Needless to say, one vote or not, I do disagree with you. You have ignored the date of the Brown comment I mentioned. Brown is much worse than you suppose. Even better was that when we were forced to withdraw from the ERM, he didn't understand what was going on. That day he cancelled his newsnight appointment where he (a history student) would be asked to explain his position and instead called a press conference to moan about the 'mess'. Brown is not a conviction polititian, he is just a polititian. And that ain't nearly enough.

As far as your pessimism for Cameron's chances, you are over simplifying the issue at hand. Kinnock was battling Marxists, Trotskyists and hard-line socialists who had hi-jacket the labour party and were ruining Labour's election chances (culminating in all-out war in 1985 conference where he lambasted the Liverpool councilors (Hatton et. al..) and Arthur Scargill.

Conservatism has, on the other hand, always been a broad church. The current 'tusstle' is, I believe, between (more or less) the 'wets' and the 'drys'. I'm a 'wet' (old fashioned tory sceptic, slowly does it...), and many on the right, who are 'drys' (free-marketeers, and some who are quite radical, like Redwood an some are an odd mixrure of the two, like Leigh or the neo-cons).

This has, for a long long time, always been a tension within the party (over 100 years). For the last 20-years the drys have been in acendency, but the public want less change now, even the poorest, who are getting relatively poorer as more change happens, even under Labour recognise this. Not the same thing as Labour's woes in the 80's.

[Chris Marshall]

Am I alone in being outraged at the calculating way that Mrs Thatcher used her visit to the prime-minister in order to publicise her disdain for Mr Cameron?

[Effie]

Oberon, my overwritten comment was not directed at you but at another.

Having said that I did hear Kinnock speech, the one he directed at Hatton.
It was one of the best speeches I have ever heard.
I still think Brown is a conviction politician regardless and whatsmore I think Lady Thatcher thinks that of him also.
The next election will prove which one of us is right and which is wrong.
DC has made too many amateurish mistakes, I do not think the people he needs to win over takes him serious now, the by-elections he has fought and lost badly is ample proof of that.

[Terry's wife]

Chris, am I alone in thinking that pink dress was mistake?

[Oberon Houston]

Well Effie, I agree that it's unlikely that he will win the next election, but I do think he has a chance, and we have a great chance in a few years time.

There is actually a hell of a lot of structural change that needs to take place within the party. Posturing is not enough, and the electorate instinctively know this. We need to find a coherent reason to be in power that the electorate can relate to. In some ways, the Labour move to the centre-ground has caused us these severe problems, as (crazy as it may seem) those within the Conservative Party cannot find a common cause to fight that is immediate and pressing enough to agree to overlook our own internal differences (as opposed to the socialist version of Labour). New Labour has hit on a winning formula, just don't wander too far from the Tories and the Conservatives will focus on internall differences rather than the Government of the day. Just look at the venom in some of the views on this site directed at fellow conservatives, Labour politicians are never served the same hostile form of attack. This is the achilles heel of the Tory party, it is actually internally more diverse than many realise.

[Oberon Houston]

Terry's Wife: I suspect you are not alone. What a laugh, brilliant!

[Moral minority]

"Am I alone in being outraged at the calculating way that Mrs Thatcher used her visit to the prime-minister in order to publicise her disdain for Mr Cameron?"

No but I have been outraged by Cameron's public disdain for Baroness Thatcher over the last two years. What goes around comes around. Loyalty is earned by example. Cameron's utter contempt for Thatcher has returned with interest. Touche!

[Oberon Houston]

Yawn.

[Scotty]

Moral minority, do you just make it up as you go along?
There is no basis to a claim like "Cameron's utter contempt for Thatcher"! You need to calm down a wee bit, and start putting forward arguments based on facts rather than your prejudices and extreme dislike of the present leadership.

[Radical Tory]

COMMENT OVERWRITTEN.

MAKING THE SAME POINT AGAIN AND AGAIN IS NOT CONSTRUCTIVE, RADICAL TORY.

[David Lindsay]

All right, Richard Tyndall, did she, or did she not, give gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, and the destruction of paternal authority within working-class families and communities through the destruction of that authority’s economic basis in the stockades of working-class male employment?

If so, then specifically which Prime Minister, ever, has therefore done more in any one, never mind all, of the causes of European federalism, Irish Republicanism, sheer economic incompetence, Police inefficiency and ineffectiveness, collapsing educational standards, and everything that underlies or follows from the destruction of paternal authority?

Meanwhile (indeed, thereby), did she, or did she not, transform the middle classes from people like her father into people like her son? If “there is no such thing as society”, then how can there be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation?

Did she, or did she not, sell off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector (forty per cent of the economy) to an unprecedented level of central government dirigisme? Was the rise of Political Correctness, or was it not, in the 1980s, i.e., on her watch? Was that decade also characterised, or was it not, by massively increased welfare dependency and by general moral chaos?

Did the unions ever control the money supply? If not, then how did her war against them ever have anything to do with monetarism? Did she, or did she not, refuse to privatise the Post Office, as her ostensible ideology would have required?

Were hers, or were they not, the continuing public subsidies to fee-paying schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders? And would the the fourth have existed much, and would the other three (then as now) have existed at all, without those market-bucking public subsidies?

Was the collapse of the Soviet Union anyway, or was it not, in accordance with the predictions of (among other people) Enoch Powell? Did she, or did she not, provide aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa? And does she, or does she not, still pointedly fail to condemn either?

Was hers, or was it not, what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the (starved) Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day?

Did she, or did she not, entrench, in and through the economic sphere, the social revolution of the 1960s?

Is it, or is it not the case that at the next General Election, people will have the vote who were not born when she was removed from office, and post-Thatcher teenagers will first enter Parliament in some numbers, a few being already there? And is it, or is it not, the case that by the time of the Election after that, she will almost certainly be dead?

Don't think that you are being clever by just answering Yes or No to any of these. Unless you can refute them, then my two points - that she was utterly unconservative, and that she is in any case massively overrated by Left and right alike - both stand.

I say again that, all in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said it was, even though, before her, it never actually had been.

And I say again, get over her! You are going to look very silly staging Dianista-like vigils for her in the near future. Do not do that to yourselves.

[Yet Another Anon]

I rather suspect that most people are going to think that the wrangle over this is rather ridiculous really, people going on about the colour of dress she wore.

Gordon Brown met David Owen as well that week although news of that was rather ignored.

[Effie]

Oberon:
"Just look at the venom in some of the views on this site directed at fellow conservatives"

I have seen it, experienced it and was quite shocked by it.
This is a great blog-site at times spoiled by some very nasty people.
People who should know better and what makes things worse is I know of quite a few people who read this blog, read the comments, turn away and comment.
"It is still the "Nasty Party"
They do not seem to remember the people on the blog who listen to reason, post accordingly, perhaps have an entirely different take on any given subject, agree to differ but never-the-less respect another's point of view, those like yourself who handle it with good grace, dignity and good manners.
Until the Conservatives stop fighting each other, stop thinking that those who have different views to them are idiots, stop thinking that it is "not that Conservatives are always right it just is they are never wrong", learn that being a true Conservative means being true to one's principles, learn to listen to those whose opinion they do not share and really hear what these people are saying, not just pay lip service, not say anything do anything get elected at any price. They are never going to return to power.
The Conservatives in my opinion will return one of these days but never with a leader like Cameron. Your new leader is there somewhere the only problem is none of us recognise him/her yet.
Incidentally my honest opinion is I admired a considerable ammount of the truly "REAL CONSERVATIVE POLICIES and PRINCIPLES", most of which Cameron has abandoned, Gordon Brown will now take up.
When Lady Thatcher was in power, the conservatives were a united front, she like Brown are conviction politicians, Cameron does not recognise the words, that was her strength, Labour had internal battles that was their weakness. Labour learned the hard way to become a united front, they were starving for power. Conservatives are not hungry enough for power and have still not learned that a dis-united Party with nasty spiteful people in it will never gain power.
Good is forgotten quicker in this life than nastiness, that is a fact of life.

[Effie]

Yet Another Anon | September 16, 2007 at 02:40
PS. can I let you into a secret.
The dress was a send up.
Have you no sense of humour?
Loosen up, relax and enjoy life a bit more!!

[Yet Another Anon]

Did the unions ever control the money supply? If not, then how did her war against them ever have anything to do with monetarism?
The Trade Unions wrecked economic policies of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Jim Callaghan. What Margaret Thatcher put in place was mostly very similar to what Barbara Castle had tried to implement through in place of strife.

The formation of the SDP in 1981 was also about an attempt to distance the Trade Unions from control of political policy - if Labour had won in 1979 after the Winter of Discontent in 1978/79 they might well have revisited In place of Strife.

[Richard Tyndall]

It is sad David Lindsay that you have such a partial and blinkered view of recent history.

For the record what she did was take a country that had been almost destroyed by the unions and Labour mismanagement (not to mention the disasterous premiership of Heath) and turned it around. SHe did nothing short of saving Britain from collapse and she did so by following a set of principles which we have later come to know as Thatcherite.

She did this in the face of opposition not only from the Unions and other parties but also from many in her own party and within the civil service. If you want to see the causes of both the Falklands and the loss of power to Europe then look to the foreign office for your answers. A department that, as a result of ideology, has long worked against Britain's best interests no matter who was in power.

As I said your view is both partial and, in the final analysis, wrong. It is also not held by any other serious, unbiased commentators.
It was those same principles that dictated that it is not the job of government to run industry and which led to the very wise decision to end that practice by privitising those industries that should and could stand on their own. Instead of costing us millions in support they ended up paying the country billions in tax revenue.

[David Lindsay]

Not a single point answered, then, Richard. What are you going to pretend next? That she was a lower-middle-class girl made good? You and yours a cult as surely as the Blairities (including the Cameroons) are a cult: facts are of no interest to you.

[Richard Tyndall]

There are none so blind as those that will not see.

You chose to pick out 'facts' which are either untrue or unrepresentative. It is an old form of logical fallacy which is rightly condemned because it seeks to make use of irrelevant or false claims in support of an otherwise unsustainable position.

It is also based first on foremost on the mistaken principle that the Prime Minister is a dictator who can do what they like, when they like. Much as you might like to think that is the case it is not. I have already cited the insidious operation of the foreign office with regard to both the Falklands and the EU - a problem which continues to exist today and which undermines any attempt to deal properly with the EU question.

I would also point out that if all the other main players including those in power in the USSR at the time cite Thatcher and her influence as being one of the main factors bringing about the start of the collapse of the Soviet Union then I am inclined to take their claims above yours.

Your belief that ending the power of the unions was somehow a bad thing simply betrays how out of touch you are with the wishes of the majority of people in Britain and with the needs of the country. To tie this claim in with a supposed loss of paternal authority is particularly warped.

I have already made clear in my last posting that the privatisation of much of industry was a great thing to do. Only those with no basic economic or poiltical knowledge could ever claim that it is the job of government to run industry. The sales took place according to the state of the market at the time and were designed not primarily to make money for the government but top ensure that the businesses concerned were sold off in a viable form. The whole process was a massive success and your apparent claims that this was somehow a bad thing are unanswerable because they are so basically stupid.

I would agree with you on one thing. Thatcherism had little to do with the old fashioned unwanted principles of paternalist conservatism which had been followed by people like Heath or Eden. Their ideas rightly belonged in the past along with the old 19th century Tory party and I and millions of others are extremely grateful that Thatcher and those who supported her had the courage to break with those dead traditions and try to develop a new conservative party.

[David Lindsay]

"There are none so blind as those that will not see."

Quite so, Richard. Quite so...

[Richard Tyndall]

Glad you agree David and are now willing to admit your mistakes and recant on all that socialist claptrap that litters your Blog.

I would strongly recommend anyone following this thread to take a look at David's Blog to see just how completely out of touch it is with anything that could vaguely be considered modern conservatism.

[Chris Marshall]

Like Effie's my comment was supposed to be tongue in cheek - I was obviously a bit too subtle as some seem to have taken it at face value.

[Dacid Lindsay]

I'm rather surprised that this thread is still gping, but since it is...

If "modern conservatism" means the cult of Margaret Thatcher, then, for all the reasons given above, I freely and gladly admit to being utterly opposed to it.

Furthermore, it is hardly "modern" now: I say again that people will have the vote next time who were not born when she left office - just think on that. Nor was it ever remotely "conservative": read Peter Hitchen's 'The Abolition of Britain' and 'The Abolition of Liberty', and Simon Jenkins's 'Thatcher and Sons', just for a start.

And yes, do look at my blog. That is, after all, what it is for. There, you will see that I am working to restore a party which believes in social democracy precisely because (unlike Thatcher) it has profoundly conservative social and moral values, not least a strong British (and therefore also Commonwealth) patriotism focused on the institution binding together each and both of the Union and the Commonwealth.

All of this was, and remains, mainstream opinion in Scotland, Wales, the North, the Midlands, and the decidedly less chi-chi parts of the South. In some such constituencies, turnout last time was as low as one in three.

So there is a huge gap to be filled by the restored party of those Labour MPs who defended the grammar schools as the ladder of working-class advancement, whereas Thatcher as Education Secretary closed so many that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled, and neither she nor Major ever made the slightest effort to restore grammar schools.

By a party tough on crime because most victims are poor, which is no doubt why it was Thatcher who pioneered ludicrously soft sentencing and hopelessly ineffective policing methods; again, read Hitchens if you have forgotten, or never knew, the facts.

By the party of the Attlee Government, which dismissed the European Coal and Steel Community as "the blueprint for a federal state", which "the Durham miners would never wear"; no wonder that the same Prime Minister who signed the Single European Act also made sure that there were no more Durham miners to boject to it. Of Hugh Gaitskell calling the Common Market "the end of a thousand years of history" and a threat to the unity of the Commonwealth, hardly likely to move the likes of Her.

By the party of ardently Unionist Labour MPs from Scotland, Wales, and their adjacent areas in the 1970s, wheraes Thatcher did more than anyone else ever to make the Scots and Welsh feel less British, and wholly ignored the conscerns both of the North East and of Merseyside not only on this, but on absolutely everything.

By the party of Roy Hattersely sending British troops into Northern Ireland in order to defend the grateful Catholics there precisely as British subjects defined by their liberties under the Crown (whereas citizens are defined by their obligations to the State and to the government of the day). Of Roy Mason running Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom, with terrorism treated as a plain and simple security problem. Thatcher, of course, signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement; she remains a very significant Unionist hate figure to this day.

By the party of Harold Wilson guaranteeing the Anguillan people’s right to be British, explicitly outside the American hegemony that had wanted to re-create there the brothels and drug dens of old Havana. Where to begin in contrasting this with Thatcher? That contrast is complete.

By the party of those Labour MPs (mostly Methodists) who resisted relaxation of the laws on drinking and gambling; in other words, the "free" market, alos applicable to drugs, prostitution and pornography.

By the party of those (mostly Catholics) who fought against abortion and easier divorce, and of those who voted in favour only after warning against exactly what has come to pass: abortion more common than having a tooth pulled (Thatcher introduced abortion up to birth), and one in three marriages ending in divorce (Major made divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract).

That was the party in favour of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation, and full employment. It dissuaded Truman from dropping an atom bomb on Korea, and it refused to send British forces to Vietnam. It opposed the Soviet Union and wider Stalinism on the same grounds, and with the same ferocity, as it opposed fascism in the Iberian world and elsewhere, as well as apartheid South Africa and its Rhodesian satellite. It won elections on enormous turnouts and in the face of serious opposition.

Britain is crying out for just such a party today. So let’s get on and build it. Watch the space that is my blog on that one.

[Richard Tyndall]

If Atlee and Wilson are your political heroes then you are most assuredly no Conservative, old or new.

Those are the governments that helped destroy Britain and after which we had to take decades rebuilding the country.

The more you post the more you reveal yourself as having nothing to contribute to the Conservatives.

[David Lindsay]

Well, nor has anyone else. They're finished. All three are. What matters now is what replaces them. I see that you still haven't actually answered a single point.

No one can accuse the woman who signed the Single European Act of being the equal of Attlee, Bevin or Morrison. And no one can accuse the woman who tried to hand over the Falklands in the first place of being the equal of Wilson over Anguilla, at least.

Have you read the two books by Peter Hitchens and and the one by Simon Jenkins. You really should. Everyone should.

And in the meantime, have a look at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/09/gordon-and-marg.html#comments - even the regular readers of Peter Hitchens can find nothing better to say about Thatcher than that she cannot really be blamed, since she was stupid to know what she was doing.

[Richard Tyndall]

No david,

people like you like to claim she was stupid when in fact she was undermined throughout her whole premiership by the foreign office and the wets in her own party who went out of their way to lie about the EU.

Nor did she try to hand over the Falklands. That is simply something dreamed up by her detractors.

No she was not equal to any of the Labour failures you mention. She was in a higher league entirely. As I said before, anyone who can consider people like Wilson as good Prime Ministers really has no consept of conservative values, large or small 'C'.

[Traditional Tory]

Your views seem a bit mixed up to me, David.

I suppose there were - maybe still are - some Catholic TU-affiliated Labour MPs who shared an outlook vaguely similar to yours, but to all intents and purposes your 'ideological bundle' is extinct.

[David Lindsay]

Almost extinct in the House of Commons, yes. But certainly not in the country at large. So change the MPs.

Which will require a new party.

Poor Richard. Bless.