i'd pay 8 million for her to have a sky burial.
She's dead
- Thread starter jexykrodic
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No, I think it should be abolished. Or, at least lowered to the level of basic income I'd set, but that level would be well below the minimum market wage, so in effect there'd be no mandated minimum. Basically the state would be reduced to a very few activities: policing, armed forces, legislation and the courts etc, a few simple regulatory bodies dealing with building planning and so on, tax collection, and redistribution of income. I guess that would probably amount to around 10-15% of GDP. Everything else would be left to the market.
do you see any problems with increasing the influence of market forces?
I'll be interested to see how many people will be at these parties Saturday night across the country.
There's gonna be one in most city & town centres by the looks of it, & I've been invited to two in houses on Saturday night, & there's a couple of pubs locally doing a 'Ding dong' night of celebrations.
My mates dad rang the local conservative club to ask if he could have his party there! They said they were already booked. Not the response he was hoping for I think!
There's gonna be one in most city & town centres by the looks of it, & I've been invited to two in houses on Saturday night, & there's a couple of pubs locally doing a 'Ding dong' night of celebrations.
My mates dad rang the local conservative club to ask if he could have his party there! They said they were already booked. Not the response he was hoping for I think!
You know what - the country & the business world don't fall apart when companies are forced to pay people a respectable, decent living wage instead of giving money away in bonus or share form to already we remunerated executives.
No. I think it would be fantastic! But, of course, I could be wrong.
Incidentally, are you still toying with being a communist? If so, do you see any problems with the record of cumunism from 1917 to present?
I think it would probably be ok for the likes of Starbucks and Wetherspoons. More of an issue for smaller independent coffee shops and pubs. But I'll still be able to get my pint of Carling so it's all good.
yep I said that earlier
Well, sure just pretend the independent coffee shops & pubs are like mines & steel yards and close them.
That's the argument the IRA tried to use when they bombed people.
Er, ok. Is there some kind of point to go with that random collection of words?
I don't think anybody should have their funeral funded by the taxpayer, especially not somebody who died quite wealthy. You can say they deserve it for service to the country etc., but how much was spent on the funeral of the brave men who died in the Battle of Britain, without whom the future of your country could have been vastly different? Or how about those police officers who not so long ago foiled a plot that was plotted to be bigger than the July 7th attacks on London. Will they be given big huge funerals for all the lives they saved? Fuck what the world expects.
Ok, I'll help you out a little..... this is a good read.
Maggie Was Not The Problem
By Jason Walsh
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DUBLIN, IE: The death of Margaret Thatcher has given the British left the opportunity to indulge in the thing it prefers to politics: historical reenactment.
Journalist and titan of Labor, Owen Jones warns darkly that her death is Not The End. Like a prematurely superannuated Eeyore, Jones argues that, although Thatcher is gone, "Thatcherism" lives on. We're all Thatcher's children, right?
Perhaps, but not quite in the way people mean. London's left-leaning "creative class" is delighted at the old woman’s keeling-over. This is an entire generation of people who rail against the evils of capitalism (at least in the form of unpaid internships and jobs in supermarkets) but who think that music, film, literature and journalism should be free. I may be going prematurely senile, but I don't recall trade unions arguing that everyone in the country should get paid a basic income so they could pursue pointless and unpopular "creative projects."
I can't even imagine what the result is going to be when Laurie Penny, the helium-filled voice of a generalization, makes good on her threat to write about Thatcher. Penny recently fantasized that otherwise revolutionary British citizens had been cowed into submission by police brutality in the form of… er, "kettling" and newspaper discussions about perhaps using water cannon? This from a woman who thinks the spawn of 4chan are the rightful heirs of the Chartists and Suffragettes.
This kind of arrant nonsense, more than anything else in recent years, has made me think of the era of Margaret Thatcher.
When I was a small child growing up in west Belfast, we used to bring plastic bullets, fired by the police, into the school playground to show off. We looked on as buses burned, buildings exploded and riots broke out. We saw her soldiers as death squads. Margaret Thatcher was, to us, the devil incarnate. How much did we hate Thatcher? A lot. My mother, a polite and otherwise largely apolitical woman, emailed me last night to denounce her as a "Rottweiler." My grandmother, an unfailingly polite snob from south Dublin, kept a roll of toilet tissue with Thatcher's face on it. Among the Irish, Thatcher was as popular as the potato famine.
British comedy writer and Labor party by-election candidate John O'Farrell recently got in trouble with the press for a line in his comic memoir, “Things Can Only Get Better,” that said he wished the IRA's attempt to assassinate Thatcher with the 1984 Brighton bomb had been successful. Liberals and lefties rushed to his defense saying it was just a joke. Maybe. In Belfast people meant it. In fact, when Thatcher's close friend, war hero Airey Neave, was assassinated by an Irish National Liberation Army car bomb, people celebrated with the joke: "He could escape from Colditz but couldn't get out of the House of Commons car park."
Last night in Brixton, London, arty types gathered to drink and dance to celebrate the death at 87 of a woman many of them were too young to remember. As a child, I knew adults who would happily have murdered the woman. This is not a metaphor.
Times change. Writing Thatcher's obituary yesterday, I spoke to a former IRA hunger striker. This morning I read something by another former IRA member. Neither is keen to dance on Thatcher's grave.
Let's look at some facts about the Iron Lady. Government spending rose in every year of Thatcher's reign, save for two. Even adjusted for inflation, she did not slash spending. The defeat of the miners in the Great Strike of 1984-5 is at least as much the fault of the miners' union's moronic leadership which failed to ballot its members and launched a strike about coal during the summer. The policies now referred to as 'neo-liberalism' and "Thatcherism" actually began under the Labour party (after a failed start under Ted Heath's previous Conservative administration).
The term "Thatcherism" was coined in the pages of Marxism Today magazine. It would be a mistake to read that magazine's title literally. Marxism Today, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, was in fact an anti-communist publication. Don't believe me? Its roll-call of writers included all manner of trendy academics such as Stuart Hall, think-tanker Martin Jacques, Guardian journalists Beatrix Campbell and Suzanne Moore and… former British prime minister Tony Blair.
This arcane piece of knowledge is significant only because it goes some way toward explaining the degeneracy of the British left today. Its dirty secret is that it thought more of Thatcher than the right ever did. After all, for all their hagiographies and sobbing over the last 24 hours, it was the right that threw her overboard as soon as she became more of a liability than an asset.
Marxism Today, starting with its essay “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” by historian Eric Hobsbawm, sought not only to explain away the left's manifest failures, but also to develop the ridiculous identity politics that pass for leftist thinking today. The kind of politics that see leftists criticize the slightly silly topless activists of Femen while remaining silent about the insane misogyny of Islamist regimes. The very term "Thatcherism" was an essential component of this, an attempt to mask the left's inability to win an argument, never mind an election.
Margaret Thatcher supported Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, yes. What she did not do was use his tactics. Throughout Thatcher's reign Britain remained a democracy. Labor party leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock were not dropped from helicopters into the Atlantic ocean. Guardian journalists were not rounded-up and shot. In fact, at least one of them, Polly Toynbee, left the Labor party to join the collaborationist Social Democratic Party, significantly damaging Labor's chances of unseating Thatcher in the 1983 election.
To hear it discussed now you'd think there was no opposition to Thatcher's governance of Britain, just as you might think the same about the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition today. But here is the truth: the right has not befuddled the public by way of tabloid newspapers and trash TV; members of the left have continued to make idiots out of themselves and lose the argument, just like they did under Thatcher.
During the 1984-5 strike that sealed Thatcher's defeat of the left, the miners, lest it be forgotten, were led by Arthur Scargill, a man so dense that his head could be used to smash diamonds. And remember: the Labor party, for all the bellicose rhetoric of its supporters today, did not support the miners.
Well, as that well-known Thatcherite Karl Marx wrote, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Whether the left's campaign to oppose cuts to sickness benefits represents the former or the latter is hard to say, but the public isn't falling for it. This policy was, after all, pioneered by Thatcher in order to disguise record levels of unemployment brought about by her disastrous stewardship of the economy. Only now it is a shibboleth of apparently left-wing thinking.
Margaret Thatcher was always a woman of myth. During her time as prime minister, feminists joked that she was a man — no woman could be as evil as she, for goodness's sake. Thatcher was a cipher. Otherwise stony-faced, politically correct lefties and student union equality officers were given carte blanche to let their misogyny run wild, while right-wing nut-jobs pretended she never backtracked despite the fact that she had to say "whoops, sorry vicar!" on monetarism and the poll tax, all the while increasing spending and strengthening those parts of the state she approved of.
Alas, in death her myth will grow, just as it grew once she was out of power and the left proved it couldn't even defeat her successor, John Major, the least charismatic former acrobat ever to have run away from the circus.
There is, however, one thing on which all of us – left and right – can agree. One legacy for which Margaret Thatcher should, and must, be judged. Her greatest crime, and the one for we should never forgive her.
Margaret Thatcher inspired the music of Billy Bragg.
So? Some causes are better and some means worse than others, but the point still stands.
No one is ganging up Peter.
i've never contemplated being a communist. watch zeitgeist addendum if you get the time (not the first film).
Yes they are. The last few pages have been full of ad hominems from various posters.
They havnt club together to give you shit Peter. Its Maggie who the mob are here for, not you.
Aidan has it spot on. I'm not arsed what send off she gets. It can be as over the top and as elaborate as can be but her estate should be paying for it. I expect it'll be the same when Lizzy pops her clogs. One of the richest women on the planet but it'll be us suckers paying for it.
Peter, if you only spent what you said that amounts to over 17% of GDP. And that's in only 7 of over 20 current departments.
Total GDP for UK at the end of Jan 2013 was 1592.87bn. So your spending:
HMRC46.6bn
Debt Int48.2bn*
Defence37.3bn
Devolved58.9bn*
HMRC46.6bn
Local Govt26.6bn
MofJ08.6bn
272.8bn
* I've added these because I don't think you could ignore the devolved parliaments or pay back debt. Of course there's lots of other stuff you can't ignore like the EU, Transport, Business, Energy, FCO, Home Office, Pensions etc etc. Even if you ignored all that lot you'd be cutting public spending by over two thirds of the 2011/12 public spend of 694.9bn.
Your figures don't add up and your plan wouldn't work.
Mate I would have zero chance of getting in my old uniform. I had a 30 inch waist then.
Hahahahahahahaha are you for fucking real?????????????????
My figures don't add up?!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm one guy talking in vague terms about huge changes to the state. Of course my figures don't fucking add up!
Jesus fucking Christ.
Plus you're an accountant, so your actual job is making figures that don't add up look like they do.
I just thought I'd do a bit of trolling. Quite fun isn't it.
Argument is indeed the cum upon which said troll likes to guzzle.
I like how people aren't ganging up to undermine my arguments by calling me a troll, btw Oncey.
Maybe you dont fully understand what a troll is Peter.
You most definitely are one.
I dont mind that of course, I myself troll about on occasion.
I dont get all ghey when im pulled up for it.
Im being picked on, im being called a troll.
Man up ffs.
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