http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/18/margaretthatcher.past

The word ’slavish’ popped into my mind, it must be said.

Don’t you mean voting floaters?

Come on, people. There are more pressing concerns other than how some has-been old ratbag is buried. She’ll still be dead and they’ll be tossing her carcass into a hole in the ground like the rest of us. Go and spend a quiet penny at her graveside, if you must. If a bunch of sad sacks want to turn out and chuck flowers, that’s their loss.

(Maybe if we’re very lucky, we’ll get the day off when she carks it.)

Well said John, that stuff put me off milk for life.

This is just the goverment trying to look statesmanlike to appeal to the floating voters.

When Thatcher dies, there will rightly be a lot of discussion and debate about the impact she had on British politics and society including whether her ideas have too great an influence today. I will contribute to that, and LC should too.

But outrage at a state funeral? She was Prime Minister for 11 years, our first female Prime Minister and the longest serving PM of the post-war period. Even those who want to disagree with just about everything she did have to recognise that she was an important historic figure.

I am sure a state funeral for Churchill was absolutely right (though you could find many, many things that Churchil got wrong for most of his political career, he did get one very big thing very right). While you could see Churchill as a one-off, there was also a state funeral for Gladstone. Probably there are others (Lloyd George, Attlee) for whom a good case could be made.

However, I do take the point of those who feel that ‘State funeral’ is ironic. On the other hand, Margaret Thatcher did many things which were regressive – like shifting the tax burden from the better off towards the poor – but (like Ronald Reagan) she did not cut the size of the state in terms of GDP.

Oh dear Sunny, you sound like somebody in need of an education in Anglo-South African relations.

Firstly, Thatcher was in no position to put pressure on Pretoria even if she had wanted to. South Africa was a rich, fiercely independent and well-armed country with a near-monopoly of vital resources. Much of Africa was under Soviet and Chinese influence at the time so Britain and the US could not afford as fussy about their allies as they might otherwise have been.

The arms embargo against SA was completely futile, and only led to South Africa developing her own powerful arms industry plus an atom-bomb (since dismantled) Most other types of sanctions, from sporting and trading boycotts, didn’t work then and don’t work now. The sanctions, which did eventually work, a refusal by the big banks to renew important loans were too radical in the days of the Cold War.

And this was the real problem. The ANC was heavily penetrated by the Sth. African Communist Party, probably more slavishly loyal to the Kremlin than any other Communist Party in the world. If the Afrikaaner regime had collapsed in the 70s/80s, and the ANC had taken over, South Africa would have become a Soviet client – no doubt about it. Since South Africa is in one of the most strategic sites in the world, and produces large quantities of very important commodities, (many of them militarily important) this would have been a heavy blow to the Free World.

Also remember that Nelson Mandela was not the only ANC leader and that the ANC’s training camps outside S.A. were often run by murderous thugs. In fact, before Mandela went to prison, he was widely known as an opponent of Communist influence in the ANC. This was not surprising given his background. He was a Xhosan nobleman (his grandfather was the chieftain of the Thembu tribe), who received his education from British christian missionaries. He was taught about the British parliamentary system and the rule of law and he came to admire these things. We should be thankful for this; had he been a Moscow-trained Marxist he most probably would have turned out as another vicious Mugabe.(It has even been alleged that Mandela was denounced to the police by ANC Communists who saw him as a threat to their control of the party, but that’s just a rumour)

Mrs. Thatcher and other Tories may have been wrong to dismiss the ANC so quickly, and those Tories who wore ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ badges were just reaction-seeking ignoramuses. But once it was clear that the Soviet Union was out of the way, Mrs Thatcher did play an important part in the release of Mandela and the peaceful handover of power.

That said, I don’t think Thatcher is deserving of a state funeral and I disagree with most other conservatives when they say she was a great PM. Whenever I ask them what she achieved for British conservatism, they suddenly go quiet.

Facts. not propaganda, socialist or otherwise.

@Charlie

Yeah, the ‘infantile sense of humour’ of Trotskyists is why Thatcher got in – or maybe is was Foot’s donkey jacket?

Are you sure about that?

I’m not saying the US model is perfect (IMHO both the NHS and the US model are inferior to continental healthcare models), but Cuban healthcare is hardly a model of success.

Don’t be taken in by the propaganda of the socialists.

The question is, I suppose, what makes a ‘great’ PM. What made Thatcher greater than, say, Harold Wilson? Would Tony Blair qualify for a state funeral?

xD.

Discourteous or not, the evil old bitch still being alive isn’t that bad – she’s a miserable old drunk by all accounts *

* Allegedly

Why have a state funeral for any of them? Let them pay for their own funeral and if people want to turn up and cheer/cry then it’s up to them.

Ah yes, the Irony of Thatcher having a “State” funeral. It’s almost too divine. )

Well if they did leak this they have even less intelligence than I thought, because somehow I don’t think this news will be greeted to nicely in Glasgow East.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Sun_(Gotcha).png

I hope the undertakers go out on strike.