Well I agree with the point on unemployment and the same has happened this time round, in the 2010 election we heard a lot about Labour's toxic legacy on youth unemployment, the figures since then have only gone one way. It says everything that now the shockingly high figures are the highest since 1996, which was the last year of Tory government.

The Chancellor that said unemployment was a price worth paying was Norman Lamont in John Major's early days. What he meant was in the context of inflation, it is easier to get inflation down when unemployment is high because it is a brake on wage demands. And once inflation is down it is easier to keep it down because when people expect inflation to be lower, wage demands are lower. So he was probably meaning that you can get inflation down now in the period of high unemployment and it will then be easier to keep it down, but yes the fact he called it a "price worth paying" revealed a man well out of touch with the realities of unemployment on an ordinary family.

Not much chance of that TBH, they were kept further back than the main fleet and any plane launched Excocet would have had to negotiate itself past a series of destroyers and frigates, which would have been hit first (as they were). Excocet is a crude missile that finds a target rather than being given a target, in fact we were around 800m from the Atlantic Conveyor when she was hit and rather than her being the 'target' she was unfortunate to be a slow moving merchantman which could not turn to narrow her profile and therefore became the biggest available target.

The biggest mistake Galtieri made was not to wait 6 months until we had sold Hermes to India and Invincible to Australia, if he had, we would have been knackered. How history repeats itself, the proposed dismantling of our fixed wing capability in 1982 and now again in 2012 and the one common denominator is that the party of 'defence' is in power !!!!

Also, taking out the politics and speaking as a (former) sailor, the Belgrano was always a legitimate target IMO, she was an enemy warship at sea. It matters not one iota the direction she was moving, ships change direction at a moments notice, she should have been sunk the minute she was spotted.

So thats why they arranged the fleet in a ring with the carriers at the centre, is it that you have to launch the Exocet from distance and send it flat across the surface, ie you can't just fly over the top of the outside ones and then send it flat down on the carriers...?

I agree with you on the Belgrano I thought it was just troublemakers trying to pin a "war crime" on Thatcher for sinking an enemy ship, it could easily have hung around outside the exclusion zone for 'safety' from attack while other ships came round the other side and then both come in on our fleet in a pincer movement (which is what I understand Sandy Woodward thought was happening). The Argentinians didn't respect UK sovereignty over the Falklands when they landed troops so they can't complain that we attacked a ship outside the exclusion zone.

As an aside what do you think would happen now if the Argentinians tried it on again, I've seen some scare stories in the media saying the UK wouldn't have the capacity to defend the Falklands any more, but a (fairly recent) ex squaddie I know says thats a load of crap, the Falklands is much more heavily defended now than it was in '82 and also the Argentinian military has had a very small budget since the mid 1980s as the government fears the military being too powerful as it has a history of launching coups, so their equipment has not advanced from where it was in the early 1980s. Also he assures me that the fact we have four Typhoons providing air defence of the island is going to be a serious problem for the Argentinians who will have to take them on with ageing Mirage jets.

Cameron bowing to pressure from the Tory base. Her popularity in certain quarters can't be denied, just as the opposite is equally true. It'd be best not to, for a whole host of reasons, IMO.

It was Blair who agreed it.

Did he? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

[uTo give a fair answer on Mrs Thatcher I would say you can see the seeds of the problems we have today in Mrs Thatcher's policies in the 1980s. [/u

that's true to a certain extent but,with respect I think the real 'seeds' actually go back to the miners strike & general industrial unrest ( the three day week & petrol rationing etc) in the early seventies with of course the oil crisis at about the same time helping to put the boot in.Mrs Thatcher cannot be blamed for that surely ?.....depriving the over 7s of free school milk in 1971 maybe.....

The point is that the political and ideology that was set in place under Margaret Thatcher's government, and has been continued (by and large) since, has absolutely been at the core of the financial crisis both here and globally.

It isn't some strange coincidence that there were so many countries affected by different financial crises at the same time. And the global financial crisis was not a result of industrial unrest in the UK in the 1970s.

I'm not saying todays global crisis is solely a result of what happened in the early seventies but it did have a direct affect on policies brought in by Mrs Thatcher - ie the demolition of the union power bases for a start.Public opinion demanded that the unions be stripped of their power,something the french governments can only dream about...

but yes,you are right that the Thatcher ideology has been continued in one guise or another with seemingly no way out of the present impasse

Very true

It is my belief that it was not done to make people into home-owners, it was done specifically to do away with as much of social housing stock as possible.
That was why the councils were expressly forbiddden to use the money for housing.
Two birds with one stone ... remove social housing as a cost ... and use the proceeds to reduce council tax (short term, as with everything they do).

Her ideology did not include social provision of anything at all.
The only barrier to dismantling even more than she did, was the fact that she knew that if she went too far (e.g. the NHS) she'd be voted out.

Cameron has picked up the dismantlement baton that Major dropped ... inter alia, he thinks he can get away with the "modernising" (for which read privatisation) of the NHS so long as he doesn't go too far (in his reading of it) by cutting middle-class benefits, so he is callously targeting ... yes, targeting ... the poor and the uneducated.
Not only that but he is gerrymandering outrageously by changing constituency boundaries to reduce the number of MPs, appointing far more Lords, and making it easier for those at the bottom of the heap to be disenfranchised by removing local councils' legal duty to register all eligible electors.
See which way he is swinging the power?

Good call.....As a country we don't make enough of our saleable attributes.....Look at this year's biggest waste of money - The Royal Wedding.

We wasted millions on that irrelevant bash..... All those people given the day off must have cost us loads if you believe the stats from the recent public sector strikes.

Instead, we should have flogged off the rights to the whole thing to the biggest buyer....The Yanks would have been throwing dollars at us to let the happy pair go over to Vegas or LA and have a proper celebrity wedding.

Now with Thatcher we should do the same thing.....Imagine it, countries would be queing up to have her paraded round their streets so people could pay their 'respects'.....I think a place next to her bestest mate, Mr Reagan would be most fitting.

It could be like a sponsored Olympic flame thing. She could first start on a tour of previous mining and steelworks communities in England, Scotland & Wales before setting off for a quick trip down the Falls Road. The on trhough Europe to Libya and on through Asia before boarding a boat to Buenos Aires. Up through South America, not forgetting a stop at her old mate Pinochet's final resting place, before ending at the Reagan Presidential Library. I'm sure they could find room for her, if not they could just embalm her and prop her in a corner somewhere

couldn't you finish off the job in real style with a burial at sea from the fishing boat à la 'Captain Bob' ?

What sea laps against [url=http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=7471219the Mount of Olives in Israel[/url?

I can't remember specific manifesto pledges on this, but never forget that any opinion is, in part, informed by a UK media that is, in the majority, hostile to trades unions.



The French people should thank their lucky stars. It's possibly been one reason that France has not gone down the neo-liberal path to the extent that the US and UK have. And why you do not have quite the same economic divide as those two, with all the social problems that that brings.

It may also reflect the fact that France has a better press than over here: even the conservative media will, in the event of a major strike, say, actually look at the facts behind the dispute and sometimes even sympathise.

Incidentally, there is lower union density in France than in the UK.

only cos' some dipstick found his body.....get yer tides right & Bobs' your uncle !

They should put a statue of her on top of Everest, like the statue of liberty,so she can be seen from space, her magnificence radiating out into the cosmos.

Why bother with a mere statue??....Send the old witch up now, while still breathing, and let her really suffer in her final days.

At the end, she'd be frozen solid so the statue wouldn't really be needed???...

How about terraforming planet earth into the likeness of her face, a la mount Rushmore, that's a even better tribute to her goddessness.

I would say there is a bigger economic divide in France. France has had unemployment levels on par with the worst of the Thatcher era through most of the last two decades. It's the flip side of having a heavily unionised society with a high level of employment legislation ("a price worth paying" as Norman Lamont might say!), in France if you have a job you're OK but if you don't especially if you are young, you can be shut outside the employment market for years or for a lifetime.

And that brings a lot of social problems with it - look at Jean Marie Le Pen making the Presidential run off a decade ago and Marine Le Pen having a fair chance of doing that next year. They are exploiting the frustration of a large proportion of the French population that is unemployed and socially excluded, by giving them enemies to blame, black Africans, north African arabs, eastern Europeans.

agree with most of that tho' many of the unemployment problems have been due to governments of all persuasions being totally inflexible regarding the employment laws ie.making the employers charges so high as to discourage the taking on of staff and encouraging illegal working practices and trying various 'schemes' for employers to take on youngsters with various 'work experience' initiatives which is basically cheap labour - when te two year contract is up the company just takes on more work experience kids therefore denying jobs for the older unemployed.The last couple of years has seen Sarko bring in legislation to make it easier and cheaper to become self-employed leaning towards the uk based system.This has helped but in times of recession people are afraid to take the risk of becoming self employed and opting to stay on the dole.

There is frustration with the north african arabs,mainly algerians who are perceived as lazy skivers who are a drain on the system (many of whom have been in france and are original immigrants or second generation who still can't be bothered to learn french,let alone look for work).Eastern europeans are seen as a big problem along with other europeans including brits,dutch & germans etc (we've been here before !) working 'on the black' etc.I personally haven't found any great opposition to the black africans who are more enterprising and seen as 'acceptable ' to the majority of white french people IMO

Not according to [iThe Spirit Level[/i.



See previous comment. And unions and working rights are not the reason for high unemployment.



That France has lower levels of a wide range of social problems than the UK (see [iThe Spirit Level[/i again) is not to say that it is Utopia or that there are not problems and those who will exploit them.

A while ago, on here, I asked someone (sal paradise, IIRC) to provide just one actual example of how legislation on unfair dismissal had stopped an employer form taking on a new members of staff. Unless I missed it, there was no response from him – or anyone else.



We had a thread about this in the UK just recently.



Sarko is a neo-liberal t**t, who is apparently too thick to see what has happened as a result of nei-liberal policies elsewhere or simply doesn't give one about the people he is supposed to represent.

Why is becoming self-employed supposed to be so good? And what are all the jobs that did not allow for self-employment but do now? I've been self-employed for a decade now – because I had pretty much no option. It's not some bed of roses and can be an absolute financial nightmare. Why promote something that will lead to less security for many? How is this beneficial to society?