“When Margaret Thatcher was minister for education, she took free milk away from schoolchildren ”

For those of us old enough to remember the misery of warm school milk being forced into you, this is reason enough for the honour. That and her being the most significant political figure in British life since Churchill by a country mile. And the first woman Prime Minister. Of course, she was deeply flawed, but grown ups don’t expect their political leaders to be prophets or paragons.

I am not aware whether the medical evidence was with her at the time on milk, but I think if you tried to introduce free milk today, it would be a very controversial policy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1104740,00.html

Are street parties the order of the day when a state funeral is held? If so then perhaps one would be appropriate for Thatcher. And I quite like the irony that someone who saw their mission as being to roll back the frontiers of the state then being honoured in such a way.

I find this idea obnoxious. She really didn’t achieve a great deal, apart from winning three elections using a deeply unfair electoral system against a fairly useless opposition.

Thatcher has caused considerable harm to this country and is a deeply divisive figure. State funerals - if held at all - should be reserved for a very small number of people, like those who lead us through major wars or who achieve major positive change. To compare Thatcher with Churchill is just nonsense.

Thatcher wasn’t just a conservative in the old-school meaning of the word, she was a bigotted reactionary who actively discriminated against large parts of this country. We should do no more to mark her death than we do for any prime minister.

Putting aside my politics, this is an insult to the imagination of the Conservative voters.

The fact that Margaret Thatcher was “divisive” is irrelevant. Have you forgotten that Churchill got booted out of office straight after WWII because the public had had enough of his government?

Being the first female Prime Minister was a historic achievement. I also cannot believe that Graham Smith #3 tried to downplay the fact that she won three elections - how pathetic. She easily defeated her political opponents and deserves huge credit for doing so. Much as I hate Tony Blair, I still respect him for winning three elections.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

Let’s tackle these conventional orthodoxies one by one.

Thatcher, divisive PM? In the terms of the day she was no more divisive than those who went before her. The fact that she was prepared to pick a damaging fight in order to establish a new balance was something subsequent leaders have benefited from the strength of.

Thatcher decimated entire industries? No, the complacency of the industrial leaders of the time created the condition under which their decimation was inevitable.

She tried to destroy the trade union movement? She tried to destroy the overweening influence of the trades unions, a different thing entirely, and some would argue no bad thing.

She suported South Africa’s apartheid regime and branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist? This again needs to be contextualised within the terms of the day - she also placed heavy restrictions on Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who’ve equally transcended their violent struggle to lead the way to develop peaceful political processes, despite close associations with actual events. Racism was an extension of polarised attitudes which carried over from before the second world war, so while the cold war lasted inequality was accepted.

It’s easy to reflect from the armchair of history, but in our own lifetime we are forced to take sides on all sorts of issues. By allowing ourselves to accept the propagandising on each side we fail to understand the real issues at the heart of the problems.

As far as I’m concerned state funerals are irrelevant and whoever gets one should be a cause of reflection on the times they represent - the true measure of the person is the size and respect of the crowds they attract.

If Palmerstone got one, why not Thatcher?

State funeral or not, I shall be can-can-ing down the street with the Katrina and the Waves hit “Walking On Sunshine” blaring from the speakers.

LFaT

So just because she’s a woman she gets a State Funeral? I though it was called “equality”…

Will we be giving a full state funeral to Wendy Toms, too?

@ John Meredith

“For those of us old enough to remember the misery of warm school milk being forced into you, this is reason enough for the honour.”

Oh, we still got warm milk after Thatcher ended the policy - we just had to pay for the warm milk instead of getting it for free. It wasn’t too bad during the winter, but whenever summer came around you really had to hold your nose. Quite bafflingly, our teacher always kept the milk near a window where there’d be sunlight. It was quite vindictive, really.

No, it was the school dinners that was the worst part of being a kid in Thatcher’s Britain. It’s taken me well over a decade to get over my distaste for healthier foods and ween myself off stuff that, y’know, causes heart disease. To this day, I still can’t stomach rice pudding, and it’s all her fault, the rotter.

Ben G, I favour a chorus of “Hiho the witch is dead” from the wizard of Oz myself.

Sunny, I can see arguments for Maggie having a state funeral, but surely they realise that a lot of the attendees will be um… less than respectful? I can totally see this turning into a riot.

Jennie - can you see how I separate my ‘official’ opinion from my ‘personal’ opinion?

Yeah, thomas, but I’m too lazy to do stuff like that ;)

I’m all in favour of it - the sooner the better.
In fact if they’d had one in the 80s I’d have been there, cheering along.

Where is the uproar over this proposal?

I’m more concerned about the blood-soaked and shit-streaked mess the old bat’s ideological children are making rather than what we do with her worthless bones when Satan decides it’s time for her to honour their contract.

Look Sunny, Children,

New Labour admires Margaret Thatcher; but publishing the idea of a state funeral for her now is just another attempt to distract people from looking at the mess the Government is in. Don’t be distracted.

To quote Homer (Simpson) ‘That dog has a puffy tail! Hehehee, here, Puff! Here, Puff!’
The way things are going they’ll have to publish distracting statements every hour.

Street party, no question. I’ll put the hot dogs on.

I had further suggestions, but I ran out of variants of “evil old crone” and the rest was unprintable.

Sunny, I thought you were pro free market? If that’s the case Thatcher should be a hero of yours! :P

I’m wondering how many cities the procession will pass through, whether we will get days off to attend and in what state of scathedness it would survive.

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.

The fact that she was the first woman to be prime minister doesn’t make her any more of a candidate for a state funeral than the the first woman to be a bus conductor.

And even if she had been the least divisive or the most praiseworthy of PMs she’s still just a citizen now like the rest of us. Surely her family can organise her funeral like every other family in the country has to.

Very true. Her and her scumbag family have lined their pockets very nicely at our expense - and to the cost of the victims of the arms they peddled.
And honouring her just for having been born with ovaries is patronising.

If Attlee didn’t get a state funeral, why should she? Arguably his impact was far more important - for one thing, he bequeathed us the NHS.

I’m interested in how they’d police a State funeral. I can’t decide if the procession would be covered in eggs, bricks, or just have a giant crowd of cheering, dancing partygoers following it the whole way.

Look at the fuss when they suggested a *statue*, for goodness sake.

(Mind you, someone’s suggestion that the statue should have animatronic bat wings, breathe fire and have ‘Lest we forget’ written underneath it, did tickle me.)

“Arguably his impact was far more important - for one thing, he bequeathed us the NHS.”

Why yes, he is responsible for the avoidable deaths of thousands and thousands of people! But you can say that of most great statesman, I suppose.

Would we be having this discussion if Michael Foot had proved wearing a donkey jacket to the cenotaph was what we wanted from our leaders? Of course the fight against tyrrany was a fight to defend imperialism, wasn”t it?

What, is there suddenly a market failure in funeral arrangements? So we, the British taxpayers, have to put our hands in our pockets to subsidize this statist funeral?

I hope the undertakers go out on strike.

The funeral cortège is clearly a threat to our forces - even if it’s heading in the opposite direction.

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

The funeral cortège presents a clear danger to our shipping.
Even if it is sailing in the opposite direction.

“New Labour admires Margaret Thatcher; but publishing the idea of a state funeral for her now is just another attempt to distract people from looking at the mess the Government is in. Don’t be distracted.”

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.

Adam Bienkov

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. :o)

There are long-standing plans for a party to be held in Trafalgar Square the day after she dies. I, for one, will be singing “Maggots 1, Maggie 0″ by Attila the Stockbroker.

So Nick, people living in countries without state funded health systems never die of curable diseases because they can’t afford treatment then?

It’s amazing that Cuba has a better health system than the USA really, isn’t it?

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

* Allegedly

Oh dear… lots of tasteless jokes will be on the way.

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.

If this site is for the Liberal Left , then the quality of the comment is extremely poor. The infantile nature of most of the comments explains why the Tories were in power for 18 years. The Tories success was in part because of the utter uselessness of Benn, Foot and Kinnock plus all the failed Trotskyists. In the land of the blind , the one eyed man king. By 1979 and until 1994 The Labour party appeared detached from reality for most middle income earners. A mixture of neoTrotskyist rant, chip on the shoulder politics and general boorishness enabled Major to win in 1992. If the Tory party had been allowed to select the leaders and the policies of the Labour Party in the period of 1974-1994, in order to enable them to win elections they could have not done a better job. Attlee, Gaitskill and Callaghan were respected by a wide rang of people outside the Labour Party. The militant left undermined Callaghan and so many traditional Labour voters who were skilled craftsmen and those who served in the Armed Forces voted for the Tories. Lady Thatcher probably regularly toasts the memory of Scargill, Benn, Foot, Red Robbo,Hatton, Livingstone, Kinnock , Ted Knight etc , for without their excellent work she probably would have not won in 1979 or 1987 and nor Major in 1992.

@BritSwedeGuy: “It’s amazing that Cuba has a better health system than the USA really, isn’t it?”

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.

Let’s put it this way - if Thatcher has a state funeral, the exact same argument will be made for Blair having one, if of course the country hasn’t disintegrated by the time he kicks the bucket. Something to chew on at least.

@QuestionThat
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the chance of a Cuban child dying at five years of age or younger is 7 per 1000 live births in Cuba, while it’s 8 per 1000 in the US. WHO reports that Cuban males have a life expectancy at birth of 75 years and females 79 years. In comparison, the US life expectancy at birth is 75 and 80 years for males and females, respectively. Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than the US with 5 deaths per thousand in Cuba versus 7 per thousand in the US. Cuba has nearly twice as many physicians as the U.S. — 5.91 doctors per thousand people compared to 2.56 doctors per thousand, according to WHO.

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?

“For someone who supported South Africa’s racist apartheid regime and branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist …”

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.

Unlike Sunny, I don’t particularly find the suggestion offensive or something to get outraged over.

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.

For those of us old enough to remember the misery of warm school milk being forced into you, this is reason enough for the honour.

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.

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

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.)

i think its great that she will be given a state funeral. i will be putting a marquee up, install a DJ and miners will gain entry for free along the route.
what a way to celebrate. drinks are on me when that cow pegs it!

[...] is of course called “no less than she deserves” from some quarters, and “an insult” from [...]

Quinn, I’m down for the street party!

What does anyone make of this?

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

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

I for one hope Thatcher rots in hell along with all of those who voted for her-including my own mother.