Posts Tagged ‘margaret thatcher’
Margaret Thatcher: ‘Is Margaret Thatcher A Woman?’ asked the envious Polly Tonybee
IN May 1988, Polly Tonybee wrote about Margaret Thatcher in the Washington Monthly. The diatribe was entitled “Is Margaret Thatcher A Woman?”.
Yes, she was. And a mother. But Tonybee wants to present Thatcher as a man, her Spitting Image puppet made flesh.
True enough, Thatcher never gave another women a job at her Cabinet table. But, then, it was her simply being there, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, that makes her a symbol of female emancipation and power. Like her or loathe her, Margaret Thatcher believed she could be Prime Minister. And she made it happen.
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Posted: 9th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comments (2)
BBC ‘live blogs’ Baroness Thatcher’s death from a ‘strike’
THE BBC tells its readers:
LIVE Baroness Thatcher Dies
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Posted: 8th, April 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
Glasgow leads parties to ‘mark Thatcher’s death’
WORDS on Margaret Thatcher’s passing will run into the millions. But only STV has the apparent scoop that her son Mark Thatcher has also died.
In other news, over 300 people massed in Glasgow to celebrate the former Prime Minister’s death.
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Posted: 8th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comments (20)
Thatcher’s death isn’t the only huge news story of the day
WHILE everyone is talking about the death of Margaret Thatcher, there has been another HUGE news story today, lead by Brightons’s The Argus, who always have their finger on the pulse.
While one political giant is pushing up daisies, another giant has been chasing around people even more unpopular than Maggie herself – the devious traffic warden!
Posted: 8th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
1972: School’s out in London for Steve ‘Ginger’ Finch and the Schools’ Action Union strike
Photo: A boy is held around the neck by a helmetless policeman during scuffles outside County Hall, Lambeth, where schoolchildren were demonstrating in support of the demands put forward by the Schools Action Union, which had called a one day strike of London pupils. 17/05/1972.
ON the 4th May 1972 about 200 boys aged between 11 and 16, put down their pencils and rulers at Quinton Kynaston School in the Finchley Road near St John’s Wood in North London, in a protest over unpleasant school dinners, caning, and the conformity of school uniforms. They swarmed over the school wall and not knowing really what to do next, decided to all go home, writes Rob Baker.
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Posted: 3rd, April 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
Margaret Thatcher’s battle bus sells for £17,000 (photos)
MARGARET Thatcher’s 28-tonne ‘battle bus’ used for her Northern Ireland tour has sold for £16,940 at auction. The bus weighs 38 tons, seats 32 passengers and can survice a 7.62 bullet / handbag-encased brick.
Posted: 23rd, February 2013 | In: Politicians | Comment
David Beckham, Jimmy Savile, Ronnie Irani, Maggie Thatcher and Jeffrey Archer: the five biggest charity boasters
THEY do a lot of work for charity, and they DO like to mention it!
When it comes to self-promotion you have to hand it to him. Transfer deadline day arrives and instead of talking about a 22-year-old Brazilian or Portuguese hotshot on his way to Chelsea or Manchester to City, the media is frothing with excitement over a 37-year-old former international whose main purpose these days is to sell merchandise with his name on.
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Posted: 7th, February 2013 | In: Celebrities, Flashback, Key Posts, Politicians, Sports | Comment
Finding happiness in poverty with TINA (‘there is no alternative’)
YOU might not be rich, but you can be happy and poor. Well , so they say. Ashley Frawley:
The politics of happiness encourages us to accept our lot, breathing life back into the patronising idea that you can be ‘poor but happy’.
…There are many reasons whyhappiness, thus conceived, was widely embraced. Most significantly, many implicitly accept Margaret Thatcher’s famous mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism (TINA). If we cannot hope to change society in real, material terms, then individual minds and behaviours become some of the few sites open to change. With the political outlook narrowed in this way, ideas like ‘rediscovering happiness’ as the ultimate goal of society can sound radical, utopian even. They also offer a way of bypassing uncertain political identities, connecting with people using the lowest common denominator. After all, who doesn’t want to be happy?
But constructing issues in such broadly agreeable terms makes it difficult to imagine how they might be challenged or opposed. Everyone seemingly agrees that ‘money can’t buy happiness’. The problem with the politics of happiness is that it abstracts this emotion from individual and social experience, and makes it into a flat, measurable policy objective. I have no idea what the future holds, in the same way that no one in 1800, if they had been handed a ‘happiness survey’, would have rated themselves less happy in the expectation of modern innovations like access to electricity. Each generation finds happiness in accordance with the world they take for granted. As a measure of ‘progress’, happiness defaults to an affirmation of the present as the best of all possible worlds.
Just happy to be here.
Posted: 13th, January 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (3)
FLASHBACK: Bombshell resignations – how to say ‘stick your job’ in style
RESIGNATIONS – memorable ones. And on that bombshell…
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Posted: 6th, November 2012 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
Moors Murders: Winnie Johnson’s letters to Myrah Hindley and Magaret Thatcher’s reply
IN 1986, Winnie Johnson wrote to Myra Hindley, the murderer who along with Ian Brady kidnapped, tortured and murdered her 12-year-old son Keith Bennett. Mrs Johnson wanted Hindley to tell her where her son’s body was. Keith Bennett disappeared in 1964. In 1988, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote to Winnie Johnson. The letters are now here for you to read in full. Myra Hindley is dead. Ian Brady is alive, playing mind games with a desperately ill Mrs Johnson:
The pictures are huge – click to enlarge:
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Margaret Thatcher’s family decline red carpet of Iron Lady
THE new Meryl Streep flick about Margaret Thatcher – Iron Lady – is almost certainly going to ruffle some feathers, not least with Thatcher’s own family who have rejected an invitation to see the movie at a public screening, according to the film’s director.
Phyllida Lloyd said that despite the fact she based most of the film on the autobiography of the former Prime Minister’s daughter Carol, she’s not actually spoken to the family about the controversial picture.
Of course, Iron Lady has attracted a fair amount of criticism from various quarters. Some don’t like the way it has depicted the Baroness suffering from dementia. Others just thoroughly hate Maggie Thatcher and are worried that the film will shine a kind light on her.
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Posted: 4th, January 2012 | In: Film | Comment (1)
Margaret Thatcher loved Liverpool because the official records say she did
MARGARET Thatchers’s Cabinet contemplated allowing the post Toxteth riots Liverpool to fester and die. She rejected it. Indeed, Mrs Thatcher detailed Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine to Liverpool as Minister for Merseyside. He would head a drive to pump money into the city.
Delroy Burroughs, a “Community Leader” in Toxteth tells the BBC that the report “exonerated his community”.
It doesn’t. The papers revealed under the 30 Year Rule just tell us what discussions were worthy of note.
What’s also revealed it that Thatcher and her Cabinet talked about the Riot Act. The then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir David McNee, offered the Riot Act as an option when Thatcher visited Scotland Yard and Brixton police station after the Toxteth riots that had followed the riots in Brixton and Bristol.
The Times notes:
He argued that the best way to keep control was by introducing the power to arrest anyone who was on the streets after a state of riot had been declared by a magistrate. The Riot Act, introduced in 1714, fell into abeyance in the 20th century and was repealed in 1967… Warning of a state of riot could be announced by loud hailer, and arrangements could be made to ensure that a magistrate was always on call,”
It’s the kind of idiocy you expects from the Met, who fail to listen. When people who want to smash things riot, the police’s big idea is to give them a real grievance and be the willing cudgel for the draconian state that see freedoms as luxuries to remove at will.
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Posted: 30th, December 2011 | In: Politicians | Comments (4)
Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher refused free ironing board
MARGARET Thatcher, currently appearing as Meryl Streep in the cinemas, was once, according to papers released by the national archives, embroiled in a row over the No 10 ironing board. The iron lady was the ironing lady.
To make Downing Street ready for Mrs Thatcher’s moving in, the public purse invested £1,836 in a sprucing up, including £464 on bedding, “replacement crockery” for £209 and £19 for an ironing board.
Nick Sanders, Mrs Thatcher’s private secretary, was unimpressed. He wrote to Whitehall mandarins:
“This must not happen again. It is all too likely that such information will be picked up and used against the Prime Minister at question time.”
Maggie wrote:
“I will pay for the ironing board.”
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Posted: 30th, December 2011 | In: Politicians | Comment
Margaret Thatcher urged ‘abandon Liverpool to managed decline’
DID Margaret Thatcher like Liverpool? Those around her didn’t. In the wake of the Toxteth Riots, Margaret Thatcher was secretly urged to abandon Liverpool to a fate of “managed decline”, according to official papers made public for the first time today. Senior ministers in Thatcher’s Conservative government urged her not to waste public money on the “stony ground” of Merseyside, suggesting it would be like “trying to make water flow uphill”.
The riots in Toxteth followed the year’s earlier Brixton riots. Lord Scarman’s reports attributed their cause to “complex political, social and economic factors” leading to “disposition towards violent protest”.
Not all of Thatcher’s children benefitted from the free market and the booming City.
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Posted: 30th, December 2011 | In: Politicians | Comment
Liam Fox Is 50: Maggie Thatcher Is Forever In The 80s
HAPPY birthday, Secretary of State for Defence Dr Liam Fox.
We spotted you in your shiny birthday shirt and your wife Jesme flanking former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher at Admiralty House in Whitehall. One or more of you is about to dance. One or more of you might be made of wax…
Posted: 25th, September 2011 | In: Politicians | Comment (1)
Lord Archer Sells Margret Thatcher’s Handbag For £25,000: Wallet Not Included
MARGARET Thatcher’s bag has been sold for £25,000 at a charity auction at Christie’s in central London. The master of the gavel was Lord Jeffrey Archer.
Rumours that Maggie is looking for the bag she asked a charming man who said all the eight things to hold while she buckled her shoe are thought to be wide of the mark and utterly baseless…
Posted: 28th, June 2011 | In: Politicians | Comment (1)
The BBC And Guardian Use Margaret Thatcher’s Lie To Slam ‘Nuts’ Sarah Palin
SARAH Palin may one say be in charge of over five thousand nuclear missiles. She wants to visit the UK on her way to Sudan. Palin told Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times:
I am going to Sudan in July and hope to stop in England on the way. I am just hoping Mrs Thatcher is well enough to see me as I so admire her.
When told of this, the Iron Lady’s aide (billed as a Thatcher “ally” in the Guardian) was reported to have uttered:
“Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.”
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Posted: 13th, June 2011 | In: Politicians | Comments (2)
Ed Miliband Won’t Dance On Margaret Thatcher’s Grave: But He Might Play The Accordion
SURE Ed Miliband posed for a smiley photo with Nottinghamshire Labour council candidate Keir Morrison who was wearing a T-shirt bearing a picture of headstone and the legend:
“A generation of trade unionists will dance on Thatcher’s grave”
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Posted: 8th, May 2011 | In: Politicians | Comment
When Thatcher Met David Cameron – And Mr Cleggy Do
PRIME Minister David Cameron helps Baroness Thatcher as she leaves Downing Street… It’s the David Cameron show – with me, Cleggy Do...
Posted: 9th, June 2010 | In: Politicians | Comment (1)
The Margaret Thatcher NUT Cracker, In Pictures
THIS Christmas why not get the Margaret Thatcher nut cracker. Or is that NUT cracker? The National Union of Teachers are a Bolshie bunch who not content with joining institutions to institutionalise the young, join a union to immerse themselves deep within institutions. Walnuts, almonds, Brazils, filberts, chestnuts and if you’re a true Tory hankering for the golden era of Maggie and all that iron might, there are pine nuts…
8113306
Posted: 9th, December 2009 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Madeleine McCann Seen With Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Simon Cowell, Princess Diana, Winston Churchill And Gordon Brown
MADDIE WATCH – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann, Kate McCann and Gerry McCann
THIS IS TAMWORTH: “Chase artist’s postage stamp portraits in museum display”
AN EXHIBITION of postage stamp portraits, created by renowned Hednesford artist Pete Mason, is on display at the Museum of Cannock Chase.
A wrote a letter to the papers, they printed it on Anorak…
The painter and illustrator is displaying his works, including pictures containing 2500 stamps up to 20,000 stamps, until November 14.
At 32p a stamp, it’s an expensive hobby…
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Posted: 1st, November 2008 | In: Madeleine McCann, Reviews | Comments (354)
