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Some of the Articles on Margaret Thatcher on this INL News page
Margaret Thatcher death: latest reaction
Margaret Thatcher died of a stroke on Monday at the age of 87. Follow the latest reaction to the death of Britain's first female prime minister
Galloway's' tramp the dirt' tweet a signal for her(Margaret Thatcher) enemies to celebrate
by Tariq Tahir- Scotland Metro Newspaper: 9th April 2012 Page While many people opposed to Margaret Thatcher and her ideas offered a sober assessment of her life, for others lingering hatred boiled over.
Respect MP George Galloway was among many who expressed their fellings on Twitter where he wrote: 'Tramp The Dirt Down'.
Parties rejoice at the passing of Margaret Thatcher
by Tariq Tahir- Scotland Metro Newspaper: 9th April 2012 Page
Celebrations were held yesterday to mark the death of Margaret Thatcher
In Glasgow, 300 people 'celebrated' the occasion in an event organised on Twitter. Anti-Capitists campaigners shouted from loudspeakers 'Maggie,Maggie, to replies of Dead, Dead, Dead'.
About 200 people gathered in Brixton, south London - the scene of rioting in 1981 - for a party organised by a socialist group called Brixton Rebels.
A Facebook group said about 800 people had registered an interest in attending.
Police were at the event, which includes banners reading 'Rejoice, Thatcher is dead.'
Once Facebook user wrote, 'She may have been awful, she may have done a lot of damage to this country, but did she ever celebrate anyone's death by having a party? No, Grow Up.'
A similar part is being organised on Twitter for Trafalgar Square in Central London on Saturday.
A backlash later emerged on social media , with some users 'unfreindling' and ' unfollowing' each other following remarks about Lady Thatcher's Death.
Time for Scots to show respect for her family
First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond urged respect for the Thatcher Family. He said the news would prompt 'renewed debate' about her legacy in Scotland, but added: ' Today, however, the proper reaction should be respect and condolences to her family.'
The comments came as around 300 people turned up in an unofficial 'Death Party' in George Square -Glasgow, which was the scene of the Poll Tax Protests in the 1980's. Police Scotland said it was unaware of the 'party plans' and would' police accordingly'.
Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont said: ' I came into politics to fight the ideology and values of Margaret Thatcher, which I believed damaged out country. But today is not a day to debate that. Today is a day to offer the deepest condolences to Margaret Thatcher's family, friends and all who loved her.
Earlier in the day, Scotland's only Tory Party MP paid his tribute to Baroness Thatcher. David Mundell said: ' She was an unwavering defender of our national sovereignty, a staunch defender of our principles of democracy and the rule of law'.
'Margaret Thatcher changed Britain for the better, but she helped change the world for the better too.'
Viewpoint: What if Margaret Thatcher had never been? Privatisation, finance boom, manufacturing decline, home ownership, union laws. The UK changed hugely in the 1980s. But how much of that would have happened if Margaret Thatcher had never taken office, asks historian Dominic Sandbrook.
Morrissey: still not Margaret Thatcher's biggest fan
Mozza releases statement claiming that 'no British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher'
Margaret Thatcher: we disliked her and we loved it
What bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value
Above
all, Margaret Thatcher Loved Britain by John Higginson
Political Editor for Metro Scotland-Tuesday 9th April, 2013
BARINESS
Thatcher, who dies yesterday, should be remembered most of all for her
patriotism, David Cameron, The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said. the
grocer's daughter who rose to take her place on the world stage was hated by
some, but was a 'great Briton', David Cameron, The Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom told reporters outside No. 10 Downing Street.
Biography of Margaret Hilda Thatcher Margaret Hilda ThatcherBaroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (née Roberts, 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and the Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century and is the only woman to have held the office. A Soviet journalist called her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As Prime Minister, she implemented policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Some of the celebrities, politicians and world leaders invited to Margaret Thatcher's funeral
12. Ten staff of The Ritz hotel in London where Baroness Thatcher died have been invited as thanks for the care the former Prime Minister received in her final days (PA)
11. Lord and Lady Lloyd Webber have been invited to attend the funeral (PA)
10. Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and the Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband are all expected to attend. All Cabinet members are invited - however Shadow Cabinet is not (PA)
9. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah will attend Thatcher's funeral (PA)
8. Dame Lady Mary Archer and Jeffrey Archer are both invited (Eddie Mulholland / Rex Features)
7. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to attend (Reuters)
7. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to attend (Reuters)
6. The last president of apartheid South Africa, FW De Klerk (right) will be attending. The Nobel Peace Prize Winner, freed fellow Nobel Prize Winner Nelson Mandela (left) from Robben Island and helped end racial segregation in the country. A representative of Nelson Mandela will also attend in the former President's stead (AP Photo/Obed Zilwa).
5. Dame Shirley Bassey will be attending (Matt Baron/BEI / Rex Features)
4. Barack and Michelle Obama are expected to attend and all living former Presidents have been invited (PA)
3. The Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, will attend Thatcher's funeral in a mark of respect. The only time the Queen has attended the funeral of a former Prime Minister was for Winston Churchill in 1965 (PA)
2. Tony and Cherie Blair are pictured with Baroness Thatcher during a church service to mark the 25th anniversary of the Falklands Island conflict. The former Labour Prime Minister is due to attend the funeral with his wife (PA)
1. Jeremy Clarkson, from 'Top Gear' is invited (Nils Jorgensen / Rex Features)
Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children'
Margaret Thatcher, the year she became leader of the Conservatives, and the year Russell Brand was born. Photograph: Keystone France
The actor and comedian recalls a bizarre recent encounter with the Iron Lady, and how it prompted him to think about growing up under the most unlikely matriarch-figure imaginable..
One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.
My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.
When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken from picture library
Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.
Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.
When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.
When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.
Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.
The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy
"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.
It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.
I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud.
There were sporadic resurrections. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.
Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness?
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.
I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.
Russell Brand - what the hell do you know about Margaret Thatcher's mothering skills?
Margaret Thatcher's mothering skills have been called into question by Russell Brand. Apparently a woman can't dole out cuddles to her children at home and be a 'warrior queen' in the workplace. Get with the times, writes Emma Barnett.
Margaret Thatcher with her twins, Carol and MarkPhoto: Daily Telegraph#
Well Carol and Mark Thatcher must be feeling a heck of a lot better now. Russell Brand, yes that greasy-haired leering man the BBC once rapped the knuckles of, has offered his sympathy to them.
Instead, a loose-lipped Brand is telling the world how he has always pitied Baroness Thatcher’s children, for simply being her offspring. In the last 48 hours, since the Iron Lady’s death was announced, I have had many a strip torn off me on national TV, radio and of course on Twitter, for daring to suggest that Lady Thatcher was a feminist icon – whether she liked it or not.
And unlike the spineless ‘Ginger Spice’, Geri Halliwell, who deleted her respectful tweet marking Britain’s only female Prime Minister’s death (post a torrent of digital hate), I have continued to advance my position – abuse and all.
But thankfully, during all of my spirited debates on this topic, I am happy to report that no one has dragged up Lady Thatcher’s mothering skills as a point of contention. In fact, one thing people have in common on both sides of the Thatcher divide, is they wish to discuss her politics and legacy – not her ability to parent.
Moreover, the one thing even the most left-wing feminists cannot disagree with, is just how much Lady Thatcher is being remembered for being a Prime Minister (not a female Prime Minister) and her political decisions, as opposed to how she managed to ‘have it all’.
However, Brand just suitably lowered the tone with his contribution – something he is a pro at. He writes: “For a national matriarch she [was] oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles.
“"Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.”
Well I hate to break it to you Russell, but warrior queens can also be good mothers. And those women doing full-time jobs up and down the country, and then coming home and knocking up their significant other a flan, while tending to the children’s homework, would beg to differ with your cheap summation.
As my Telegraph colleague, Judith Woods, writes today: “the outside world meddles in family dynamics at its peril. Lady Thatcher was a pioneering politician and a working mother before the term had even been properly coined”.
Only she, Denis (her beloved husband of 52 years), Carol and Mark have the right and knowledge to comment on her capacity as a mother. And even then, it’s not really any of our business – as much as we enjoy prying on famous people’s private lives.
Tony Blair is another hugely controversial British Prime Minister – and yet at no point when his political decisions are hotly debated, does anyone opine whether they felt sorry for his large brood in some dire need of cuddles – while he waged war in Iraq.
We need to move beyond the idea that a tough woman in the workplace cannot be a loving person in the privacy of her own home. While Brand is feigning an odd concern for where Carol and Mark Thatcher got their cuddles from, he could also do with updating his views of women’s multifaceted natures.
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she crisply observed: “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.”
Viewed through the refracting prism of political life today, such remarks seem old-fashioned, naïve – laughable, even. Redolent as they are of maternal homeliness and domestic prudence, they are the sort of un-PC sentiments that would make any modern female politician, drilled in the stubborn dogma (some would say myth) of Westminster egalitarianism, wince.
But, as it transpired, Baroness Thatcher really was a new broom, sweeping through the nation determined to diligently balance budgets, declutter sclerotic national industries, and make Britain once again fit for purpose.
She saw no shame in making mention of her roles as wife and mother as well as leader; there are precious few MPs today whose first television interview would be conducted with their six-year-old twins sitting on the arm of the chair. But while her incontrovertible legacy as prime minister is in no doubt, her family life is more opaque.
Certainly, her marriage was a happy one. She met and married her husband Denis, a wealthy, divorced businessman, in 1951. From the outset he was aware of her fierce ambition and, easygoing by nature, was happy to pursue his business interests under the media radar.
Paradoxically, his portrayal as a gin-soaked reactionary in the Dear Bill letters of Private Eye worked in his favour, according to the couple’s daughter, Carol. Pigeonholed in public perceptions as a harmless buffoon, he didn’t distract or indeed detract from his wife’s high profile.
Carol and her twin, Mark, were born in 1953, when their mother was 27. Having studied chemistry at Oxford, she was training to be a barrister when she became pregnant, but with typical resoluteness, posted off her exam application from the hospital ward so as to ensure that she would qualify for the Bar. The family lived in Chelsea and the twins were installed in the nanny’s room – something that wasn’t unusual, given their wealth and status.
Within six years, Margaret had, by dint of talent and determination, entered an exceedingly male-dominated Parliament. After her barnstorming maiden speech in 1960, the aforementioned BBC interview took place with her twins. When her suitability for a front-bench career was mooted, she demurred. “Certainly until these two are a little older I couldn’t take on any more political responsibilities,” she said, and it was a decade before she became Education Secretary in the Heath government.
From the outset, Carol and Mark were very different. But Carol, now 59, has been outspoken about what she perceived as overt favouritism towards her brother, the elder twin by two minutes: “Mark was certainly the star.”
Yet in her book A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl, she depicts a traditional, even-handed childhood; her mother filling rolls for picnics and taking pains to personally wallpaper her children’s rooms. There were riding lessons and ski trips. Lady Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, recalls: “She’d often say 'weekends are for the family’”, and while he concedes that she was not a conventional parent, “she was certainly a caring and loving mother”.
But Carol has written: “As a child I was frightened of her. I always felt I came second of the two. Unloved is not the right word, but I never felt I made the grade.” Mark was sent to boarding school at the age of eight and Carol claims she was dispatched to prep school a year later as “there wasn’t much point in running a household for one child”.
She recently revealed in a BBC documentary that: “All my childhood memories of my mother were just someone who was superwoman before the phrase had been invented. She was always flat out, she never relaxed, household chores were done at breakneck speed in order to get back to the parliamentary correspondence or get on with making up a speech.
“You couldn’t distract her… she had tunnel vision in term of what ever she was doing.”
Carol, who was easily the brighter of the twins, may not have been close to her mother, but onlookers say her inference that she was somehow loved less did not chime with reality.
Former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had a relationship with Carol when he was a fledgling MP and she was in her early twenties. He remembers that once, when the couple’s planned holiday was jeopardised by a three-line whip, requiring all Tory MPs to vote, Mrs Thatcher (then leader of the Opposition) quietly rearranged parliamentary business so as not to disappoint her daughter.
Carol went on to study law, then moved to Australia. She established a successful media career, although after splitting from Aitken she did not go on to marry or have children.
“I’ve written books. I won I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, but nobody will ever know me for being anything other than Margaret Thatcher’s daughter, so at the end of the day whatever I did was never good enough,” was her bruising verdict. It’s a painfully harsh judgment, but one, it must be remembered, that she makes on herself. It’s impossible to know whether her self-esteem issues stem from nature or nurture.
Mark, meanwhile, was not so prone to self-doubt. Having failed his accountancy exams, he gained something of a reputation as a playboy. When he went missing for six days in 1982 in the Sahara while driving in the Paris-Dakar rally, his mother was beside herself.
By the late Eighties he was a wealthy businessman – something that has puzzled commentators. Although there has never been any implication of financial impropriety, the consensus seems to be that, at some level, he enjoyed the benefit of his connections. His first marriage ended in divorce. His children, Amanda and Michael, live in Texas, with their mother, Diane, while he lives in Spain with his second wife.
He gained notoriety for his role in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea; his co-conspirator, Simon Mann, was sent to jail, but he plea-bargained and received a four-year suspended jail sentence and a fine.
“I see him. We maintain contact,” his sister says of their relationship. “We do not have Sunday lunch together, not like other families. But then we never did. Just because you’re related it doesn’t necessarily mean you see a lot of them. You need to have something in common.”
Perhaps it was this ongoing iciness that prompted Lady Thatcher to comment at a meeting with Tory grandee Lord Spicer in April 1995: “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t go into politics because of what it does to your family.”
This shocking admission was revealed in a set of diaries by Lord Spicer published in The Sunday Telegraph last year, but whether it was an off-the-cuff comment or a sincerely held belief isn’t known.
Subsequently, she told Saga magazine, in more measured tones: “Look, you can’t have everything. It has been the greatest privilege being prime minister of my country… Yes, I wish I saw more of my children. We don’t have Sunday lunch together; we don’t go on holiday skiing any more. But I can’t regret. And I haven’t lost my children. They have their lives. I took a different life.”
Lady Thatcher was devastated in 2003 by the death of Denis after 52 years of marriage. And in recent years, as her health deteriorated, friends observed that her children did not visit as often as they might.
Asked about her mother’s complaints of not seeing her grandchildren more often, Carol’s response was unflinching. “A mother cannot reasonably expect her grown-up children to boomerang back, gushing cosiness, and make up for lost time,” she responded. “Absentee mum, then gran in overdrive is not an equation that balances.”
Harsh words, but the outside world meddles in family dynamics at its peril. Lady Thatcher was a pioneering politician and a working mother before the term had even been properly coined. Retrospective feelings of guilt, or circumspection over the sacrifices demanded by the office of prime minister, would not be so very surprising.
And as the nation she led – and the foreign leaders she influenced – prepare for her funeral, there will be ample opportunity to pay tribute to Lady Thatcher, both as public figure and private person.
Windy and cold in the north, warmer in the south. After 24 hours of programmes about the life and achievements of our first female Prime Minister I have come to the conclusion that anything said about Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 1925–2013, shows the same divisions in the country as the weather forecast. Your view of both will vary according to where you’re from.
I was listening to Radio 3 when I first heard of Baroness Thatcher’s death on Monday. It was just before 1.00pm. The bulletin that followed was, as is the way on Radio 3, short and clear. But this was a historic moment, one where the whole nation pauses to reflect so I retuned to Radio 4 and The World at One. It felt like a visit to the undertaker’s parlour. The presentational tone was reverently unctuous, as if the script were written by manuscript nib. The most vivid contributor was Lord Bell, close Thatcher adviser to the end, who spoke of her warmly, saying we would not see her like again. He sounded close to tears.
It was understandable. It isn’t easy to separate personal feeling on such an occasion. Yet it can be even harder for a listener. The emotional churn that comes when what you are hearing does not correspond with your own view is apt to find voice. It once did over gardens walls, it still does on radio phone-ins. It fires up Twitter and Facebook, explodes in kitchens and cars. “No,” we shout, “it wasn’t like that.” Then we sit and wonder whether, really, it was.
Radio, as the hours went on, certainly offered substantial food for thought. Whoever had planned the formal programmes to mark Baroness Thatcher’s death had done an impressive job. Peter Riddell, once political correspondent for The Times, now Director of the Institute for Government, presented Monday night’s Potency and Paradox (produced by Simon Coates), an hour of views from inside the corridors of power. Evidently, as some of the speakers are also now dead, the interviews had been collected over quite a long time but the range was impressive, including former members of Thatcher cabinets, advisers, civil servants, people who had been part of her closest circle.
Riddell’s thesis, diligently explored, is that there was always a paradox of head and heart within her politics. It showed in her personal kindness and compassion, it defined her political convictions. Early on, she could be persuaded, as Lord Carrington revealed. Yet the more dominant she became, the more isolated she was.
Andrew Neil’s special Radio 4 programme yesterday morning (produced by Paula McGinley) was built from voices of ordinary people, some who had known her in her earliest political career, some who only knew her public persona. Neil added in his own fond personal memories, of her friendship and guidance, his admiration for her courage, his regrets.
This was an unusual programme, a tapestry of everyday opinions, memories, insights. An innocence came out in the story of how she was desperate for nylons to go to her first Buckingham Palace garden party and, back in austerity 1951, the only way to get them was on the black market so that’s where her constituency worker got them. Not that young Margaret Roberts would have countenanced such a thing. Determined, brave, convinced, kindly but, as even Neil said, dangerously deaf to dissent.
Today yesterday, having only room for a bit of sports news alongside so many memories of Baroness Thatcher, ended with a brilliantly chosen trio of columnists, Sir Simon Jenkins former editor of The Times, Sir Max Hastings former Daily Telegraph editor and Eleanor Goodman, Channel 4’s former political editor. I think Hastings’s final thought should be framed and put on every newsroom wall. “Prime Ministers can only do what they do at the time.” In other words, yesterday never comes back.
I interviewed Mrs Thatcher twice. First in a constituency office in Warrington in 1975 when she had just been elected party leader. The second time was in Downing Street in 1986, when Michael Heseltine had just left the Cabinet and dangerous rumours were flying. She was everything these programmes said: kindly, careful and dauntingly convinced she was right about everything.
One of Margaret Thatcher's lasting legacies was to turn Britain into a nation of private shareholders.
Justin Urquhart Stewart of Seven Investment Management said: "This was an era of popular share ownership. People might have only owned shares in a couple of companies but this was the first time they held shares and made money from them."
Before the 1980s a small elite – of around 3 million people – owned shares privately. But the number boomed with the privatisation of state-owned utilities such as British Telecom and British Gas.
Mr Urquhart Stewart said that by the end of the 1980s there were almost 12m private shareholders in the UK, a number that would rise still higher with the demutualisation of the building societies, which started in 1989 when Abbey National floated on the stock market. Many others followed in the late 1990s.
Adrian Lowcock of Hargreaves Lansdown added: "In the 1970s just 7pc of people in Britain owned shares directly. By the end of the 1980s a quarter did."
These privatisations were hugely popular. When British Telecom was sold in 1984 two-fifths of the shares sold went to the general public, most of whom were novice investors. Around 2.1 million people invested in the company; they saw the value of their holdings double on the first day, such was the demand for the shares.
The British Gas privatisation in 1986 proved to be just as popular, backed by a TV advertising campaign urging viewers to "Tell Sid" about the offer.
According to Brian Dennehy of Fundexpert.co.uk, 4 million people applied for the shares, of whom 1.5 million received an allocation. Many sold their shareholdings within the first few days for a handsome profit.
Those that held these shares for the longer term have also seen good returns in many cases. According to the Brewin Dophin, British Gas has proved to be the most profitable of these privatisations. An investment of £100 would have been worth £1,246, by the end of 2011 – an increase of 1146pc. This is just the capital gain and does not include the value of any dividends paid. This is a far bigger gain than the growth in the stock market over this period.
These were two of the most high-profile privatisations. But during this period ordinary investors were able to buy shares in Cable & Wireless, British Aerospace, Britoil, Jaguar, British Steel, Rolls-Royce and British Airways – to name but a few.
The chart below shows how some of the popular privatisations have performed relative to the stock market.
A spokesman for Brewin Dolphin said: "In the 1980s, the Thatcher Government successfully developed the policy of selling nationalised industries into private ownership, or privatisation as it became known. However, back then the notion of selling national assets to the public was largely untested and there was uncertainty whether the public would support the issues.
"Thankfully this was not the case. In 1984, BT was the first well known public sector company to be sold and private investors welcomed the offer. More than 2 million people participated, keen to purchase the discounted shares offered at a price of 130p.
"This performance is impressive when you consider the renowned underinvestment in assets prior to privatisation, and the higher levels of staffing at the time of flotation. However, while not actually given away, they were deeply discounted floats and when the companies were exposed to the full force of competition they certainly improved their performance, resulting in very rapid growth from a low base."
Mr Dennehy said: "At the time, Only Fools and Horses was topping the TV ratings. Del Boy's catchphrase of 'this time next year we'll be millionaires' was also a mantra from the Thatcherite generation."
But it wasn't just the privatisations that encouraged wider share ownership. At the same time the Government made it more tax-efficient to hold shares by introducing personal equity plans (or Peps) in 1986.
Initially these plans allowed people to shelter £6,000 in a tax-free environment, by investing in investment funds, or later up to £3,000 in a "single company" Pep.
But many novice investors also learnt the hard way that share dealing wasn't a one-way bet, with the stock market crash of 1987. However, share prices recovered relatively quickly compared with subsequent booms and busts of the past decade.
Property
Ray Boulger of John Charcol said that as far as the housing market was concerned the Right to Buy scheme was Margaret Thatcher’s biggest legacy. This fuelled a significant increase in the proportion of people who were able to buy their own home.
But other factors helped reform the housing market over this period. It is easy to forget that when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister the UK still had exchange controls after the previous Labour Government’s mismanagement of the economy resulted in the humiliation of the UK having to go to the IMF for a bail-out in 1976.
Lifting exchange controls and opening up the UK capital markets had a far reaching impact on the UK economy, and this helped transform the mortgage market during the 1980s. That decade saw several new lenders enter to UK market and new types of mortgage becoming available. Instead of mortgage queues being the norm, borrowers saw the benefit of competition with an increasing choice of different rate options, such as fixed and capped rates, which had been almost unheard of previously.
Mr Boulger said: "Lenders actually had to start competing for business rather than most borrowers having to decide which lender to start saving with in order to qualify for a standard variable rate (SVR) mortgage a couple of years later. Until the early 1980s most banks were not active in the mortgage market and nearly all mortgage lending was done by the much larger number of building societies which then existed. The Building Societies Association operated a cartel, resulting in most lenders charging the same rate. This of course would be illegal today!
Until the mid 1980s it was impossible to raise capital by remortgaging and as until then nearly all lenders charged the same rate there was no point in remortgaging to get a better, or different, rate. Therefore until that time the remortgage market didn’t exist."
Pensions
Tom McPhail, the head of pensions research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said it was "impossible to overstate" the impact that Lady Thatcher had on Britain’s retirement saving culture.
"Back in the early 1980s, we still had a relatively paternalistic pension system, with the state and employers between them providing individuals with a guaranteed retirement income, risk free," he said. "Job mobility was relatively low compared to today, meaning that the final salary pension structure made sense for both employers and employees."
He added: "Through her battles with the unions, the privatisation programme, the abolition of compulsory pension scheme membership and the introduction of personal pensions, successive Thatcher governments fundamentally changed the entire social context. We now have a system of pensions which is largely based on private provision and, while the workplace still plays an important role, individuals’ retirement prosperity is more dependent today than at any time for decades upon the personal decisions which they choose to make.
"This emphasis on individuals bearing responsibility for the decisions they take, aided and supported by their employers, is a direct legacy of Lady Thatcher."
Key privatisations Mrs Thatcher’s premiership
1980 Amersham International Medical Diagnostics – £71 million
1981 Cable & Wireless – £71 million
1982 Britoil (BNOC) £549 million
1983 Associated British Ports £22 million
1984 British Telecom – £3.9bn for treasury
1984 Enterprise Oil – £392 million
1984 Jaguar – £294 million
1985 Trustees Savings Bank (TSB)
1986 British Gas – £5.43bn
1987 British Airways £900m
1987 Rolls-Royce £1.3bn
1987 British Airports Authority £1.28bn
1987 British Petroleum (sold in tranches)
1988 British Steel
1989 Regional water companies – £5.1bn
1990 National Power & Powergen – £2.23bn
1990 Scottish Power and Scottish Hydro Electric – £2.88bn
Internet activist Aaron Swartz helped build many of the web technologies many of us rely on every day, and he didn't do it to enrich himself. But the U.S. government literally scared him to death by threatening him with 35 years in prison--just for engaging in civil disobedience for the open information movement. Aaron committed suicide last month, but let's not let his death be in vain. [Read more]
Tell Congress to reform the CFAA, a law which makes criminals out of practically all of us. Demand Justice for Aaron and Help Rein In Out-Of-Control Prosecutors!
Preparations for the funeral, under the code name Operation True Blue, get under way as the Queen confirms her attendance.
9:07pm UK, Tuesday 09 April 2013
Video: Thatcher Funeral Divides Britain
Baroness Thatcher's funeral will be held at St Paul's Cathedral next Wednesday and attended by the Queen, it has been announced.
Britain's longest serving prime minister and the only woman so far to hold the role will be given a ceremonial funeral with full military honours.
It is the same status as that accorded to the Queen Mother and Diana, Princess of Wales, although some Tories want a full state ceremony.
The Queen also attended Sir Winston Churchill's state ceremony in 1965.
The Queen will attend Lady Thatcher's funeral next Wednesday
She will be accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, and other heads of state and foreign dignitaries from around the world are expected to attend.
Lady Thatcher died at The Ritz in central London on Monday morning after suffering a stroke. She had battled ill health for a number of years.
Downing Street said the date of her funeral was agreed at a meeting attended by her family and officials from Buckingham Palace.
The day before the ceremony, Lady Thatcher's coffin will be transferred to the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster.
Newspaper front pages were dominated by the former PM's death
There will be a short service following its arrival before the coffin rests in the chapel overnight.
The streets will then be cleared for a procession taking the former leader's body from parliament to Church of St Clement Danes, the RAF Chapel on the Strand.
At the church, it will be transferred to a gun carriage drawn by the King's Troop Royal Artillery. The streets will be cleared for the procession on to St Paul's.
There the coffin will be met by a guard of honour as members of the armed services and pensioners of the Royal Hospital Chelsea line the steps.
A private ambulance taking Lady Thatcher's body from the Ritz
The public will not be able to attend the funeral service itself but will be able to line the route of the procession.
Parliament is expected to be suspended for the event, which means the first Prime Minister's Questions since the Easter break could be cancelled.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, who is in charge of some of the funeral arrangements, said: "There's already a huge amount of interest.
"There's a guest list and people will be invited over the coming days. It will be a big event. I think there's a huge amount of people - not just in Britain, but around the world - who will want to pay their respects to her."
A flag flying at half-mast over the Houses of Parliament
Some Tory MPs have expressed disappointment that the 87-year-old has not been granted a state funeral, as wartime leader Churchill was.
Peter Bone, MP for Wellingborough, said she should have "the highest kind of funeral that can be allowed".
"I would have thought a state funeral would be very appropriate. She was the first female prime minister. She was also the greatest peacetime prime minister we ever had," he told the Daily Mail.
However, her friends have indicated she did not want such treatment. She did not want to lie in state and thought a fly-past would be a waste of money.
The former PM sitting for a 70th birthday photograph
For a state funeral to be granted to a non-royal, a parliamentary vote would have to be passed to permit the release of public funds.
Parliament is being recalled on Wednesday to allow MPs to voice their tributes, although the decision has angered some MPs.
Labour's John Mann questioned why taxpayers' money was being spent on bringing back MPs when tributes could have been paid next week, when parliament was due to resume.
"It is perfectly valid that, when a prime minister dies, MPs can pay tribute, but this could be perfectly properly done on Monday," the MP said.
Mrs Thatcher in a tank on a British base in Germany in 1986
He added that he would not be attending the session tomorrow, saying: "I will be at the dentist's."
Prime Minister David Cameron, who has already hailed Lady Thatcher as "a great Briton", is expected to give a statement to the Commons, followed by Labour leader Ed Miliband.
Mr Miliband said on Monday that while he "disagreed with much of what she did", he respected "her extraordinary achievements and her extraordinary personal strength".
The former Tory leader was hailed across the world as a towering politician, although there was also jubilation at her death from critics angry at some of her most controversial actions in office.
Flowers outside her home in Belgravia, London
While some mourners laid flowers in tribute outside her home in Belgravia, London, others took to the streets to celebrate her demise.
Some 200 revellers took to the streets in Bristol, where six police officers were injured in a scuffle as bottles and cans were thrown.
There were similar scenes in south London, where more than 100 people gathered in Brixton - the scene of fierce riots in 1981, two years into Lady Thatcher's first term in office.
A crowd of 300 also gathered in Glasgow's George Square, where in 1989 protests at the introduction of the infamous poll tax took place.
Crowds celebrating the death of the former Tory PM in Brixton
Many on the Left have condemned the social impacts of Lady Thatcher's policies encouraging the free market and stripping power from unions during her 11 years in power.
Her death was also welcomed by veterans of the Falklands conflict in Argentina, who blamed her for the deaths of the 649 troops who died during the 74-day war.
But the news was received with "great sadness" by islanders on the Falklands, who flew the union flags at half mast and hailed her intervention 31 years ago.
Margaret Thatcher died of a stroke on Monday at the age of 87. Follow the latest reaction to the death of Britain's first female prime minister as MPs pay tribute at special Commons session.
16.48 Cries of "sit down" as Mr Winnick continues his assault on Lady Thatcher's legacy. He says she had "brutal contempt" for people in Britain.
16.47 David Winnick heavily criticises Lady Thatcher. He says there was a "human cost" because of her policies and that some of them caused "immense suffering".
16.45 David Cameron has left the Chamber, according to the Telegraph's Tim Ross.
16.44 Labour's David Winnick stands up and says it would be "wrong" if he was not to speak freely about his views of Lady Thatcher.
16.40 Rowena Mason, the Telegraph's political correspondent, has a round-up of some of the best quotes from the House of Lords:
Lord Howard, former Tory leader and minister: "If she'd waited for consensus nothing would ever have happened. She saw what needed to be done and did it."
Lord Armstrong, former Cabinet Secretary: "She was nothing if not feminine.... [Mitterand] flattered her femininity. She recognised it and loved every minute."
Lord Ashdown, former Liberal Democrat leader: "Complex, extraordinary, magnificent, fallible, flawed, infuriating... If politics is defined by principles and the courage to hold to them she was the commanding politician and the greatest prime minister of our day."
Lord Tebbit, former Trade Secretary: "I left her, I fear, at the mercy of her friends. That I do regret."
Lord Fowler, former Health and Employment Secretary: "If you were prepared to be handbagged, she would oblige."
Lord Waddington, former Home Secretary: When you had endured flame and fire [of Lady Thatcher] you came out of it thinking you might have won but weren't absolutely sure
16.34 The Prime Minister is checking his phone as Sir Tony Baldry speaks...
16.33 Tory Sir Tony Baldry talks about Lady Thatcher's "prodigious work ethic". He says that Lady Thatcher always ensured that she was the best person in the room by being the best-prepared person in the room.
16.30 Tim Ross, the Telegraph's political correspondent, has some reaction from David Cameron from inside the chamber:
After Sir Gerald Howarth's first-hand account of serving in Thatcher's era, David Cameron turned on the front bench to congratulate him. The MP, whom Mr Cameron sacked as a defence minister in last September's reshuffle, wasn't paying attention as he took his seat at the very back of the chamber.
The Prime Minister had to wait - and he did - while MPs sitting between the two alerted Sir Gerald, who accepted Mr Cameron's approval with a thumbs up. Earlier, the PM had given similar congratulations to Conor Burns, despite the Tory MP repeatedly teasing his party leader during another speech that had all sides waiting on every word.
Mr Cameron is heading for two hours in the Commons listening to the debate, a long time for any PM to spend sitting in the House. But he has been rewarded with some fine contributions so far.
16.29 Labour's Diane Abbott reminds the House "very gently" that all these years after Lady Thatcher stood down there are still many people around the country who feel on the wrong side of the battles she fought.
"This House should not give the appearance that their voice cannot be heard," Ms Abbott adds.
16.25 Cheryl Gillan, the Conservative MP for Chesham and Amersham, becomes the first woman to speak today in the Commons. Mrs Gillan hails Lady Thatcher as an inspiration and says her many feats "reflect a politician of substance whose like we may never see again".
16.21 Rowena Mason has this from the Lords:
16.18 Michael Meacher, Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton, hails Lady Thatcher's recognition of the issue of climate change. However, he goes on to criticise the unemployment and the the inequality seen during Lady Thatcher's leadership.
16.17 We've now had 11 backenchers speak in the Commons. Not one of them has been a woman.
16.16 Here's more from the Telegraph's Rowena Mason, who is watching the session in the Lords:
16.13 Sir Gerald Howarth: I think she has been the salvation of the nation. I think she has restored our position in the world.
16.12 Another great quote from the Lords via Tim Shipman of the Daily Mail:
16.08 Sir Gerald Howarth was the first MP to an attempt an impression of Lady Thatcher. It wasn't bad at all...
16.07 Sir Gerald Howarth criticises Tony Blair: "She was no poodle to the United States." He then hails her work to end the Cold War, saying she helped to introduce "harmony across the Iron Curtain".
16.05 Tory MP Sir Gerald Howarth goes next. Shouts of "you tell 'em" Gerald as he tells the Labour benches that if the Tories had not privatised the telecoms industry they wouldn't have any mobile phones. He was getting frustrated with them playing with their smartphones.
15.59 Here is a short clip from the Prime Minister's tribute to Lady Thatcher:
15.57 Mr Cameron also told MPs an anecdote during his speech about when one Number 10 staffer wrote a hand-written note to the former Prime Minister asking her to "re-sign a minute".
But unfortunately the hapless official had left the hyphen out so the note actually read "please can you resign this minute".
Lady Thatcher replied: "Thank you dear, but I'd rather not."
15.54 Quote of the day so far from the Lords as tweeted by The Daily Mail's Tim Shipman:
15.50 Sir Gerald Kaufman, the Labour MP for Manchester Gorton, pays tribute to his "old adversary" but says she is more well-known as a "milk snatcher". He blames Arthur Scargill for allowing Lady Thatcher to win during the miners' strike.
15.49 This from The Telegraph's Tim Ross inside the Commons:
15.48 Mr Burns concludes by saying that Lady Thatcher was an inspiration to people all across the world.
15.45 Mr Burns apologises to the Prime Minister for telling an anecdode about a visit he paid to Mr Thatcher's home by taxi. He said that when he got out of the taxi, the driver refused to take his money and simply said: "Your fare tonight 'gov is you go in there and you tell her that we 'aint had a good'un since." Mr Burns said he went inside, told Lady Thatcher and she responded: "Well, he's quite right"
15.41 Mr Burns says that on Sunday evenings when he was on his way to visit Lady Thatcher at her home in Chester Square he would often bump in to Commons Speaker John Bercow on his way to the gym. That gets a good laugh from both sides of the House.
15.38 Conor Burns, the Tory MP who was a friend of Lady Thatcher's, says he feels a "deep sense of personal loss".
15.36 Rowena Mason, the Telegraph's political Correspondent, is watching the session in the House of Lords:
15.34 The tributes in the Commons have been going on for just over an hour, but we are yet to hear from a woman.
15.33 Alasdair MacDonnell, of the SDLP, now speaks. He says that as a democratic Irish nationalist he must register the differences that he had with Lady Thatcher. He says that Lady Thatcher left a "divisive legacy" in Ireland and that she caused "great pain, hurt and distress".
He says that Lady Thatcher incorrectly thought that issues in Ireland could be solved by using military force.
15.29 Peter Lilley then responds to criticisms made of Lady Thatcher. In response to the claim that she was "harsh", he says that Lady Thatcher "made us face reality and reality was harsh".
He also criticises the BBC for calling Lady Thatcher a "divisive" leader.
15.27 Peter Lilley, who wrote speeches for Lady Thatcher long before joining her Cabinet, says Lady Thatcher was "unforgettable" and "immensely kind". He also says she "could be remarkably diplomatic, not least in how she handled those who worked for her".
He says she was in fact "cautious" in contrast to the legend that has been built up that she recklessly "took on all-comers". He says her trade union reforms were implemented bit by bit.
However, he says that once she was convinced that a policy was right in principle and right in detail she would "push it through with unswerving tenacity".
15.24 Angus Robertson, the SNP Westminster leader, says people in Scotland will "never forgive" the poll tax.
15.21 Sir Malcolm Rifkind talks about the disagreement Lady Thatcher had with her great friend Ronald Reagan when the USA invaded Grenada. He says that when she phoned the American President to "berate" him, he turned to his aides and said: "Gee, isn't she marvellous."
15.19 Tim Ross, the Telegraph's political correspondent writes this from the chamber:
It's a very strange atmosphere inside the Commons today. The MPs should all still be on their Easter holidays. Some Labour and Opposition MPs still are.
But plenty of others have turned out and were warmly praised for doing so by David Cameron. The PM, who betrayed some emotion as his voice cracked during his speech, acknowledged that he was little more than a boy when Lady Thatcher was already in Downing St.
Ed Miliband, also a child when she won the 1979 election, warmly praised her personal strength and courage. And while Mr Cameron's endorsement of Lady Thatcher's legacy is a given, Mr Miliband went further than he might have done, embracing many of her political values and policies, from reforming the economy, to privatisation.
The Labour leader even persuaded the Prime Minister to laugh when he joked that Lady Thatcher pioneered the green agenda long before anyone considered "hugging a husky".
But Mr Cameron, the butt of the joke, was laughing with Mr Miliband, not, as usual, at him. The normal rules do not apply today.
15.13 Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who served in Lady Thatcher's Cabinet goes next. He says it was "never dull". He says she was "intolerant of people who were woolly". He says she was the most "radical prime minister of the last few generations", adding that she recognised that Britain had gone the wrong way. He then quotes the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, which says that "if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change".
15.12 Nigel Dodds adds: "How many times have we heard it said during her lifetime that like her or loathe her, at least you knew where Maggie stood, and people admire that in their politicians."
15.08 Robin Brant, of the BBC, says there was a lot of chatter in the chamber during Nick Clegg's speech:
15.06 Nigel Dodds, the DUP Westminster leader, is next and calls Lady Thatcher a "pioneer". He says that she "played an enormous role in changing fundamentally the world order".
15.02 Mr Clegg says that "Whether you liked her or disliked her it is impossible to ignore the indelible mark Margaret Thatcher...left on the world."
Mr Clegg hails Lady Thatcher's support for European integration, pointing out her help in achieving the single market. "Margaret Thatcher was far from the cardboard cutout that is sometimes imagined," Mr Clegg said. He says there was something "extraordinary, even unsettling" about her political presence.
15.00 John Redwood ends by saying that Lady Thatcher showed the world "there is a better way". Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, is next to speak.
14.59 It is Important to note the smiles between Ed Miliband and David Cameron during their respective speeches. It's very unusual to see warmth between them in the Commons. It will not last long.
14.57 Here is a video of the statement Mark Thatcher's gave earlier this afternoon:
14.55 Tory MP John Redwood is the first backbencher to speak. He praises the speeches from Miliband and the Prime Minister and says Lady Thatcher was the "best boss" he ever had.
14.53 Mr Miliband goes on to criticise Lady Thatcher, for example over her original stance on Nelson Mandela. However, he says the debate about Lady Thatcher is part of what makes her great. He says that whatever you think, Margaret Thatcher was a "unique and towering figure". He adds that "we today remember a prime minister who defined her age".
14.51 Mr Miliband says that Thatcherism "departed" from the typical ideas of this time. "It was that approach that enabled her to define the politics of a generation," Mr Miliband adds.
Mr Miliband adds that Lady Thatcher was "right to understand the sense of aspiration of people across the country." He also says she was right to defend the Falklands and that she was the first politician to warn about the dangers of climate change "long before anyone thought of hugging a husky".
14.49 Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, now speaks. "She also believed that ideology mattered," he says. "She believed and she showed that ideas matter in politics."
14.46 The full quote from the end of Mr Cameron's speech: "As Winston Churchill said, there are some politicians who make the weather and Margaret Thatcher was undoubtedly one of them. They say 'cometh the hour, cometh the man', well in 1979, came the hour, came the lady...she made the weather, she made history, and let this be her epitaph - that she made our country great again."
14.45 Mr Cameron moves on to the Falklands. He then says that so many of the principles she fought for are now part of the political landscape. He says that "Margaret Thatcher rescued our country from decline". He adds: "Let this be her epitaph: That she made this country great again."
14.44 The Prime Minister then goes on to talk about Lady Thatcher's respect for Parliament. "She loved and respected this place and was for many years its best debator," he says.
14.41 Mr Cameron gets on to Lady Thatcher's political legacy. He talks about the difficult, reformist agenda she undertook. "Success was never assured," Mr Cameron said.
14.40 Mr Cameron sends his condolences to Lady Thatcher's friends and family. Mr Cameron then hails the politicians "from all parties" who have made it to the Commons today, even if they "profoundly disagreed" with Lady Thatcher.
14.38 The Prime Minister says that Lady Thatcher spent much of her life threatened by the IRA. He says she was a "woman of contrasts". He tells the story of a female member of staff who was soaked while on a visit to Cornwall with the former prime minister and says Lady Thatcher ensured she found a new set of clothes.
14.36 David Cameron begins by saying it is "right" that Parliament has been recalled. He says her funeral will be a "fitting salute to a great Prime Minister".
14.35 The Labour benches look sparsely populated as the debate begins.
14.26 The special session of Parliament held in tribute to Lady Thatcher is about to start. A number of Labour MPs have boycotted it, despite senior figures in the party calling for as many members as possible to be in the Commons.
14.14: Sir Mark Thatcher has spoken for the first time about the death of his mother, saying that she would be "greatly honoured as well as humbled" that the Queen's is attending her funeral next week.
He said his mother had been blessed with "a long life, and a very full one", but her death was "without doubt a very sad moment".
"We have quite simply been overwhelmed by messages of support, condolence, of every type, from far and wide, and I know that my mother would be pleased they have come from people of all walks of life," he said.
Sir Mark added the messages of support following his mother's death would be a "source of encouragement and strength as we face the inevitable days ahead".
13.49: Here is a round up of next Wednesday's funeral plans by the Telegraph's political correspondant Rowena Mason.
Breaking his silence about her death the Tory peer said: "I am sorry to learn of Lady Thatcher's death. The illness of her last years has been cruel and very difficult. I send my deepest condolences to Mark and Carol."
But the man who challenged her to a leadership contest in 1990 has not responded to questions about whether he will be present at the event next Wednesday.
The Prime Minister's official spokesman today said Mr Cameron is aware of a "number of good ideas in this area", including a tribute in the Falkland Islands.
"The Prime Minister thinks its a good idea to think of how in due course Lady Thatcher could be commemorated," he said.
13.31: After mounting calls for a statue to commemorate Lady Thatcher in the heart of central London Westminster Council have said that they would look "favourably" on any application.
Cllr Robert Davis, Deputy Leader of Westminster City Council said: “I’m sure Westminster Council would look favourably upon an application for a statue for Baroness Thatcher, we would need to ensure it is sited in an appropriate place.”
The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square was originally suggested as an appropriate site, but the Greater London Authority, who manage the space, have said that it would be unsuitable as there is an ongoing arts programme which is set to continue on the plinth for several years.
13.30: Further details of Lady Thatcher’s funeral have been released following a meeting of the “True Blue” committee which has been convened to organise the event.
Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude chaired the meeting which was attended by representatives of Lady Thatcher along with officials from No 10, Buckingham Palace, St Paul's Cathedral, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and the Metropolitan Police.
Further books of condolences are to be opened at the Guildhall and St Margaret's Church, Westminster, alongside those in the Finchley and Golders Green Conservative Association in her old constituency and at the museum in her home town of Grantham, it was decided.
The ceremonial funeral plans include soldiers from the Welsh Guards, which suffered heavy losses during the Falklands conflict - 32 Welsh Guards were among 48 members of the British forces who died when troop ship Sir Galahad was bombed by the Argentines in May 1982 in Britain's worst loss of the war.
Lady Thatcher's coffin will be taken on a Gun Carriage of the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery from St Clement Danes Church, the church of the Royal Air Force, in the Strand to St Paul's.
The Gun Carriage will be drawn by six horses, three of which are mounted, with a sergeant riding alongside, an officer riding in front and three dismounted troops on foot.
A Bearer Party made up of all three services will walk alongside the coffin, and will include those from ships, units and stations notable for their service during the Falklands Campaign.
Members will be taken from the Royal Navy/Royal Marines; the Scots Guards; the Welsh Guards; the Royal Artillery; the Royal Engineers; the Parachute Regiment; the Royal Gurkha Rifles; and the RAF.
12.59: Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah have confirmed that they will be attending the funeral of Lady Thatcher next week, although the former Prime Minister will not be in Parliament today owing to a prior commitment in France.
12.20: Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie are to attend Lady Thatcher's funeral next week, they confirmed today.The couple will be among a number of high-profile guests expected to attend from across the world.
Planning is under way for the ceremonial funeral, which will have full military honours, at St Paul's Cathedral, next Wednesday, under an operation dubbed True Blue.
Downing Street is expected to begin releasing details of the guest list today, amid speculation that it could include former Soviet leaderMikhail Gorbachev and ex-US first lady Nancy Reagan.
Britain's former Prime Ministers - Baroness Thatcher and Tony Blair talk as they line up during a formal salute
12.15: More than 700 Armed Forces personnel drawn from all three services will take part in the funeral of Baroness Thatcher, Downing Street said today.
Lady Thatcher's coffin will be carried into into St Paul's Cathedral by bearers from units particularly associated with the Falklands War.
David Cameron's official spokesman confirmed that details of the cost to the public purse would be published after next Wednesday's service has taken place.
Her coffin will be carried by personnel from units particularly associated with the Falklands conflict, a No 10 spokesman said.
Labour MP Sarah Champion also announced she would be absent, tweeting: “I'm not in Parliament today as I my time is better spent helping #Rotherham. Thatcherism tried to destroy our town & community, they failed!”
Her colleague added: "Neither will I be in Parliament today. Absurd waste of money and there also the cost of the funeral. Due back on Monday anyway!"
Labour Co-operative MP Gavin Shuker publicly announced that he would be elsewhere while Respect MP George Galloway declared that he will not be attending the re-called session, due to start at 2.30pm.
11.10: A former Labour minister has accused David Cameron of hijacking the death of Baroness Thatcher for political gain.
John Healey, the former treasury and housing minister in the Blair and Brown years, said the Prime Minister was using Parliament as a platform for Tory Party ideology after MPs were recalled early to pay tribute.
Mr Healey, MP for Wentworth and Dearne in South Yorkshire, an area hit hard by coal mine closures, said Mr Cameron's references to the Lady Thatcher's economic reforms in his tribute to her on Monday were "partisan" and "divisive"
Writing on the PoliticsHome website, Mr Healey, who is boycotting this afternoon's special session, said: "Parliament is being used today for narrow political gain by the Prime Minister, as a platform for his party's ideology not just eulogy."
He went on: "He's wrong to recall Parliament, and wrong to hijack it in this way. I will play no part and I will stay away, with other things to do at home in the constituency."
Mr Healey said today's Commons session would not be balanced as there would be no opportunity to debate Lady Thatcher's legacy.
He said her ceremonial funeral next Wednesday was "a full-scale state funeral in all but name", adding that "her legacy is too bitter to warrant this claim to national mourning".
A sand sculpture of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made by sand artist Sudersan Pattnaik at the Golden Sea beach in Puri, about 65 kilometers from the eastern Indian city of Bhubaneswar (Picture: ASIT KUMARSTRDEL/AFP/Getty Images)
10.39: Foreign Secretary William Hague today defended the taxpayer contribution to the funeral of Lady Thatcher and the costs of today's debate.
He said Britain could "afford" to cover some of the costs of next week's events.
Speaking on BBC One's Breakfast programme, Mr Hague said: "It's right Parliament meets and commemorates such a leader of historic proportions in our country's history.
"She changed the course of our history and there have been many comments over the last few days from all corners of the political spectrum.
"When it comes to money, the rebate she negotiated for this country from the EU has brought us so far £75 billion - which is twice the size of our annual defence budget. I think that puts money in perspective... so I think we can afford to contribute to a funeral."
Lady Thatcher's family is also meeting an unspecified amount of the funeral cost
Mr Hague said he believed many people on the left's biggest problem with Lady Thatcher was "they could never beat her".
"They claimed to stand for millions of people but they could never get as many votes as Mrs Thatcher in an election," he said.
10.15: MPs returning from overseas visits to pay tribute to Baroness Thatcher can claim up to £3,750 in travel expenses, it was confirmed today.
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) said that, in line with normal rules, MPs were entitled to claim for their journeys back to Westminster following the recall of Parliament during the Easter recess.
For any MPs who are abroad on holiday or overseas visits there is a maximum of £3,750 which they can claim back.
That sum could include the cost of returning to their holiday destination if they choose to resume their break following recall.
An Ipsa spokesman said that some MPs could well have been out of the country when the recall was announced and that it was "reasonable" that they should be reimbursed for the cost of returning.
"If Parliament is recalled, MPs can claim the cost of getting to Parliament," the spokesman said.
10.06: Comedian Russell Brand has said he “always felt sorry” for Lady Thatcher’s children Mark and Carol.
Describing himself as “one of Thatcher’s children” after she took over the Conservatives the year he was born and was prime minister when he was aged between four and 15, said she was “so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything”.
Writing inthe Guardian he said: “For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles.
"Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else?”
Describing her as “an icon of individualism, not of feminism”, he added: “Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else.”
09.50: The manager of an Oddbins wine merchant has been suspended after promoting discounted Champagne on Twitter in the aftermath of Lady Thatcher’s death.
A tweet appeared on the north London store’s after the news broke, reading: “If for any reason anyone feels like celebrating anything we have Taittinger available at £10 less than usual at £29. Just saying...”
The tweet was deleted within hours,the Broadway reported,and the staff member suspended.
A link to a statement was then tweeted from the Crouch End store’s account.
It said: "The tweet in question was made by a member of branch staff without the approval or knowledge of the company's management. The tweet was completely inappropriate and in the worst possible taste.
“We would like to apologise profusely for the offence it has quite rightly caused. The member of staff responsible has been suspended with immediate effect pending a disciplinary hearing.”
09.30: The Metropolitan Police's Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, which monitors disturbed individuals who are obsessed with famous figures, has a list of Lady Thatcher fanatics who it plans to monitor at her funeral.
Obsessed individuals are to be vetted whilst other protesters could be banned from attending.
A multimillion-pound security operation, led by the Metropolitan Police, will be in place for next Wednesday’s ceremonial service, which will be attended by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
There have already been “celebrations” following Lady Thatcher’s death at the age of 87 on Monday, and more are rumoured to be planned for the day of the funeral.
Dai Davies, a former head of royal protection at Scotland Yard, told the Times that although remaining aware of the potential for attacks by the IRA and other terrorist organisations, police are likely to be most concerned about a "fixated person with a psychological hatred of Margaret Thatcher".
Obsessed individuals may be visited to ensure that they do not pose a threat, as happened before the visit of Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.
09.15: Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said it would be "very appropriate" to have a permanent memorial to Lady Thatcher in the capital.
He told the BBC: "I think it would be very appropriate to have a memorial to Margaret Thatcher somewhere in London. I haven’t personally given any thought yet to where that should be, but certainly the fourth plinth could be one of the options.
"Let’s look at that in slower time, I think these things are better thought about in slightly slower time after the event."
09.10: The death of Lady Thatcher has dominated the front pages of Britain’s newspapers for the second day running, here is a look at how it is being reported -
09.00: Further street parties have been planned to “celebrate” Lady Thatcher’s death, including one on Saturday night in Trafalgar Square where a notorious Poll Tax riot took place in 1990
The organisers have claimed thousands will turn up, and more celebrations are set to take place next Wednesday - the same day as her funeral.
On the night of her death hundreds gathered in Brixton, south London, Bristol, and Glasgow, resulting in three arrests and six police officers being injured.
Labour MP for Streatham Chuka Umunna has since condemned those who took to the streets.
Writing inthe Sunhe described the parties as “extreme bad taste” and “utterly disgraceful”, adding: “Those who came to Brixton to "celebrate" the death of Baroness Thatcher do not speak for or represent the people of the area.
“It was a disgraceful act. The overwhelming majority of people from Brixton have nothing but sympathy for a family that has just lost a loved one.
“Baroness Thatcher was a global political figure, and our first and only female Prime Minister. As Ed Miliband has said, she reshaped the politics of a whole generation."
Revellers with posters and bottles of milk and wine to celebrate the death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Brixton, south London (Picture: REUTERS/Olivia Harris)
08.40: Lady Thatcher’s political opponent Lord Kinnock is set to snub her funeral, it has been reported.
The former Labour leader, who was defeated by Lady Thatcher in the 1987 election, has engagements that day and is unlikely to attend if he is invited, his office toldthe Sun. The guest list for next Wednesday’s ceremonial funeral has not yet been finalised.
The Queen has already confirmed that she will be attending. The last prime minister’s funeral she attended was that of Winton Churchill.
Sources have claimed that Lord Kinnock is likely to be invited. When asked if he would go an aide said: "Both of them have engagements on that day, but I would rather think not."
He said: "We have lost the greatest peacetime prime minister of the last century. She and Reagan, probably their greatest moment, and she would say this, was the defeat of communism, though she had so many. She defeated the unions when they held this country to ransom over the miners’ strike.
“More than that though, she made Britain great again. When she came to power our standing in the world was on the decline. She once again made us a nation of importance in the world.”
Margaret Thatcher with Jeffrey Archer in 1998.
08.20: Rupert Murdoch has praised the "brave leadership" of Lady Thatcher, claiming Britain is "far more successful" as a result of her premiership.
Describing her as the “the woman who gave us back our backbone” in an opinion column for the Times, the tycoon praised her role in facing down the trade unions in the 1980s.
He said she made it possible for News International to survive a year of industrial action fighting against a move of operations to Wapping, East London.
Mr Murdoch said: "Mrs Thatcher understood that risk was a vital ingredient in a free enterprise society. She understood that such a society had to be led by a government with backbone.
"After the Second World War, in which the country lost a second generation of its finest men, Britain had created a dependency state. It killed off aspiration.
"In 1979 Margaret Thatcher set about its rehabilitation. She put the economy on a sound footing, she ended a culture of crippling strikes, she encouraged entrepreneurs to come here and set up their businesses.
"Thanks to her I have experienced in Britain many of my defining moments as a businessman, a Britain that is far more successful as a result of her brave leadership."
The News International boss said he was "inspired" by Lady Thatcher who was a "risk taker" who "believed in doing the right thing".
08.10: Lady Thatcher believed that David Cameron was too popular as she thought that doing things properly would entail dislike from the public, Conservative MP Conor Burns has revealed.
She criticised Mr Cameron for not being “far enough behind” Labour in the popularity stakes and believed that he should be pushing through policies despite opposition, it was said.
Mr Burns, who visited Lady Thatcher on a weekly basis, told the Daily Mail he had shown her poll in November last year which put the party nine points behind - two and a half years before the next election.
“She said, “That’s not far enough behind at this stage.” She sort of took a view that to do things that were right did entail unpopularity until people saw that what you were doing was working,” he said, giving a fascinating insight into the mind of Britain’s only female Prime Minister.
Remembering the confidence she had in her own convictions Mr Burns added: “She sort of took a view that to do things that were right did entail unpopularity until people saw that what you were doing was working.”
During one of her periods of lucidity despite her bad health she also expressed disapproval of the fact that the Government was a coalition and UKIP, he said.
Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron at the Great Briton awards
07.55: Sir Mark and Carol Thatcher have returned to London as their family gathers ahead of next Wednesday’s funeral. The twins, 59, have not yet issued a statement on their mother’s death.
Sir Mark was on holiday with his wife Sarah Jane Russell in Barbados when he was informed. Carol lives in Switzerland.
07.40: London Mayor Boris Johnson has described Lady Thatcher as "brave", "principled" and "electric" as he tries to explain to those too young to remember what she meant for the country.
Writing for the Telegraphhe said: " I cannot think of any other modern leader who has been so fierce in sticking up for her core beliefs, and that is why she speaks so powerfully to every politician in Britain today, and why we are all in her shade. In the end she was martyred by lesser men who were fearful for their seats.
"But by the time she left office she had inspired millions of people – and especially women – that you could genuinely change things; that no matter where you came from you could kick down the door of the stuffy, male-dominated club and bring new ideas. She mobilised millions of people to take charge of their economic destiny, and unleashed confidence and a spirit of enterprise.
"She changed this country’s view of itself, and exploded the myth of decline. She changed the Tory Party, she changed the Labour Party, and she transformed the country she led: not by compromise, but by an iron resolve."
07.28: A poll has found that Baroness Thatcher is Britain's most popular prime minister since the Second World War, eclipsing even Sir Winston Churchill. She was named as the best of the 13 prime ministers since 1945 by 28% of people, the poll YouGov poll of 1,893 adults found.
Sir Winston - Britain's leader during the Second World War and again from 1951 to 1955 - was in second place with 24% of the vote, and Tony Blair in third with 10%,the research for the Sun found.
Lady Thatcher was regarded as a "great" or "good" prime minister by 52% of people, while 30% deemed her "poor" or "terrible".
Almost half of those polled (48%) felt she left Britain economically better off, while 60% felt she left it more respected in the world.
More than half (51%) believed she created more opportunities for women, but just 36% declared she left society more free, and almost half (49%) said she left a less equal society.
Baroness Thatcher gladly adopted the moniker of the "Iron Lady" and 72% of those polled felt she stuck to what she believed in, with 66% saying she was a strong leader and 59% saying she was a decisive prime minister.
People also voted her being elected as Britain's first female prime minister as her greatest achievement, followed by winning the Falklands War and defeating the miners' strike and limiting the power of the unions.
The introduction of the hated poll tax was deemed her greatest failure, followed by her overseeing of the decline of mining and manufacturing and the privatisation of utilities such as British Telecom and British Gas.
Only in Scotland did more people think her a bad prime minister than good.
When asked about their overall feelings towards her, 47% of people felt Lady Thatcher's period as prime minister was good for Britain, and 36% as bad.
Even in death Lady Thatcher divides the nation, with outpourings of both mourning and celebration across Britain.
The Sun's poll found 50% of people back her being given a full ceremonial funeral at St Paul's Cathedral next week - the rest disagree or simply do not know what to think.
07.10: The House of Commons has been recalled for a special session to discuss the death of Baroness Thatcher. It is the first time that the Commons has been recalled since the riots swept the nation in August 2011.
Several MPs areset to boycott the session, which will begin at 2.30pm. John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, Ronnie Campbell, MP for Blyth Valley, and George Galloway, the former Labour MP who now sits for the Respect Party in Bradford, have all said that they will stay away.
Baroness Thatcher on the steps of 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister David Cameron (Picture: Eddie Mulholland)
07.00: London Mayor Boris Johnson has backed calls for a statue of Baroness Thatcher in a "prominent" central London location. Some have called for the commemorative statue to be placed in Trafalgar Square, which is dominated by military figures.
The group, bringing together MI5, National Security Secretariat, the police, Buckingham Palace, the Church of England, the Parliamentary authorities, Government departments and representatives of Lady Thatcher’s estate, met for the first time yesterday and will continue to meet on a daily basis until the funeral takes place.
In the Finchley constituency Lady Thatcher served for 33 years there is a sombre but patriotic mood. As they people paid their respects there was "no gushing hysteria, just quiet, dignified respect".
Lady Thatcher died at around 11am on Monday after suffering a severe stroke in her suite at the Ritz. She passed away peacefully aged 87, after battling poor health for more than a decade.
06.45: Good morning and welcome to the Telegraph's coverage of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Floral tributes to Baroness Thatcher are laid on the pavement outside her Chester Square residence in London (Picture: Anthony Upton)
Margaret Thatcher
Articles on Margaret Thatcher on this INL News page
Biography of Margaret Hilda Thatcher Margaret Hilda ThatcherBaroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (née Roberts, 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and the Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century and is the only woman to have held the office. A Soviet journalist called her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As Prime Minister, she implemented policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Baroness Thatcher's funeral will be held at St Paul's Cathedral next Wednesday and attended by the Queen, it has been announced.
Britain's longest serving prime minister and the only woman so far to hold the role will be given a ceremonial funeral with full military honours.
It is the same status as that accorded to the Queen Mother and Diana, Princess of Wales, although some Tories want a full state ceremony.
The Queen also attended Sir Winston Churchill's state ceremony in 1965.
The Queen will attend Lady Thatcher's funeral next Wednesday
She will be accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, and other heads of state and foreign dignitaries from around the world are expected to attend.
Lady Thatcher died at The Ritz in central London on Monday morning after suffering a stroke. She had battled ill health for a number of years.
Downing Street said the date of her funeral was agreed at a meeting attended by her family and officials from Buckingham Palace.
The day before the ceremony, Lady Thatcher's coffin will be transferred to the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster.
Newspaper front pages were dominated by the former PM's death
There will be a short service following its arrival before the coffin rests in the chapel overnight.
The streets will then be cleared for a procession taking the former leader's body from parliament to Church of St Clement Danes, the RAF Chapel on the Strand.
At the church, it will be transferred to a gun carriage drawn by the King's Troop Royal Artillery. The streets will be cleared for the procession on to St Paul's.
There the coffin will be met by a guard of honour as members of the armed services and pensioners of the Royal Hospital Chelsea line the steps.
A private ambulance taking Lady Thatcher's body from the Ritz
The public will not be able to attend the funeral service itself but will be able to line the route of the procession.
Parliament is expected to be suspended for the event, which means the first Prime Minister's Questions since the Easter break could be cancelled.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, who is in charge of some of the funeral arrangements, said: "There's already a huge amount of interest.
"There's a guest list and people will be invited over the coming days. It will be a big event. I think there's a huge amount of people - not just in Britain, but around the world - who will want to pay their respects to her."
A flag flying at half-mast over the Houses of Parliament
Some Tory MPs have expressed disappointment that the 87-year-old has not been granted a state funeral, as wartime leader Churchill was.
Peter Bone, MP for Wellingborough, said she should have "the highest kind of funeral that can be allowed".
"I would have thought a state funeral would be very appropriate. She was the first female prime minister. She was also the greatest peacetime prime minister we ever had," he told the Daily Mail.
However, her friends have indicated she did not want such treatment. She did not want to lie in state and thought a fly-past would be a waste of money.
The former PM sitting for a 70th birthday photograph
For a state funeral to be granted to a non-royal, a parliamentary vote would have to be passed to permit the release of public funds.
Parliament is being recalled on Wednesday to allow MPs to voice their tributes, although the decision has angered some MPs.
Labour's John Mann questioned why taxpayers' money was being spent on bringing back MPs when tributes could have been paid next week, when parliament was due to resume.
"It is perfectly valid that, when a prime minister dies, MPs can pay tribute, but this could be perfectly properly done on Monday," the MP said.
Thatcher in a tank on a British base in Germany in 1986
He added that he would not be attending the session tomorrow, saying: "I will be at the dentist's."
Prime Minister David Cameron, who has already hailed Lady Thatcher as "a great Briton", is expected to give a statement to the Commons, followed by Labour leader Ed Miliband.
Mr Miliband said on Monday that while he "disagreed with much of what she did", he respected "her extraordinary achievements and her extraordinary personal strength".
The former Tory leader was hailed across the world as a towering politician, although there was also jubilation at her death from critics angry at some of her most controversial actions in office.
Flowers outside her home in Belgravia, London
While some mourners laid flowers in tribute outside her home in Belgravia, London, others took to the streets to celebrate her demise.
Some 200 revellers took to the streets in Bristol, where six police officers were injured in a scuffle as bottles and cans were thrown.
There were similar scenes in south London, where more than 100 people gathered in Brixton - the scene of fierce riots in 1981, two years into Lady Thatcher's first term in office.
A crowd of 300 also gathered in Glasgow's George Square, where in 1989 protests at the introduction of the infamous poll tax took place.
Crowds celebrating the death of the former Tory PM in Brixton
Many on the Left have condemned the social impacts of Lady Thatcher's policies encouraging the free market and stripping power from unions during her 11 years in power.
Her death was also welcomed by veterans of the Falklands conflict in Argentina, who blamed her for the deaths of the 649 troops who died during the 74-day war.
But the news was received with "great sadness" by islanders on the Falklands, who flew the union flags at half mast and hailed her intervention 31 years ago.
Australia's foreign minister, Bob Carr, said that Margaret Thatcher pleaded with him to ensure Sydney did not 'end up like Fiji'. Photograph: Achmad Ibrahim/AP
Margaret Thatcher has been accused by the Australian foreign minister of having held "unabashedly racist" views after he revealed that the late former British prime minister had warned him of the challenge posed by immigration from Asia.
Bob Carr, who served as premier of New South Wales between 1995 and 2005, said that Thatcher pleaded with him to ensure Sydney did not "end up like Fiji" where citizens of Indian heritage formed a majority until a coup in 1987.
Carr, whose wife is of Malaysian origin, spoke of his surprise at Thatcher's remarks. The senator told the Lateline programme on ABC TV: "I recall one conversation I had with her in her retirement where she said something that was unabashedly racist, where she warned Australia – talking to me with Helena [his wife] standing not far away – against Asian immigration, saying that if we allowed too much of it we'd see the natives of the land, the European settlers, overtaken by migrants."
Carr expressed astonishment when Thatcher drew an analogy with Fiji, where the Indo-Fijian community formed a majority of the population in 1970 when it achieved independence from Britain. The community, descendants of labourers who travelled to the former British colony to work on sugar plantations in the late 19th century, has fallen to just over 38% in the last two decades after a 1987 coup. In 2000 Mahendra Chaudhry, the first Indo-Fijian prime minister, was taken hostage in another coup.
Carr said: "I was astonished. Helena fortunately was out of earshot. I remember one thing she [Thatcher] said as part of that conversation. She said: 'You will end up like Fiji. I like Sydney but you can't allow the [Asian] migrants … to take over otherwise you will end up like Fiji where the Indian migrants have taken over."
The foreign minister added: "I was so astonished I don't think I could think of an appropriate reply. I think we moved on to other subjects pretty quickly."
Carr, a Labour senator who was appointed foreign minister after the resignation of the former prime minister Kevin Rudd last year, made clear that he still respected Thatcher on the grounds that she challenged the centre-left to modernise.
He said: "She produced a realignment of politics. She forced my side of politics, the social democrat parties, to think more deeply about the role and function of the state, of the public sector. [She] forced Labour parties around the world to consider whether government could remotely pretend to be the answer to many of the problems it was assumed it could be. I also think she was right in joining Reagan and denouncing the old Soviet Union as an evil dictatorship."
Carr's remarks contrasted with warm praise for Thatcher from Julia Gillard, Australia's British-born and first woman prime minister. Speaking in Beijing, she said: "Her service as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom was a history-making achievement. Her strength of conviction was recognised by her closest supporters and her strongest opponents."
The actor and comedian recalls a bizarre recent encounter with the Iron Lady, and how it prompted him to think about growing up under the most unlikely matriarch-figure imaginable
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ONLY a handful of peace-time politicians can claim to have changed the world. Margaret Thatcher, who died this morning, was one. She transformed not just her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Her enthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingness to stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “ism”.
The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom—odd, since as a prim control freak, she was in some ways the embodiment of conservatism. She thought nations could become great only if individuals were set free. Her struggles had a theme: the right of individuals to run their own lives, as free as possible from the micromanagement of the state.
In Britain her battles with the left—especially the miners—gave her a reputation as a blue-rinse Boadicea. But she was just as willing to clobber her own side, sidelining old-fashioned Tory “wets” and unleashing her creed on conservative strongholds, notably the “big bang” in the City of London. Many of her pithiest putdowns were directed towards her own side: “U turn if you want to”, she told the Conservatives as unemployment passed 2m, “The lady’s not for turning.”
Paradoxes abound. Mrs Thatcher was a true Blue Tory who marginalised the Tory Party for a generation. The Tories ceased to be a national party, retreating to the south and the suburbs and all but dying off in Scotland, Wales and the northern cities. Tony Blair profited more from the Thatcher revolution than John Major, her successor: with the trade unions emasculated and the left discredited, he was able to remodel his party and sell it triumphantly to Middle England. His huge majority in 1997 ushered in 13 years of New Labour rule.
Yet her achievements cannot be gainsaid. She reversed what her mentor, Keith Joseph, liked to call “the ratchet effect”, whereby the state was rewarded for its failures with yet more power. With the brief exception of the emergency measures taken in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-08, there have been no moves to renationalise industries or to resume a policy of picking winners. Thanks to her, the centre of gravity of British politics moved dramatically to the right. The New Labourites of the 1990s concluded that they could rescue the Labour Party from ruin only by adopting the central tenets of Thatcherism. “The presumption should be that economic activity is best left to the private sector,” declared Mr Blair. Neither he nor his successors would dream of reverting to the days of nationalisation and unfettered union power.
On the world stage, too, Mrs Thatcher continues to cast a long shadow. Her combination of ideological certainty and global prominence ensured that Britain played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union that was disproportionate to its weight in the world. Mrs Thatcher was the first British politician since Winston Churchill to be taken seriously by the leaders of all the major powers. She was a heroine to opposition politicians in eastern Europe. Her willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with “dear Ronnie” to block Soviet expansionism helped to promote new thinking in the Kremlin. But her insistence that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom the West could do business also helped to end the cold war.
The post-communist countries embraced her revolution heartily: by 1996 Russia had privatised some 18,000 industrial enterprises. India dismantled the licence Raj—a legacy of British Fabianism—and unleashed a cavalcade of successful companies. Across Latin America governments embraced market liberalisation. Whether they managed well or badly, all of them looked to the British example.
But today, the pendulum is swinging dangerously away from the principles Mrs Thatcher espoused. In most of the rich world, the state’s share of the economy has grown sharply in recent years. Regulations—excessive, as well as necessary—are tying up the private sector. Businessmen are under scrutiny as they have not been for 30 years. Demonstrators protest against the very existence of the banking industry. And with the rise of China, state control, not economic liberalism, is being hailed as a model for emerging countries.
For a world in desperate need of growth, this is the wrong direction to head in. Europe will never thrive until it frees up its markets. America will throttle its recovery unless it avoids over-regulation. China will not sustain its success unless it starts to liberalise. This is a crucial time to hang on to Margaret Thatcher’s central perception—that for countries to flourish, people need to push back against the advance of the state. What the world needs now is more Thatcherism, not less.
Margaret Thatcher
A cut above the rest
Apr 8th 2013, 16:13 by A.W. and R.C.
As prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher transformed Britain and left an ideological legacy to rival that of Marx, Mao, Gandhi or Reagan
SEVERAL prime ministers have occupied 10 Downing Street for as long as, or even longer than, Margaret Thatcher. Some have won as many elections—Tony Blair, for one. But Mrs Thatcher (later Lady Thatcher), Britain’s sole woman prime minister, remains the only occupant of Number 10 to have become an “-ism” in her lifetime. She left behind a brand of politics and a set of convictions which still resonate, from Warsaw to Santiago to Washington, DC.
What were those convictions? In Mrs Thatcher’s case, the quickest way to her political make-up was usually through her handbag. As she prepared to make her first leader’s speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1975, a speechwriter tried to gee her up by quoting Abraham Lincoln:
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.
When he had finished, Mrs Thatcher fished into her handbag to extract a piece of ageing newsprint with the same lines on it. “It goes wherever I go,” she told him.
And it was a fair summation of her thinking. Mrs Thatcher believed that societies have to encourage and reward the risk-takers, the entrepreneurs, who alone create the wealth without which governments cannot do anything, let alone help the weak. A country can prosper only by encouraging people to save and to spend no more than they earn; profligacy (and even worse, borrowing) was her road to perdition. The essence of Thatcherism was a strong state and a free economy.
For Mrs Thatcher, her system was moral as much as economic. It confronted the “evil” empires of communism and socialism. Many things caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, but the clarity of Mrs Thatcher’s beliefs was a vital factor.
Her beliefs were fine-tuned in the political struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. But in effect they changed little from what she imbibed at her home in Grantham, a provincial town in eastern England, where she was born in 1925. The most important influence in her life was her father, Alfred Roberts, who ran the grocer’s shop above which she was brought up.
He was a member of the respectable middle classes, the petite bourgeoisie of Marxist derision. As a town councillor for 26 years, Alderman Roberts, a devout Methodist, preached the values of thrift, self-help and hard work. Young Margaret, ever earnest, was inspired by the moral and political example that her father set.
A clever girl and a hard worker, she took a degree in chemistry at Oxford, where she began to be active in Conservative politics. In order to get on in what was then a rather grand, aristocratic party, she started to distance herself from her humble origins, marrying a successful businessman, Denis Thatcher, who financed her political career. Training as a lawyer and shopping around for a safe seat, she dressed and spoke as required: as a conventional upper-middle-class woman, with a nice house in the country and the children at posh public schools. She entered Parliament in 1959 for the safe seat of Finchley in north London, and quickly became a junior minister in 1961.
Just as she left Grantham well behind, so the new post-war Britain was leaving its old values and politics far behind as well. The country shifted significantly to the left during the second world war, leading to a landslide victory for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party in 1945. Building on the forced collectivism of the war years, the Attlee government embarked on industrial nationalisation and introduced the welfare state. To a generation of politicians scarred by the mass unemployment of the 1930s, full employment became the overriding object of political life.
Mrs Thatcher, like almost all ambitious politicians of her age, went along with this. But to keep employment “full”, successive governments, Labour and Conservative, had to intervene ever more minutely in the economy, from setting wages to dictating prices. In doing so, they crowded out the private enterprise and economic freedoms that Conservatives were supposed to stand for. It was, as Mrs Thatcher’s favourite intellectual guru, Friedrich Hayek, had warned in 1944, “the road to serfdom”.
A few intellectuals and politicians, Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph among them, rallied to Hayek’s cause. But they were derided as dangerous mavericks, and Mrs Thatcher, for her part, contented herself with climbing the greasy pole. She was made education secretary in Edward Heath’s government of 1970-74. Heath tried at first to inject a more free-market approach into economic management, but he was forced into a humiliating U-turn as unemployment passed the 1m mark. The government then went on such a huge spending binge to bring unemployment down that inflation reached 25% and people began to hoard food.
It was then that Mrs Thatcher became a Thatcherite. She was led there by Joseph, who argued that only a free-market approach would save the country. These policies, extremely daring for 1975, became her agenda for the next 15 years.
Mrs Thatcher, a great patriot, had been hurt and bewildered by Britain’s precipitate decline since 1945. Not only had Britain lost an empire; it was, by the mid-1970s, no longer even the leading European power. Joseph’s critique seemed a way to halt, and even reverse, that decline. What Britain now needed was an urgent return to the values of enterprise and self-help.
Thus Mrs Thatcher was reborn as a Grantham housewife. Out went the grating voice, hats and pearls of the aspiring Tory grande dame; in came the softer voice, kitchen photo-opportunities in her apron, and endless homilies about corner-shop values and balancing the books. She read her Hayek (which she was also prone to produce from her handbag), but it was her new populist style that made her a winner.
The Lady’s not for turning
Mrs Thatcher won the Conservative Party leadership election of 1975, defeating Heath by a good margin. A woman had never held any of the highest posts in British politics before. With her twin children (a boy and a girl; even that was done efficiently), her job and her energy, she seemed to be the very “Superwoman” of Shirley Conran’s bestseller of the year before. The Russians tried to mock her as “the Iron Lady”. It backfired; she loved it, and used it to her own advantage.
But she was also cautious. Well aware that most of her party, let alone the rest of the country, did not support her new policies, she proceeded slowly, appointing her supporters to a few key posts, but otherwise doing little to suggest a radical break with the past. She relied more on the mounting unpopularity of the Labour Party, unable to control its supposed allies in the trade unions during the anarchy of the “winter of discontent” of 1978-79, to win the election of 1979.
Once in power, however, she revealed her true colours. Government spending was curbed to control the money supply, while the currency was allowed to float, both decisive breaks with post-war orthodoxies. Industrial subsidies were cut, sending many firms to the wall. Against the background of a world recession, the result was a sharp rise in unemployment. By 1981, when joblessness passed 3m, police were openly battling molotov-cocktail throwing protesters on many city streets in Britain.
This was Mrs Thatcher’s low-water mark. She was, for a time, the most unpopular prime minister on record. Most of her colleagues expected her to retreat, but instead she ploughed on. “U-turn if you want to, the Lady’s not for turning,” she cried. She sacked all those ministers, the “wets”, who wanted to change course, and stocked her cabinet with ideological fellow-travellers. The 1981 budget contained more spending cuts, further depressing demand, in the teeth of the recession.
This, more than anything, saw the birth of her reputation for ruthless decisiveness. With the economy still at a low ebb, her political fortunes were turned by the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982. Shocked and angry, Mrs Thatcher launched a task force to re-take the islands, 8,000 miles away in the south Atlantic. Her arguments—that she was going to defend the islanders’ choice to be British, and that she would not “appease” the Argentine dictatorship—resonated strongly with a British public disheartened by years of defeatism and retreat. The recapture of the islands made her a world star.
This, and the haplessness of the Labour Party under Michael Foot, won her a landslide second general-election victory in 1983, which allowed her to press ahead with core structural adjustments to the economy. In 1984 began the great round of privatisations, in which behemoths such as British Telecom, British Airways and British Gas were sold off to the private sector. Individuals were encouraged to buy shares, thus creating the image, at least, of “popular capitalism”.
After vanquishing the enemy in the south Atlantic, she also rounded on the “enemy within” at home: in the BBC; the universities; and in local government, much of which she simply abolished. But her primary target was organised labour, which had made the country ungovernable—and in particular the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), up to 1m strong, led by Arthur Scargill.
The NUM had cowed Heath’s government with its militant strike tactics. A showdown was inevitable, and it came when the NUM went on strike in the winter of 1984-85. Mrs Thatcher outlasted the miners, arguing that it was a battle for the right of management to manage over the arbitary use of union power, and her victory ended the union problem for good. From a British perspective, it was the most important thing she ever did.
The success of these policies made her, together with Ronald Reagan, the most distinctive advocate of a revived capitalism in the world. Under her, the Anglo-American special relationship went through one of its cosiest phases, basking in mutual adoration. She was a staunch cold-war warrior, mobbed wherever she went behind the Iron Curtain and lauded as a herald of freedom, which she often was.
An act of regicide
The third term was the only one that culminated in personal humiliation, though not, as she liked to point out in her restless retirement, at the hands of the British electorate. At home Mrs Thatcher set about reforming the inner workings of the welfare state, attempting to introduce competition among health and education “providers” and to hand day-to-day decision-making to schools, hospitals and family doctors (thereby sidelining hated local-government bureaucrats). Abroad she was confronted with the “European problem”—the fact that the European Common Market (which she had embraced) was becoming an ever-closer European Union.
Mrs Thatcher’s domestic reforms pitted her against much wilier opponents than Mr Scargill. Middle-class trade unions like the National Union of Teachers and august professional bodies like the British Medical Association argued that Mrs Thatcher was hell-bent on dismantling the welfare state even as real spending on the public sector rose. Many middle-of-the-road voters were now nervous, as well as rank-and-file Tory MPs. Suddenly “their people” were complaining about “that woman”.
The European question added fuel to this nervousness. The question has always been difficult for Britain, a country that looks across the Atlantic as well as the Channel; but it was particularly difficult for a Conservative Party that was then divided between Europhiles (who saw integration as a necessary price for free trade) and Eurosceptics (who feared the creation of a European super-state). The growing ambition of Brussels made it impossible to paper over these divisions.
Adding to all this was Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly imperial style. After her third victory she became inclined to refer to herself as “we” and to ride roughshod over any opposition. She used a clique of fellow-believers to design policy and sidelined backbench MPs. And she habitually asked of colleagues whether they were “one of us”. Even the Tory Sunday Telegraph accused her of “bourgeois triumphalism”.
In October 1989 Nigel Lawson, her chancellor, resigned, infuriated that she was trying to undermine his policy of shadowing the Deutschmark. She lumbered her party with a “poll tax” which required both dukes and dustmen to pay exactly the same for their local-government services—a tax so unpopular that she had to rescind it. She addressed the European question with increasingly high-octane rhetoric, as in Bruges in 1988: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level.”
This led to a rapid succession of tactical mistakes that eventually persuaded her own party to sack her, an act of regicide that deeply shocked her and took the party a generation to get over. In November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining giant from her 1979 Cabinet, resigned as deputy prime minister over her refusal to agree on a timetable to join a single European currency. As he left, he delivered a devastating speech on the difficulty of trying to work with Mrs Thatcher: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”
Michael Heseltine, her most charismatic foe from the left of her party, immediately mounted a leadership challenge. Mrs Thatcher won the first ballot, but not easily enough to avoid a second one: her cabinet ministers visited her one by one and eventually persuaded her to take a bullet for the good of the party.
A long shadow
Judged from the grand historical perspective, Mrs Thatcher’s biggest legacy has to do with the spread of freedom—with the defeat of totalitarianism in its most vicious form in the Soviet Union, and with the revival of a liberal economic tradition that had gone into retreat after 1945. Her combination of ideological certainty and global prominence ensured that Britain played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union that was disproportionate to its weight in the world. She was the first British politician since Winston Churchill to be taken seriously by the leaders of all the major powers. She was a heroine to opposition politicians in eastern Europe. Her willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with “dear Ronnie” to block Soviet expansionism helped to promote new thinking in the Kremlin. But her insistence that Michael Gorbachev was a man with whom the West could do business also helped to end the cold war.
Mrs Thatcher’s privatisation revolution spread around the world. The post-communist countries embraced it heartily: by 1996 Russia had privatised some 18,000 industrial enterprises. India dismantled the licence Raj—another legacy of British Fabianism—and unleashed a cavalcade of successful companies. Across Latin America governments embraced market liberalisation. Whether they managed well or badly, all of them looked to the British example.
At home, her legacy was more complicated. Paradoxes abound. She was a true Blue Tory who marginalised the Tory Party for a generation. The Tories ceased to be a national party, retreating to the south and the suburbs and all but dying off in Scotland, Wales and the northern cities. Tony Blair profited more from the Thatcher revolution than John Major, her successor: with the trade unions emasculated and the left discredited, he was able to remodel his party and sell it triumphantly to Middle England. His huge majority in 1997 ushered in 13 years of New Labour rule.
She was also an enemy of big government who presided over a huge expansion of it. Her dislike of the left-wing councils that dominated many British cities was so great—and, it must be added, their sins were so egregious—that she did more than any other post-war prime minister to bind local governments into an ever tighter net of restrictions and prescriptions. She had no time for the idea of elected mayors who united real power with real responsibility. Britain became much more like highly-centralised France than gloriously decentralised America.
Yet her achievements cannot be gainsaid. She reversed what her mentor, Keith Joseph, liked to call “the ratchet effect”, whereby the state was rewarded for its failures with yet more power. With the brief exception of the emergency measures taken in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-08, there have been no moves to renationalise industries or to resume a policy of picking winners.
Thanks to her, the centre of gravity of British politics moved dramatically to the right. The New Labourites of the 1990s concluded that they could rescue the Labour Party from ruin only by adopting the central tenets of Thatcherism. “The presumption should be that economic activity is best left to the private sector,” declared Mr Blair. Neither he nor his successors would dream of reverting to the days of nationalisation and unfettered union power.
The Lady continues to cast a long shadow. This is not just because she was a divisive figure, but also because the issues that she addressed continue to confront and divide. The British state has continued to expand after a period of continence. Deficits have exploded. The relationship between some companies (this time banks, rather than manufacturers) and government has become too close. Margaret Thatcher and the -ism that she coined remain as relevant today as they were in the 1980s.
Margaret Thatcher prepares for victory in the 1983 general election
Margaret Thatcher prepares for victory in the 1983 general election
Source: Getty Images
As Margaret Roberts, a grocer's daughter, she checks the price and quality of goods in 1950s Dartford, where she is standing for election
Source: AP
A jubilant wave as Mrs Thatcher, shown with husband Denis and son Mark, wins the 1979 general election for the Conservatives
Source: AP
Protests in Liverpool as unemployment rises to 2.16m in 1981 and Mrs Thatcher's popularity plummets
Source: Homer Sykes
Inside 10 Downing Street, Mrs Thatcher worked long hours
Source: Rex Features
A shared purpose: with American president Ronald Reagan in 1984 during the Cold War
Source: AP
Antipathy towards integration during a European Economic Community summit in 1984
Source: AP
The lady is not for turning: on a visit to British troops in Germany, four years after the Falklands War
Source: AP
Mrs Thatcher wins a record third successive term in office as a result of the 1987 election victory
Source: AP
Lampooned by puppet makers in the television series "Spitting Image"
Source: AP
The thawing of relations with the Soviet Union: with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990
Source: PA
As Baroness Thatcher at the state opening of Parliament in 2010
By far the most disgusting article I've read on the Economist. Surely you realize that such blatant disregard of one sides view, and complete embrace of the others puts your magazine in journalistic shambles.
If I didn't know better, you would have made her out to be a Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela (whom ironically your freedom woman called a terrorist in her relentless support for apartheid South Africa.) oh and Latin American leaders that embraced her way? You mean ruthless fascists like Pinochet? Can't disagree there.
You want a leader whom embraced modern economics and encompassed all of his society, and not just the upper class? Try Gerhard Schroder.
I usually enjoy your analysis, and thorough thought out views. However having read this, and comparing with you writing about Chavez after his passing (a man who cared about the most vulnerable, which used to be a virtue) its unfortunate that if the individual in question is someone ideologically important, your sense of objectivity ceases to exist.
Thatcher was a product of her time. Capitalism was in crisis in the 1970’s. To avoid a major recession Bretton Woods was ditched. There was no longer a direct link to gold & fiat money launched financialisation. What finance capital needed above all else was the abolition of capital controls. This, alongside the defeat of the trade unions & privatisation, was Thatcher’s significant achievement. With the free movement of capital banks were able to begin ‘globalisation’. Imperial colonies were no longer needed to plunder the world. Finance capital directing the multi-national corporations were able to further discipline & enslave the workers of the world. But all this was built upon the dodgy foundations of excessive credit/debt which has ultimately led to the crisis capitalism faces today. Hence Thatcher’s wins were battles won that only postponed, & importantly magnified, the crisis of capitalism. Capitalism will still lose the war.
I must say that I am disappointed by some of the vitriolic comments about the article and the lady. I wonder how many of the commentators were around in the UK in the 70's? I was. As a young graduate entering industry full of socialist ideals, I became disillusioned with the behaviour of trades unions and their opportunistic, confrontational Marxist leaders. I can sympathise with the workers and their families who suffered, but their criticism at Thatcher is misdirected. "Lions led by donkeys" pursuing their conflict agendas and obstructing successive reasonable attempts at progress by governments (think Barbara Castle, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan). Little wonder the country was in a mess: poor productivity, not enough investment, unlike northern Europe. Why? Constructive (but strong) trades unions with a common cause of progress not conflict: I know, I worked there on and off for 17 years. So fellow commentators, direct the accusations of divisiveness at others, and greed at Blair/Brown who encouraged it and joined the government in it.
Why is this article shooting itself in the foot by going out of its way to glorify her, when the truth is that she was just nice to those she thought were on her side and sharing her agenda:
"and bet on freedom"..." her willingness to stand up to tyranny "
by embracing such champions of freedom and democracy as Pinochet?
pr 10th, 06:32
Wait hold on a second, wasn't the point of nationalisation across the world to save the financial institutions and intermediaries - the beloved symbols of free-market liberalism - who blew up spectacularly and the world along with it?
To those who try to give Thatcherism and Reaganism credits for economic boom since early 1980s :
The economic boom since early 1980s was due to technology breakthough : personal computer and internet in 1990s, which greatly enhanced the productivity. So suddenly government had lot of extra money.
When only 20 people has a cake for 50 people, Thatcherism is good, because there is still cake left for the last 10 people.
When 100 people has a cake for only 50 people, Thatcherism is garbage. Without government, the last 20 people will have no food at all.
The economic boom was due to freedom and democracy, without these tenets technology was useless.
For example, see the paranoia and oppressiveness of the Soviet government. Home computers and personal copying machines were illegal during the Brezhnev period. Hence the individual was hampered by the state. How did that turn out for the Soviets?
As recently as the late nineties France under Chirac was backwards in it's attitude towards technology with a woeful 15 percent owning a PC and less than 1 percent connected to the internet. Having to catch up has made France's economy what it is today.
I am not discounting other factors or comparisons to other nations, as technology is a snippet of a country's overall progress. However to to say technology alone without the effects of a positive government as the deciding factor is wrong.
My point is technology is useless if not permitted or promoted. What Thatcherism and Reaganism brought forward was a belief in individual productivity and entrepreneurship. Without the fertile ground seeds do not grow as strong, thus the economy did, as well as democracy.
There is a lot of divided opinion on her . The main may be 1 Churchill as bulldog man had all the work done well. 2 Kennedy had the charisma and the Cuban crises was solved as this was near USA 3 while Falkland is too far and going there has drained the cash from UK. Scotland seems to have well wishers . Well I guess we have our good and evil but best is the autobiography sold. Lady Di had the plenty of sell on her DVD and Bios and she was not the politician. The media tell us more after few days I thank you Firozali A.Mulla DBA
Life had , has , will give time for regrets and awards Some have tears when a personality dies , some have a smile on the faces, it all boils down to what have you di=one for me, it is I I I and will remain I me I thank you Firozali A.Mulla DBA
What a load of crap! Thatcherism like it's equally corrosive & destructive American counterpart, Reaganomics is what has spearheaded the economic downfall of Britain.
The Iron Lady was nothing less than a pompous, bossy, arrogant know-it-all tyrant who orchestrated Britain's slide into penury & fiscal chaos.
Wake up & see the flying debris, Tory supporters..
I find this article and its relatively strong support of economic liberalism quite odd given that this very same publication endorsed Barack Obama only about six months ago. Has something changed in six months?
No simply because we asked for a change then the real change and then what we have to change then we lost where we were as all want the change but there is clear definition of this I thank you Firozali A.Mulla DBA
In terms of legacy no matter your economic or political view, she did in fact change the world. Nonetheless facts are facts. Thatcher's legacy was everlasting, so much so, she virtually created the one ideological political system we currently have. If you look at privatisation in particular, a historic opportunity to create genuine competing businesses was lost and subsequent cartels were formed, think transport, telecommunications, utilities and so on. Moreover, this is just one aspect of Thatcherism that has profound effects on society today. Have a read here for more http://theconscienceblog.com/2012/11/18/privatisation-is-justified-only-...
Funny how the left come out with opinion that are so easily proved to be no more than drivel, totally wrong, being the product of propagating head bangers.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
AS far as I can see Margaret Thatchers "Big Bang" led directly to the Big financial crisis that we are still recovering from. Thanks Margaret. Without North Sea oil, Britain would have sunk many years before it has. Whilst she withdrew the Nuclear submarines from the South Atlantic thereby allowing the Argentine Dictator to invade the Falklands, she is only remembered for the loss of several hundred lives getting them back.
And please, no more changing the world, it is still the same as it was when I was born, a small planet circling the Sun
I totally agree and the worst or the best is Tony Blaire speaks well of her and he himself tells the papers , 'Why do people dislike me after 10 years? I wonder if knows that he made the world shrink in the economic and financial policies , Financial is micro economic is macro I thank you FirozaliA.Mulla DBA
pr 9th, 12:33
"Regulations—excessive, as well as necessary"
- well, which is it? You can't have both. Either they're necessary, in which case they're not excessive, or they're excessive because they go beyond what is necessary.
I assume this ambiguity reflects the Economist's problem at the moment in admitting that its endless editorialising in favour of unfettered capitalism is somewhat at odds with the lessons of the past five years.
It is hugely risible: eulogies are pouring out for Thatcher, currently, as if she was a cross between Mother Theresa and the Fairy Queen!
And just today it has been reported how over 5 million households are in serious debt with their energy providers!
It must be remembered, Thatcher was a politician: nothing else. And a very clever and scheming politician at a time when the only real opposition, Labour, were in utter disarray and no real opposition: thus the lady enjoyed free reign.
By emulating US politics, she underwent a complete image makeover and with the most able assistance of Tim Bell, her PR adviser and the Saatchi Bros, was able to bamboozle millions of people including senior politicians (who really ought to have known better!), the media and too many voters who fell to the siren call of the misrepresentations and calumnies of Thatcher's government.
Margaret Thatcher was the architect of all the subsequent economic malaise: the Big Bang enabled the financial and monetary disasters we today suffer; the UK's infrastructure will never ever recover from her neglect: anymore than will both education and the Health Service.
yes, 5 million households in serious debt...and what has that to do with Margaret Thatcher? In case you haven't noticed, she's not been in office for decades.
Amazing how the left is always blind to the misery they cause when they are in power, and just seek to blame those who have nothing to do with their ruinous policies.
If you really do not understand, then I am not about to educate you.
However, I'll give you a few study topics:
Privatisation:
Dash for Gas:
BNOC:
Amongst others......
I always find it hugely amusing how juvenile political-economic "Script Kiddies", always assume anyone who dares to offer intellectual critique of their heroes, or in this case, heroines,are Left Wing!
Amazing how the right wing extremists with an extreme view of "property rights" are always blind to the misery their institutions, always more or less in power, never accept any blame for their socially ruinous actions, including wrongful wars and war crimes.
I find the eulogy on Margaret Thatcher almost offensive. it reads like a hagiography, not a thoughtful reflection. Although a subscriber to the Economist I by no means subscribe to their views on capitalism unfettered. Margaret Thatcher's legacy at best is mixed. She was as destructive as she was creative, and the present world-wide economic slowdown is directly attributable to policies she was instrumental in championing. As for the demise of the unions, we now find ourselves in a place where we understand why they existed. Wages are not at a living level and people in the UK work the longest hours in the developed world. That unions had become too powerful is certain. That they needed to be destroyed was not. More of Mrs Thatcher's medicine is likely to be lethal, not helpful.
Viewpoint: What if Margaret Thatcher had never been? Privatisation, finance boom, manufacturing decline, home ownership, union laws. The UK changed hugely in the 1980s. But how much of that would have happened if Margaret Thatcher had never taken office, asks historian Dominic Sandbrook. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22076886
9 April 2013Last updated at 10:00
Viewpoint: What if Margaret Thatcher had never been?
“…She was not merely the dominant political personality of her generation - she was a transcendent cultural figure…”
“…Even if she had never been prime minister, many of the changes she came to represent, would almost certainly have happened anyway…”
Privatisation, finance boom, manufacturing decline, home ownership, union laws. The UK changed hugely in the 1980s.
But how much of that would have happened if Margaret Thatcher had never taken office, asks historian Dominic Sandbrook.
Privatisation, finance boom, manufacturing decline, home ownership, union laws. The UK changed hugely in the 1980s. But how much of that would have happened if Margaret Thatcher had never taken office, asks historian Dominic Sandbrook.
In the summer of 1970, a week after their local MP had joined the cabinet for the first time, the Finchley Press sent a journalist to interview her.
Did she, he wondered, fancy a crack at becoming Britain's first woman prime minister? "No," Margaret Thatcher said emphatically. "There will not be a woman prime minister in my lifetime - the male population is too prejudiced."
We know now, of course, how wrong she was.
Indeed, the thought of Britain without Margaret Thatcher seems unimaginable today, especially for people of my generation. I was not yet five when she first walked into Downing Street as prime minister, and had just turned 16 when she resigned.
For my generation, whether you loved or loathed her, she was always there, a fact of life. But she was not merely the dominant political personality of her generation - she was a transcendent cultural figure who inspired more songs, books, plays and films than any other British leader since Oliver Cromwell.
As her biographer John Campbell astutely remarked, if you want to see her legacy, just look around.
Yet what was that legacy? Even now, more than 20 years after her tearful exit from No 10, Britain cannot agree. It is often said that she was the most divisive leader of the last century, which is almost certainly true.
Yet her impact was much more complicated, even contradictory, than we often think. Margaret Thatcher called herself a conservative, but she led the most radical government in living memory.
She promised to restore law and order, yet she presided over the worst urban riots Britain had ever seen. She talked of bringing back Victorian values, yet her decade in office saw divorce, abortion, illegitimacy and drug-taking reach unprecedented heights.
She extolled thrift, hated profligacy and even paid for her own Downing Street ironing board, yet she presided over a gigantic credit boom and unleashed the power of casino capitalism. And although she talked of rolling back the frontiers of the state, the stark fact is that, in real terms, public spending rose in all but two of her years in office.
In the future, when historians look back at the Thatcher years, the familiar landmarks will surely loom largest - the savage battle over the economy in the early 1980s, the stunning victory in the Falklands in 1982, the bitter struggle with the miners in 1984-85, the deregulation of the City in 1986, the disastrous introduction of the poll tax, and the high drama of her resignation in 1990.
Yet none of this makes sense without a bit of context. For when Margaret Thatcher won power in May 1979, it was against the backdrop of perhaps the gloomiest decade in modern British history.
Shorn of its empire, Britain now cut a very miserable figure on the world stage. For at least two decades we had been falling behind our rivals, and now the contrast was painful to see.
Britain's average inflation rate for the 1970s was 13%. West Germany's was just 5%. Our unemployment rate was 4%. Theirs was only 2%. Our major cities seemed shabby and seedy, our newspapers were full of strikes and walkouts, almost every week seemed to bring some new atrocity in Northern Ireland.
Over the course of the 1970s, two Prime Ministers, Edward Heath and James Callaghan, had been broken by the trade unions, while a third, Harold Wilson, descended into paranoia. Foreign papers talked of Britain as the Sick Man of Europe. Callaghan himself told his Labour colleagues: "If I were a young man, I would emigrate."
HMS Invincible returns victorious from the Falklands, 1982
Margaret Thatcher's achievement, as many of her opponents now admit, was to blow away the stale winds of decline. At first, with unemployment soaring and the inner cities ablaze, she seemed certain to go down as a one-term fluke. But victory in the Falklands in 1982, when she risked her entire career on a desperate gamble to retake the islands from Argentina, changed her political image.
The lame duck had suddenly become Britannia incarnate - military success had won her the time she needed. And by the time she left office, Britain was unquestionably a more open, dynamic, entrepreneurial and colourful society than it had been in the 1970s.
Taxes were lower, strikes were down, productivity growth was much improved and far from fleeing Britain, as they had once threatened to do, foreign investors were now queuing to get in - a trend symbolised above all by Nissan's groundbreaking investment in the North East of England.
The City of London enjoyed a boom during the 1980s
There is no getting away, though, from the fact that this came at a very heavy cost. During the early 1980s, unemployment reached a record 3.6 million, though some estimates suggest that the real figure was much higher.
The real question, though, is whether this could realistically have been avoided. It is a myth that Thatcher single-handedly ended the era of full employment - in fact, unemployment had already hit 1.5 million under Callaghan.
In truth, Britain in the 1980s was always facing an immensely painful transition, partly because so many difficult decisions had been postponed for so long, but also because the stark reality of globalisation meant that major industries - notably carmaking, shipbuilding and coal-mining - were doomed even before she took power.
As a strident and often abrasive woman, Thatcher became the convenient scapegoat. But though her shock therapy never produced the nationwide renaissance for which she had hoped, she did not deserve all the blame.
Poll tax riot in London's Trafalgar Square, 1990
Indeed, whether you see it a land of opportunity or a selfish society, Thatcher's Britain was as much our creation as it was hers. Her supporters laud her as the woman who saved her country, her critics damn her as the woman who destroyed it. But historians will surely reach a more nuanced verdict.
Even if she had never been prime minister, many of the changes she came to represent, from privatisation and deregulation to the death of heavy industry and the rise in unemployment, would almost certainly have happened anyway, only more slowly.
With her characteristic blend of high principle, tactical opportunism and populist rhetoric, Thatcher came to embody the trends that transformed British life. Yet the old working-class world of busy factories, crowded pubs and cobbled streets was already dying, while a new Britain, more ambitious, more materialistic and more individualistic, was already emerging.
If she had fallen under a bus in 1978, would Britain today be so different? Her champions and her critics would answer with a firm yes. But I doubt it.
Margaret Thatcher in 1970 (left), and in 2009 (right)
In the end, you are left with the woman herself. Indeed, the very fact that she was a woman may well have been the most remarkable thing about her.
It is astonishing to think that when Margaret Thatcher first joined the cabinet in 1970, the Wimpy hamburger chain still banned women from coming in late on their own on the bizarre grounds that only prostitutes would be out at that time of night.
Indeed, there is a supreme irony in the fact that Thatcher, who loathed feminism, came to embody the extraordinary expansion in the horizons of Britain's women, which was arguably the single biggest social change of the 20th Century.
And in several centuries' time, when the minutiae of the Falklands War or the poll tax have been forgotten, I suspect that what Britain will remember about Margaret Thatcher is the simple fact of her femininity.
Thatcher herself might not agree, but in the end, the interesting thing about the Iron Lady was not that she was made of iron. It was that she was a lady.
About the author
Dominic Sandbrook is the author of several history books about Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, including White Heat, State Of Emergency and most recently, Seasons In The Sun
Morrissey: still not Margaret Thatcher's biggest fan
Imperious … Morrissey performing in New Zealand. Photograph: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
Biography of Margaret Hilda Thatcher Margaret Hilda ThatcherBaroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (née Roberts, 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and the Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century and is the only woman to have held the office. A Soviet journalist called her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As Prime Minister, she implemented policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Margaret Thatcher forced us to decide what was truly important. Photograph: Gerard Fouet/AFP/Getty Images
"Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!" That chanted demand of the left has been fully and finally met. At countless demonstrations throughout the 80s, it expressed a curious ambivalence – a first name intimacy as well as a furious rejection of all she stood for. "Maggie Thatcher" – two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her. She forced us to decide what was truly important.
In retrospect, in much dissenting commentary there was often a taint of unexamined sexism. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society.
But if today's Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow's TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of "privatisation" and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted.
We have paid for that transformation with a world that is harder-edged, more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. We might now be taking stock, post credit crunch, of our losses and gains since the 1986 deregulation of the City, but it is doubtful that we will ever undo her legacy.
It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. The novel may thrive in adversity and it was a general sense of dismay at the new world she was showing us that lured many writers into opposition. The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias.
She mesmerised us. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. Asked to report on the "state of things" in our country, we could barely see past her. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers.
Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. Take the larger view. Get over her! They had a point, but they had no idea how fascinating she was – so powerful, successful, popular, omniscient, irritating and, in our view, wrong. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach.
Not all writers were against her. Philip Larkin visited Downing Street where the prime minister quoted approvingly one of his lines to him – "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives." Accounts vary. She may have got it slightly wrong. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched.
We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. But the choice captures her perfectly. For a start, she had a superb memory for a brief, and she would have had no problem memorising quickly any number of lines. Larkin's evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. One turns with gratitude to Alan Clark's diaries for a fine description of being summoned to No 10 and being subjected to just such an examination.
When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. She was right, he was wrong. In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. Over the years, and through much re-telling, the story had it that Thatcher told Hitchens to bend over, and that she spanked him with her order papers.
The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her. From the invention of the term "sado-monetarism" through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation's masochistic imagination. This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed.
Meryl Streep's depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. The virtual state funeral will rehearse again our extravagant fixations. Opponents and supporters of Margaret Thatcher will never agree about the value of her legacy, but as for her importance, her hypnotic hold on us, they are bound to find common ground.
Above all, Margaret Thatcher Loved Britain by John Higginson Political Editor for Metro Scotland-Tuesday 9th April, 2013
BARINESS Thatcher, who dies yesterday, should be remembered most of all for her patriotism, David Cameron, The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said. the grocer's daughter who rose to take her place on the world stage was hated by some, but was a 'great Briton', David Cameron, The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom told reporters outside No. 10 Downing Street.
The one who’ came to our rescue’
Political friends and foes of Baroness Thatcher paid their respects to the ‘greatest British peacetime prime minister’. UK Chancellor George Osborne tweeted: ‘Sad news. Margaret Thatcher’s belief in freedom and optimism about the future overcame all. Her determination is our generation’s inspiration.’
Foreign secretary and former Conservative Party leader William Hague said lady Thatcher ‘recued the country in the 1980s’. He added:’ She gave the country hope in so many ways to million of people around the world, particularly those behind the Iron Curtain, that they could be free.’ Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair called Lady Thatcher a ‘towering political figure’. He said: ‘Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world.’ The Queen was saddened by the death, Buckingham Palace said. ‘Her Majesty will be sending a private message of sympathy to the family.’ It added. And Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond described Lady Thatcher as a ‘truly formidable Prime Minister whose policies defined a political generation’. London mayor Boris Johnson even went as far as to state that Britain lost its greatest prime minister since the time of Winston Churchill. ‘She freed millions of people to but their own homes and buy shares in British companies’, Mr Johnson said.
Irish Taoiseach Edna Kenny heralded Lady Thatcher’s achievements concerning Britain and his country. ‘While her period of office came at a challenging time for British-Irish Relations, when the Violent conflict I northern Ireland was at its peak, Mrs Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement which laid the foundation for improved North-South co-operation and ultimately the Good Friday Agreement,’ he said.
Margaret Thatcher prepares for victory in the 1983 general election
GETTY IMAGES
As Margaret Roberts, a grocer's daughter, she checks the price and quality of goods in 1950s Dartford, where she is standing for election
AP
Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children'
Margaret Thatcher, the year she became leader of the Conservatives, and the year Russell Brand was born. Photograph: Keystone France
The actor and comedian recalls a bizarre recent encounter with the Iron Lady, and how it prompted him to think about growing up under the most unlikely matriarch-figure imaginable..
One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.
My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.
When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken from picture library
Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.
Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.
When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.
When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.
Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.
The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy
"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.
It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.
I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud.
There were sporadic resurrections. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.
Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness?
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.
I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.
Russell Brand - what the hell do you know about Margaret Thatcher's mothering skills?
Margaret Thatcher's mothering skills have been called into question by Russell Brand. Apparently a woman can't dole out cuddles to her children at home and be a 'warrior queen' in the workplace. Get with the times, writes Emma Barnett.
Margaret Thatcher with her twins, Carol and MarkPhoto: Daily Telegraph#
Well Carol and Mark Thatcher must be feeling a heck of a lot better now. Russell Brand, yes that greasy-haired leering man the BBC once rapped the knuckles of, has offered his sympathy to them.
Instead, a loose-lipped Brand is telling the world how he has always pitied Baroness Thatcher’s children, for simply being her offspring. In the last 48 hours, since the Iron Lady’s death was announced, I have had many a strip torn off me on national TV, radio and of course on Twitter, for daring to suggest that Lady Thatcher was a feminist icon – whether she liked it or not.
And unlike the spineless ‘Ginger Spice’, Geri Halliwell, who deleted her respectful tweet marking Britain’s only female Prime Minister’s death (post a torrent of digital hate), I have continued to advance my position – abuse and all.
But thankfully, during all of my spirited debates on this topic, I am happy to report that no one has dragged up Lady Thatcher’s mothering skills as a point of contention. In fact, one thing people have in common on both sides of the Thatcher divide, is they wish to discuss her politics and legacy – not her ability to parent.
Moreover, the one thing even the most left-wing feminists cannot disagree with, is just how much Lady Thatcher is being remembered for being a Prime Minister (not a female Prime Minister) and her political decisions, as opposed to how she managed to ‘have it all’.
However, Brand just suitably lowered the tone with his contribution – something he is a pro at. He writes: “For a national matriarch she [was] oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles.
“"Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.”
Well I hate to break it to you Russell, but warrior queens can also be good mothers. And those women doing full-time jobs up and down the country, and then coming home and knocking up their significant other a flan, while tending to the children’s homework, would beg to differ with your cheap summation.
As my Telegraph colleague, Judith Woods, writes today: “the outside world meddles in family dynamics at its peril. Lady Thatcher was a pioneering politician and a working mother before the term had even been properly coined”.
Only she, Denis (her beloved husband of 52 years), Carol and Mark have the right and knowledge to comment on her capacity as a mother. And even then, it’s not really any of our business – as much as we enjoy prying on famous people’s private lives.
Tony Blair is another hugely controversial British Prime Minister – and yet at no point when his political decisions are hotly debated, does anyone opine whether they felt sorry for his large brood in some dire need of cuddles – while he waged war in Iraq.
We need to move beyond the idea that a tough woman in the workplace cannot be a loving person in the privacy of her own home. While Brand is feigning an odd concern for where Carol and Mark Thatcher got their cuddles from, he could also do with updating his views of women’s multifaceted natures.
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she crisply observed: “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.”
Viewed through the refracting prism of political life today, such remarks seem old-fashioned, naïve – laughable, even. Redolent as they are of maternal homeliness and domestic prudence, they are the sort of un-PC sentiments that would make any modern female politician, drilled in the stubborn dogma (some would say myth) of Westminster egalitarianism, wince.
But, as it transpired, Baroness Thatcher really was a new broom, sweeping through the nation determined to diligently balance budgets, declutter sclerotic national industries, and make Britain once again fit for purpose.
She saw no shame in making mention of her roles as wife and mother as well as leader; there are precious few MPs today whose first television interview would be conducted with their six-year-old twins sitting on the arm of the chair. But while her incontrovertible legacy as prime minister is in no doubt, her family life is more opaque.
Certainly, her marriage was a happy one. She met and married her husband Denis, a wealthy, divorced businessman, in 1951. From the outset he was aware of her fierce ambition and, easygoing by nature, was happy to pursue his business interests under the media radar.
Paradoxically, his portrayal as a gin-soaked reactionary in the Dear Bill letters of Private Eye worked in his favour, according to the couple’s daughter, Carol. Pigeonholed in public perceptions as a harmless buffoon, he didn’t distract or indeed detract from his wife’s high profile.
Carol and her twin, Mark, were born in 1953, when their mother was 27. Having studied chemistry at Oxford, she was training to be a barrister when she became pregnant, but with typical resoluteness, posted off her exam application from the hospital ward so as to ensure that she would qualify for the Bar. The family lived in Chelsea and the twins were installed in the nanny’s room – something that wasn’t unusual, given their wealth and status.
Within six years, Margaret had, by dint of talent and determination, entered an exceedingly male-dominated Parliament. After her barnstorming maiden speech in 1960, the aforementioned BBC interview took place with her twins. When her suitability for a front-bench career was mooted, she demurred. “Certainly until these two are a little older I couldn’t take on any more political responsibilities,” she said, and it was a decade before she became Education Secretary in the Heath government.
From the outset, Carol and Mark were very different. But Carol, now 59, has been outspoken about what she perceived as overt favouritism towards her brother, the elder twin by two minutes: “Mark was certainly the star.”
Yet in her book A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl, she depicts a traditional, even-handed childhood; her mother filling rolls for picnics and taking pains to personally wallpaper her children’s rooms. There were riding lessons and ski trips. Lady Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, recalls: “She’d often say 'weekends are for the family’”, and while he concedes that she was not a conventional parent, “she was certainly a caring and loving mother”.
But Carol has written: “As a child I was frightened of her. I always felt I came second of the two. Unloved is not the right word, but I never felt I made the grade.” Mark was sent to boarding school at the age of eight and Carol claims she was dispatched to prep school a year later as “there wasn’t much point in running a household for one child”.
She recently revealed in a BBC documentary that: “All my childhood memories of my mother were just someone who was superwoman before the phrase had been invented. She was always flat out, she never relaxed, household chores were done at breakneck speed in order to get back to the parliamentary correspondence or get on with making up a speech.
“You couldn’t distract her… she had tunnel vision in term of what ever she was doing.”
Carol, who was easily the brighter of the twins, may not have been close to her mother, but onlookers say her inference that she was somehow loved less did not chime with reality.
Former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had a relationship with Carol when he was a fledgling MP and she was in her early twenties. He remembers that once, when the couple’s planned holiday was jeopardised by a three-line whip, requiring all Tory MPs to vote, Mrs Thatcher (then leader of the Opposition) quietly rearranged parliamentary business so as not to disappoint her daughter.
Carol went on to study law, then moved to Australia. She established a successful media career, although after splitting from Aitken she did not go on to marry or have children.
“I’ve written books. I won I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, but nobody will ever know me for being anything other than Margaret Thatcher’s daughter, so at the end of the day whatever I did was never good enough,” was her bruising verdict. It’s a painfully harsh judgment, but one, it must be remembered, that she makes on herself. It’s impossible to know whether her self-esteem issues stem from nature or nurture.
Mark, meanwhile, was not so prone to self-doubt. Having failed his accountancy exams, he gained something of a reputation as a playboy. When he went missing for six days in 1982 in the Sahara while driving in the Paris-Dakar rally, his mother was beside herself.
By the late Eighties he was a wealthy businessman – something that has puzzled commentators. Although there has never been any implication of financial impropriety, the consensus seems to be that, at some level, he enjoyed the benefit of his connections. His first marriage ended in divorce. His children, Amanda and Michael, live in Texas, with their mother, Diane, while he lives in Spain with his second wife.
He gained notoriety for his role in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea; his co-conspirator, Simon Mann, was sent to jail, but he plea-bargained and received a four-year suspended jail sentence and a fine.
“I see him. We maintain contact,” his sister says of their relationship. “We do not have Sunday lunch together, not like other families. But then we never did. Just because you’re related it doesn’t necessarily mean you see a lot of them. You need to have something in common.”
Perhaps it was this ongoing iciness that prompted Lady Thatcher to comment at a meeting with Tory grandee Lord Spicer in April 1995: “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t go into politics because of what it does to your family.”
This shocking admission was revealed in a set of diaries by Lord Spicer published in The Sunday Telegraph last year, but whether it was an off-the-cuff comment or a sincerely held belief isn’t known.
Subsequently, she told Saga magazine, in more measured tones: “Look, you can’t have everything. It has been the greatest privilege being prime minister of my country… Yes, I wish I saw more of my children. We don’t have Sunday lunch together; we don’t go on holiday skiing any more. But I can’t regret. And I haven’t lost my children. They have their lives. I took a different life.”
Lady Thatcher was devastated in 2003 by the death of Denis after 52 years of marriage. And in recent years, as her health deteriorated, friends observed that her children did not visit as often as they might.
Asked about her mother’s complaints of not seeing her grandchildren more often, Carol’s response was unflinching. “A mother cannot reasonably expect her grown-up children to boomerang back, gushing cosiness, and make up for lost time,” she responded. “Absentee mum, then gran in overdrive is not an equation that balances.”
Harsh words, but the outside world meddles in family dynamics at its peril. Lady Thatcher was a pioneering politician and a working mother before the term had even been properly coined. Retrospective feelings of guilt, or circumspection over the sacrifices demanded by the office of prime minister, would not be so very surprising.
And as the nation she led – and the foreign leaders she influenced – prepare for her funeral, there will be ample opportunity to pay tribute to Lady Thatcher, both as public figure and private person.
Windy and cold in the north, warmer in the south. After 24 hours of programmes about the life and achievements of our first female Prime Minister I have come to the conclusion that anything said about Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 1925–2013, shows the same divisions in the country as the weather forecast. Your view of both will vary according to where you’re from.
I was listening to Radio 3 when I first heard of Baroness Thatcher’s death on Monday. It was just before 1.00pm. The bulletin that followed was, as is the way on Radio 3, short and clear. But this was a historic moment, one where the whole nation pauses to reflect so I retuned to Radio 4 and The World at One. It felt like a visit to the undertaker’s parlour. The presentational tone was reverently unctuous, as if the script were written by manuscript nib. The most vivid contributor was Lord Bell, close Thatcher adviser to the end, who spoke of her warmly, saying we would not see her like again. He sounded close to tears.
It was understandable. It isn’t easy to separate personal feeling on such an occasion. Yet it can be even harder for a listener. The emotional churn that comes when what you are hearing does not correspond with your own view is apt to find voice. It once did over gardens walls, it still does on radio phone-ins. It fires up Twitter and Facebook, explodes in kitchens and cars. “No,” we shout, “it wasn’t like that.” Then we sit and wonder whether, really, it was.
Radio, as the hours went on, certainly offered substantial food for thought. Whoever had planned the formal programmes to mark Baroness Thatcher’s death had done an impressive job. Peter Riddell, once political correspondent for The Times, now Director of the Institute for Government, presented Monday night’s Potency and Paradox (produced by Simon Coates), an hour of views from inside the corridors of power. Evidently, as some of the speakers are also now dead, the interviews had been collected over quite a long time but the range was impressive, including former members of Thatcher cabinets, advisers, civil servants, people who had been part of her closest circle.
Riddell’s thesis, diligently explored, is that there was always a paradox of head and heart within her politics. It showed in her personal kindness and compassion, it defined her political convictions. Early on, she could be persuaded, as Lord Carrington revealed. Yet the more dominant she became, the more isolated she was.
Andrew Neil’s special Radio 4 programme yesterday morning (produced by Paula McGinley) was built from voices of ordinary people, some who had known her in her earliest political career, some who only knew her public persona. Neil added in his own fond personal memories, of her friendship and guidance, his admiration for her courage, his regrets.
This was an unusual programme, a tapestry of everyday opinions, memories, insights. An innocence came out in the story of how she was desperate for nylons to go to her first Buckingham Palace garden party and, back in austerity 1951, the only way to get them was on the black market so that’s where her constituency worker got them. Not that young Margaret Roberts would have countenanced such a thing. Determined, brave, convinced, kindly but, as even Neil said, dangerously deaf to dissent.
Today yesterday, having only room for a bit of sports news alongside so many memories of Baroness Thatcher, ended with a brilliantly chosen trio of columnists, Sir Simon Jenkins former editor of The Times, Sir Max Hastings former Daily Telegraph editor and Eleanor Goodman, Channel 4’s former political editor. I think Hastings’s final thought should be framed and put on every newsroom wall. “Prime Ministers can only do what they do at the time.” In other words, yesterday never comes back.
I interviewed Mrs Thatcher twice. First in a constituency office in Warrington in 1975 when she had just been elected party leader. The second time was in Downing Street in 1986, when Michael Heseltine had just left the Cabinet and dangerous rumours were flying. She was everything these programmes said: kindly, careful and dauntingly convinced she was right about everything.
One of Margaret Thatcher's lasting legacies was to turn Britain into a nation of private shareholders.
Justin Urquhart Stewart of Seven Investment Management said: "This was an era of popular share ownership. People might have only owned shares in a couple of companies but this was the first time they held shares and made money from them."
Before the 1980s a small elite – of around 3 million people – owned shares privately. But the number boomed with the privatisation of state-owned utilities such as British Telecom and British Gas.
Mr Urquhart Stewart said that by the end of the 1980s there were almost 12m private shareholders in the UK, a number that would rise still higher with the demutualisation of the building societies, which started in 1989 when Abbey National floated on the stock market. Many others followed in the late 1990s.
Adrian Lowcock of Hargreaves Lansdown added: "In the 1970s just 7pc of people in Britain owned shares directly. By the end of the 1980s a quarter did."
These privatisations were hugely popular. When British Telecom was sold in 1984 two-fifths of the shares sold went to the general public, most of whom were novice investors. Around 2.1 million people invested in the company; they saw the value of their holdings double on the first day, such was the demand for the shares.
The British Gas privatisation in 1986 proved to be just as popular, backed by a TV advertising campaign urging viewers to "Tell Sid" about the offer.
According to Brian Dennehy of Fundexpert.co.uk, 4 million people applied for the shares, of whom 1.5 million received an allocation. Many sold their shareholdings within the first few days for a handsome profit.
Those that held these shares for the longer term have also seen good returns in many cases. According to the Brewin Dophin, British Gas has proved to be the most profitable of these privatisations. An investment of £100 would have been worth £1,246, by the end of 2011 – an increase of 1146pc. This is just the capital gain and does not include the value of any dividends paid. This is a far bigger gain than the growth in the stock market over this period.
These were two of the most high-profile privatisations. But during this period ordinary investors were able to buy shares in Cable & Wireless, British Aerospace, Britoil, Jaguar, British Steel, Rolls-Royce and British Airways – to name but a few.
The chart below shows how some of the popular privatisations have performed relative to the stock market.
A spokesman for Brewin Dolphin said: "In the 1980s, the Thatcher Government successfully developed the policy of selling nationalised industries into private ownership, or privatisation as it became known. However, back then the notion of selling national assets to the public was largely untested and there was uncertainty whether the public would support the issues.
"Thankfully this was not the case. In 1984, BT was the first well known public sector company to be sold and private investors welcomed the offer. More than 2 million people participated, keen to purchase the discounted shares offered at a price of 130p.
"This performance is impressive when you consider the renowned underinvestment in assets prior to privatisation, and the higher levels of staffing at the time of flotation. However, while not actually given away, they were deeply discounted floats and when the companies were exposed to the full force of competition they certainly improved their performance, resulting in very rapid growth from a low base."
Mr Dennehy said: "At the time, Only Fools and Horses was topping the TV ratings. Del Boy's catchphrase of 'this time next year we'll be millionaires' was also a mantra from the Thatcherite generation."
But it wasn't just the privatisations that encouraged wider share ownership. At the same time the Government made it more tax-efficient to hold shares by introducing personal equity plans (or Peps) in 1986.
Initially these plans allowed people to shelter £6,000 in a tax-free environment, by investing in investment funds, or later up to £3,000 in a "single company" Pep.
But many novice investors also learnt the hard way that share dealing wasn't a one-way bet, with the stock market crash of 1987. However, share prices recovered relatively quickly compared with subsequent booms and busts of the past decade.
Property
Ray Boulger of John Charcol said that as far as the housing market was concerned the Right to Buy scheme was Margaret Thatcher’s biggest legacy. This fuelled a significant increase in the proportion of people who were able to buy their own home.
But other factors helped reform the housing market over this period. It is easy to forget that when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister the UK still had exchange controls after the previous Labour Government’s mismanagement of the economy resulted in the humiliation of the UK having to go to the IMF for a bail-out in 1976.
Lifting exchange controls and opening up the UK capital markets had a far reaching impact on the UK economy, and this helped transform the mortgage market during the 1980s. That decade saw several new lenders enter to UK market and new types of mortgage becoming available. Instead of mortgage queues being the norm, borrowers saw the benefit of competition with an increasing choice of different rate options, such as fixed and capped rates, which had been almost unheard of previously.
Mr Boulger said: "Lenders actually had to start competing for business rather than most borrowers having to decide which lender to start saving with in order to qualify for a standard variable rate (SVR) mortgage a couple of years later. Until the early 1980s most banks were not active in the mortgage market and nearly all mortgage lending was done by the much larger number of building societies which then existed. The Building Societies Association operated a cartel, resulting in most lenders charging the same rate. This of course would be illegal today!
Until the mid 1980s it was impossible to raise capital by remortgaging and as until then nearly all lenders charged the same rate there was no point in remortgaging to get a better, or different, rate. Therefore until that time the remortgage market didn’t exist."
Pensions
Tom McPhail, the head of pensions research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said it was "impossible to overstate" the impact that Lady Thatcher had on Britain’s retirement saving culture.
"Back in the early 1980s, we still had a relatively paternalistic pension system, with the state and employers between them providing individuals with a guaranteed retirement income, risk free," he said. "Job mobility was relatively low compared to today, meaning that the final salary pension structure made sense for both employers and employees."
He added: "Through her battles with the unions, the privatisation programme, the abolition of compulsory pension scheme membership and the introduction of personal pensions, successive Thatcher governments fundamentally changed the entire social context. We now have a system of pensions which is largely based on private provision and, while the workplace still plays an important role, individuals’ retirement prosperity is more dependent today than at any time for decades upon the personal decisions which they choose to make.
"This emphasis on individuals bearing responsibility for the decisions they take, aided and supported by their employers, is a direct legacy of Lady Thatcher."
Key privatisations Mrs Thatcher’s premiership
1980 Amersham International Medical Diagnostics – £71 million
1981 Cable & Wireless – £71 million
1982 Britoil (BNOC) £549 million
1983 Associated British Ports £22 million
1984 British Telecom – £3.9bn for treasury
1984 Enterprise Oil – £392 million
1984 Jaguar – £294 million
1985 Trustees Savings Bank (TSB)
1986 British Gas – £5.43bn
1987 British Airways £900m
1987 Rolls-Royce £1.3bn
1987 British Airports Authority £1.28bn
1987 British Petroleum (sold in tranches)
1988 British Steel
1989 Regional water companies – £5.1bn
1990 National Power & Powergen – £2.23bn
1990 Scottish Power and Scottish Hydro Electric – £2.88bn
Internet activist Aaron Swartz helped build many of the web technologies many of us rely on every day, and he didn't do it to enrich himself. But the U.S. government literally scared him to death by threatening him with 35 years in prison--just for engaging in civil disobedience for the open information movement. Aaron committed suicide last month, but let's not let his death be in vain. [Read more]
Tell Congress to reform the CFAA, a law which makes criminals out of practically all of us. Demand Justice for Aaron and Help Rein In Out-Of-Control Prosecutors!
Russell Brand's obituary for Margaret Thatcher is a beautiful and incisive piece of writing, and a good example of why he's not just another actor:
When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.
When I was in college, many years ago, I remember being impressed by a mention in my psychology class that when rats in contained cages became overpopulated they started becoming abusive and eventually cannibalistic. In the subsequent years, then, the rise of authoritarianism, right-wing hatred, and dysfunctional politics directed at hurting other people rather than helping them has been no surprise.
And it's not over--I suspect it's just beginning. Woe is us..
What a load of arse. The most highly populated areas of every first world country are the most liberal. It's the people with giant houses in the countryside you have to look out for, same as ever.
Your cynicism about human nature is far more insulting than any silly words I might choose to use. Treat people like rats and they will behave like rats. I would rather believe that our natural inclination to altruism, to being considerate of others and a little fucking optimism for a change will save us from the sociopaths who keep stealing all the power and resources.
Unfortunately for your thesis human beings are very different from rats in all the ways that are relevant to this discussion. For example, rats are not known for charitable giving, community organizing, or rescuing strangers from burning buildings.
The response to the Rat Park data from "mainstream science" (if there is such a thing) strongly resembles echolocate chocolate's response to your own post.
Yes, I read it through twice, and then just stated my opinion. Not trying to "troll" at all, but I did figure the majority here wouldn't agree. Aside from some cleverly descriptive insults, it just seemed to present Brand's unevolved teen-aged opinions. And that's just MY opinion. Man.
I decided to go read the web on my memories of the 79-82 period, and realize that while Russell was contemplating Thatcher as his head mistress, I was probably what we would now couch as a 'fellow traveller' of the militant group, joining the labour party to fight for the retention of the socialist clause IV (which the clause IV group was fighting to water down, and expell the militants). Booing Neil Kinnock when he visited university, welcoming every prattfall the tory party took in those days (and by golly, there was a lot).
I also suspect that I had an almost complete disconnect from the council house residents, lining up to buy their house, which we could identify as we canvassed for Labour: they had painted the door a non-mandated colour to demonstrate their independence from the council regulations. They weren't remotely interested in our vision of utopia. I can't say I blame them either.
Thatcher was not nice. She didn't mean to be nice, and she didn't set out to be nice. She also wasn't nearly as effective as people seem to think: We still have an NHS, even if a pale shadow, and we still have taxes, and a concept of society as something we value, and we still have a broad sense of unease at unfettered monetarist reductionisms around wealth and taxation. Keith Joseph, Michael Hezeltine, Howe, the lot of them are like a vision of incompetency. I find myself asking why Thatcher tolerated such a parade of suck-holes, arse-lickers and yes-men to the end. Was she afraid of people with real ideas? Did she realize that a competent cabinet would have weakend her?
On the whole, I think we're entitled to view her as a bad leader, in every sense. I think Cameron and even that little twat Ed Mileband have seriously misjudged how people feel about the past. We're not that into lining up to cry crocodile tears, and we're probably more in tune with "the thick of it" than the Labour party would like.
I think Glenda Jackson is on the money.
I won't miss Thatcher. I wish she'd never come to power. Heath had at least two redeeming features: he fought fascism in the war, (at D-Day even) and he loved music. I can understand people seeking to show Thatcher was a loving partner of Denis, and a loving mother, she may even have been kind to animals. She was a complete bastard politically.
I repudiate the position taken by the anarchists who released a cover with her head on Wonderwomans body. I think talking about her as a HER rather than her politics is stupid. Milk Snatcher Thatcher lay at the core of Thatchers sense of polity. Her sex had nothing to do with it.
I can understand people seeking to show Thatcher was a loving partner of Denis, and a loving mother, she may even have been kind to animals. She was a complete bastard politically.
More to the point, did she make a good stroganoff?
I think this sums it up nicely: if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
Completely agree. I don't understand how some people can complain about her lack of humanity and compassion in the same breath as gleefully celebrating the death of a human being.
If you need to lower yourself below the level of the thing you're complaining about in order to make your point, you're not doing it right.
And we over here in Sweden had not handled the current financial crisis as good as we have withouth her inspiration during our earlier crisises. Thank you Margaret Thatcher.
Now, that is some concentrated BS. In Sweden, a lot of newly privatized hospitals, schools and various care institutions are currently downgrading their service while simultaneously hemorrhaging money into corporate bonuses and private off shore accounts. It is an utter waste of taxpayer money, like throwing cash down a hole.
All because of a wave of badly planned privatization that was made for purely ideological reasons under the guise of necessity. Yeah, thanks, Maggie.
We were reaching the end of the road with higher taxes and more public services about 25 years ago while previously highly successfull private businesses had a harder time competing on the world market.
UK and US influenced Sweden to reach a new political consensus where we tried to create new markets instead of increasing the central government power, it had mixed results.
This included deregulation of finance wich probably gave us an economical boom with runaway property prices, mostly in commercial properties and a very large bust in 1990-1994 that were a Sweden-only equivalent to the global 2008 financial crisis.
The reaction to this crisis were to make our currency free floating with a central bank inflation goal and a right to left wing consensus that the government budget must be ballanced and have a net surplus over whole high-low economical cycles. It were also recogniced that the pension system were unballanced and could crash given a future severe economical crisis and it were replaced with one that gradually lowers pensions when the ecnomy shrinks and raises them when the economie expands instead of promising that all is well and run into a brick wall. Pensions were automatically lowered in the later stages of the 2008 crisis withouth any active political decisions, very unpopular but more humane then a system that can crash suddenly.
The budget ballancing during a severe crisis hurt, it must have hurt even more in UK since you seem to have been deeper in debt and had larger efficiency problems then Sweden. The goal to ballance the budget and save for the next crisis actually worked and helped us a lot during the 2008 crisis, we did not have to make emergency savings in governmnet servicers and could even increase the investments in infrastructure.
We have also held banks responsibe for their own businesses and when they fail are their services bailed out by our government while the owners and bond holders get 0 untill it is sold back to the market, hopefully with a profit. I hope this holds if large banks go belly up, if it dosent will both the left and right join hands with the pitch-forks.
The market creation and liberalism has had mixed results.
We essentially changed to a school-check system while the overall trend were worse results, especially in hard subjetcs like math.
We got a mix of new small schools and large scale schools chains, few or no new in small municipialities and lots in large cities. Some were and are religious, one of the very few muslim ones is actually in my own neighbourhood but they all have to have the same science education, sex education and so on. Some of them are realy good, some are crappy and on average are all schools better including the public ones in municipialities where the competition is more intense.
Comparing now and then is made harder since our socialist party changed the public schools from being government run to being municipiality run and manny municipialities are crappy at running schools.
Care of elderly and people with special needs that no one else cares about has been part of the municipiality responsibility since before we became a modern democracy. This was very easy to expand into a socialism style organisation and it worked quite well as long as the organisations were fresh and people were enthuiastic with the overall progress. It atrophied and even socialists recognized that it were troublesome to both have the union people, responsibility for the employees and represent the publics needs within the same group of politicians. In my own municipiality Linköping we had a consensus that competition were a good idea and the municipiality organisation were split into a buing and a producing part and companies were invited to bid. This worked realy well and costs went down and quality were good or ok and then it stagnated. Mistakes were made, the way to handle them with bueraucracy were good for large coprorations and bad for small and now are we trying to change over from ”fixed service for minimum cost” to ”best possible service for a fixed cost” and we are trying to make more of it into ”check” systems were everybody chooses instead of central municipiality procurement.
The split up of the governmnet railway into a rail owning company, passangare traffic, freight traffic, workshops, train-stations and a separate organisation for security and control is one of the very mixed ones.
The new politics lead to a boom in railway building and upgrades. (Not big enough but still good)
The investments in trains in the government owned business went down and were too low but since municipialities were part of this pseudo market and a couple of regions with train friendly municipialities invested in almost ”S bahn” we had a boom in regional traffic that spread.
Splitting trains, workshops and houses into separate companies were a terrible inefficient idea that wasted manny millions and it has slowly been sorted out by train companies building new facilities as train traffic has increased.
We have not found a good way to share the limited track capacity between corporations and since traffic has increased a lot its getting worse, some of it would work better if there were fewer corporations.
The healthiest market development has been in freight.
Government and municipiality sales of powerplants, district heating systems and electricity grids has mostly turned out badly, they sold way too cheap. Such sales has almost stopped completely but buing services for the infrastructure instead of having all of the work force in house has turned out realy well efficency wise. My municipialities infrastructure company Tekniska Verken is regularly pruned and smaller businesses that it develops by own or political initaitaive are sold to keep it focused on the main business of providing us with electricity, water, district heating and cooling etc.
I could go on with more examples but I guess I already have shed most readers. These large scale examples span the whole era and are ongoing concers.
To get more good than bad from these trends you realy need to create markets and not crony capitalism since the the only thing worse then a public monopoly is a private monopoly.
It should be noted that ranting Magnus over here used to work directly for the <stroke>conservative</stroke> free market-fundamentalist minority that is currently governing Sweden through a thoroughly weird coalition government, where the smaller parties just seem to be along for the ride. So *of course* he thinks his boss is doing the absolute right thing, and *of course* they're NOT destroying the infrastructure out of pure ideologic spite - that just happens to be a happy side effect of the inevitable measures they have to take. See how nice it all works out?
I am active in municipiality politics in Linköping where I am among the people who handle issues regarding food safety, health issues like noise, radon gas levels, ventilation in public buildings, practical environmental issues like private sewage and building permits. Its volonteer work with some benefits and they suck since I dont get any compensation for lost income when having my own small business. I worked for a couple of years for my partis parlamentarians supporting them in farming and environmental issues and got chewed at by more career interested people,
Moderaterna is a right wing party moving towards the center in Swedish politics and our official buddies are the US Republicas but we are probably to the left of the Democrates in practical politics.
Personal opinions about the party leader is probably uninteresting for most readers. What probably is more interesting is that we have a fairly well functioning democracy with new parties being established and that is good even if roughly half of them are crazy or even brown. We also have a consensus culture were almost everybode left to right tend to come to the same conclusions wich amplifies both good and bad ideas and make it possible to reverse realy bad policies. Our opposition is active but could be way better, opposition is good for the decision quality. And we got fairly independent and strong municipialities that can have significant differences in how they are run.
I debate far to much on the Internet and is well known in environmental, energy and military online communities. I enjoy discussions and can actually change my opinion about stuff so go on but please be more specific EeyoreX.
I think it is good for people to hear other opinions and what stuff that were bad for them meant for other people, for good and bad. Since I have totally different things to say then the norm here I figure my comments could be usefull and add to BoingBoing.
How was Thatcher an inspiration? Neoliberalism caused the problems and your country took a progressive approach to fixing it. Neoliberals would argue against seizing the financial sector, and would, depending on their brand of right wing ideology either let the financial system crash and harm everybody (not possible anyway as elite business corrupts the government), or make the taxpayers take over bad debts and let bankers off the hook as we saw in the U.S. and Britain.
We had too much socialism and neoliberalism filtered thru liberals and people that actually wanted a functioning market and opposed by socialists made us a lot of good. Some of it went sour, often when no real market actually were created and some failed totally.
When failures were attended to we tried to do more of what worked out well with our version of "neo liberalism" and somtheing else with the rest, this fixed some problems and gave us new ones.
Its not a government responsibility to save the financial sector, its a government responsibility to make the bankruptcies less harmfull by saving the function of failed banks and not their owners. Other more healthy banks can then grow on their own or by buying the leftover bits of the failed bank from the government. We have done this a few times but only with small banks, it did however make wonders with the big banks ability to find additional private capital.
"I don't understand how some people can complain about her lack of humanity and compassion in the same breath as gleefully celebrating the death of a human being."
Use the edit button to open it up and then, in the case of your comment, use the backspace button and the space bar six or seven hundred times to get rid of the line breaks.
If you're going to copy and paste something into the comments, it's better to type it (or scrub it) in a text program like Notepad with the window at maximum width before you copy/paste. Disqus (which I hope soon to refer to solely in the past tense) turns soft line breaks into hard ones.
Sorry to Godwin, but I'm really curious whether you think it would have been similarly inappropriate to celebrate Hitler's death in 1945. I don't mean to suggest any equivalence between Hitler and Thatcher, I'm just curious how far you're willing to take this conviction of yours.
I can't speak for Dom, but where the line resonated with me is that I think people who embrace cruelty don't understand that the people opposing them aren't just playing the same game with the same goals.
People rejoiced Hitler's death because it meant an end to what he was doing, not because they were gloating over a reversal of fortune that would let them set up their own death camps to exterminate the Germans.
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else.
Precisely. I don't understand why you think polnareff wasn't agreeing with the statement in context. There's no indication otherwise.
While the news programs prattled on about what a great lady she was, it reminded me so much of what it was like when Reagan died. As if all your sins were erased once you kicked the bucket, and there was nothing left to say but good things.
Good Lord, yes. You know, it sounds like England was in worse shape than the U.S., and I'm too young to judge, but...yes, something needed to be done. Reagan certainly didn't act alone. Being a human being, he made mistakes. Being well-liked and dead, well, it sure seems we need a 12th Commandment: Thou shalt never speak unkindly of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was seen as a great benefactor, a sort of Santa Claus to conservatives and others who were butthurt by the upheavals of the 1970's. What he offered was a balm to their doubts and fears in the form of huge tax cuts and vague ponifications about how God wanted us to live. Although they both won their elections overwhelmingly and did many of the same things, Reagan gets away with this beneficent mystique more than Thatcher does. I suspect wording, perhaps.
(EDIT) That brings up a funny question: if Reagan was a balm for post-Watergate & Vietnam conservatism, what was Dubya a balm for? Spiteful idiots like Rush Limbaugh who couldn't stand the success of middle-of-the-road liberalism in the 90's? I guess so, although even they were quick to disown him and his Midas shit-touch as soon as his eight years were up.
thatcher did not win any of her elections overwhelmingly. a divided opposition and the UK election system allowed her to win even though more people voted against her than voted for her.
The last time any party got over 50% in the popular vote was the Conservatives in 1931, and that was an unusual case. Labour got a large majority in 2005 with little over 1/3 of the vote.
I wish that more people who object to things like this had voted yes to AV in the referendum.
The other thing is that Thatcher did get over 50% in 79, 83 and 87, since she only stood in Finchley. Nobody outside of that constituency voted for or against her at all, even if they think they did.
"The other thing is that Thatcher did get over 50% in 79, 83 and 87, since she only stood in Finchley. Nobody outside of that constituency voted for or against her at all, even if they think they did."
I'm not sure why all of a sudden this is an argument.
Whether or not you're voting for a party or a person in British politics is beside the point. Chances are VERY VERY good that the person in charge when you vote is the person in charge when the next election comes around.
Practically speaking you're voting both for a person and a party. It's just that on very rare occasions that person might be replaced.
So I refute your point. People that voted Conservative at that time were also voting for Thatcher. No one was thinking "well I hate Thatcher, but you never know, they might put someone else in charge once they're in power". Because that would be insane.
It's been an argument since people complained about Brown (and Major) becoming unelected Prime Ministers, when they weren't.
Maybe it's a diversion, but our (crap, outdated, utterly unsuited to > 2 Parties) system doesn't require a popular mandate - good job, since it's only provided one once, ever - and that time the majority party ended up in a coalition led by a party of 4 MPs.
Since universal suffrage in 1929, we have had 21 General Elections. The largest party averages 43.9% of the vote and 55.8% of the seats, overrepresented by 27.6%.
Conservatives under Thatcher averaged 42.8% of the vote and 57.4% of the seats (over by 34.2%) - a clear outlier in '83 (over by 44%). Until you look at Labour under Blair.
39.7% of vote, 60.35% of seats. Over by 52.3%.
If you want a cast iron example of a government without popular support, Labour in 97-10 are the ones to look at.
I don't much like her policies, but I can't deny that half the country still thinks she was a net positive. She was not a lone tyrant, she was representing their views. Next time you're out in public in the UK, think to yourself: half these people disagree with me and like Thatcher.
"Next time you're out in public in the UK, think to yourself: half these people disagree with me and like Thatcher."
Haha try that up north.
Let's not forget Maggie supported Pol Pot - let me repeat this: when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia (Year Zero) , Mrs Thatcher supported Pol Pot and made sure they kept their seat at the UN. Mrs Thatcher supported a government that eliminated 30% of their population.
Year Zero (1975) was four years before the Vietnamese invaded, and the invasion ended Pol Pot's mis-rule of Cambodia. Since Thatcher didn't come to power until the year Pol Pot was deposed, I'm left in utter confusion over what Thatcher did that was bad here.
George Bush was popular too. He won his election. Twice. So remember also that half of America disagrees with you on Bush.
Mind you, you could apply that same logic to just about any person you choose.
The celebrities, politicians and world leaders invited to Margaret Thatcher's funeral
Plans for Margaret Thatcher's funeral are being drawn up under 'Operation True Blue'. It will involve 700 armed forces personnel and the ceremony will take place in St Paul's Cathedral. Although it is not a state funeral the occasion will be afforded the same status as the funerals for Lady Diana and the Queen Mother. A number of politicians, world leaders and celebrities will attend - including the Queen. St Paul's has a capacity of 2,300 and is expected to be full on the day.
Jeremy Clarkson, from 'Top Gear' is invited (Nils Jorgensen / Rex Features)
Some of the celebrities, politicians and world leaders invited to Margaret Thatcher's funeral
12. Ten staff of The Ritz hotel in London where Baroness Thatcher died have been invited as thanks for the care the former Prime Minister received in her final days (PA)
11. Lord and Lady Lloyd Webber have been invited to attend the funeral (PA)
10. Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and the Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband are all expected to attend. All Cabinet members are invited - however Shadow Cabinet is not (PA)
9. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah will attend Thatcher's funeral (PA)
8. Dame Lady Mary Archer and Jeffrey Archer are both invited (Eddie Mulholland / Rex Features)
7. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to attend (Reuters)
7. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to attend (Reuters)
6. The last president of apartheid South Africa, FW De Klerk (right) will be attending. The Nobel Peace Prize Winner, freed fellow Nobel Prize Winner Nelson Mandela (left) from Robben Island and helped end racial segregation in the country. A representative of Nelson Mandela will also attend in the former President's stead (AP Photo/Obed Zilwa).
5. Dame Shirley Bassey will be attending (Matt Baron/BEI / Rex Features)
4. Barack and Michelle Obama are expected to attend and all living former Presidents have been invited (PA)
3. The Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, will attend Thatcher's funeral in a mark of respect. The only time the Queen has attended the funeral of a former Prime Minister was for Winston Churchill in 1965 (PA)
2. Tony and Cherie Blair are pictured with Baroness Thatcher during a church service to mark the 25th anniversary of the Falklands Island conflict. The former Labour Prime Minister is due to attend the funeral with his wife (PA)
1. Jeremy Clarkson, from 'Top Gear' is invited (Nils Jorgensen / Rex Features)
Ind. man with 47 guns arrested after school threat
Associated Press
CEDAR LAKE, Ind. (AP) — A northern Indiana man who allegedly threatened to "kill as many people as he could" at an elementary school near his home was arrested by officers who later found 47 guns and ammunition hidden throughout his home.
Von. I. Meyer, 60, of Cedar Lake, was arrested Saturday after prosecutors filed formal charges of felony intimidation, domestic battery and resisting law enforcement against him. He was being held Sunday without bond at the Lake County Jail, pending an initial hearing on the charges, police said in a statement.
Cedar Lake Police officers were called to Meyer's home early Friday after he allegedly threatened to set his wife on fire once she fell asleep, the statement said.
Meyer also threatened to enter nearby Jane Ball Elementary School "and kill as many people as he could before police could stop him," the statement said. Meyer's home is less than 1,000 feet from the school and linked to it by trails and paths through a wooded area, police said.
Police said in the statement that they notified school officials and boosted security at all area schools Friday — the same day 26 people, including 20 students, were shot and killed at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
On Saturday, officers served warrants at Meyer's home and arrested him. The statement said police had learned that Meyer kept many weapons in his older, two-story home and "is a known member of the Invaders Motorcycle Gang."
Officers searched the home, finding 47 guns and ammunition worth more than $100,000 hidden throughout the home. Many of the weapons were collector's guns.
Cedar Lake is about 45 miles southeast of Chicago.
A dispatcher with Cedar Lake Police said that the police chief was not available for interviews until Monday.
Lake County police spokeswoman Patti Van Til said Sunday that a SWAT team from the department assisted in serving Saturday's warrants.
Jacintha Saldanha's Death: Australian DJs Behind Royal Prank May Face Police Probe
The two Australian DJs who pulled the prank call on the U.K. hospital where Kate Middleton was staying are now in hiding and may soon have to face police after the death of a nurse caught in the hoax.
Kate Middleton and Indian-born mother-of-two Jacintha Saldanha, 46, is thought to have taken her own life.
2Day FM hosts, Michael Christian and Mel Greig.
Questions have been raised by members of the Australian public whether MI5, MI6 and/or their well known murder partners Mossad where involved somehow in the death ofIndian-born mother-of-two Jacintha Saldanha, 46, who the UK media are claiming that she took her own life...
and it is noted that all media reports coming from the United Kingdom only ever call it a suspected suicide... but was it a murder by MI5, MI6 and/or their well known murder partners Mossad
to make and example of the nurse who gave out the private information about Kate Middleton who was in a U.K. hospital...
Australian readers of INLNews.com and awn.bz who have read all about the murder of Thomas Allwood,
INL News Under-Cover Investigative Journalist and co producer with Stephen Carew-Reid andthe INL News Group of Fringe Shows Have Talent TV Shows Have, on the 21st June, 2012 inBroxburn Scotland which is about an hour's drive from Edinburgh... and how the Scottish Lothian Borders Police and the Scottish Prosecution known in Scotland as the Procurator Fiscal's Office and the world's media are clearly not looking closely enough the evidence brought out at the recent trial of Kyle Montgomery heard from the 19th November to the 26th November 2012 in Scotland's High Court in Livingston,who had been charged by the Scottish Lothian Borders Police for the murder of Thomas Allwood ..the evidence clearly indicates strongly that Thomas Allwood was not murdered by Kyle Montgomery who locals in Broxburn say is a well known local mentally depressed Scitzophrenic at around 2.20am on the 21st July, 2012 ... as implied by his father John Montgomery in his sworn evidence at by Kyle Montgomery's trial... when the much more believable independent evidence from two next door neighbours who have a common wall with John Montgomery's house in Galloway Cresent, Broxburn was produced at the trial that say they both heard and felt an enormous bang on their bedroom wall that felt like their bedroom wall was about to cave in...coming from John Montgomery's house at about 3.15 am on the 21st June, 2012.... which was the loudest bang that they had ever heard coming from John Montgomery's house which they stated was like living next door to a pub with drinking, shouting, arguing and fighting went on all the time all hours of the day and night... they said in evidence that before the enormous bang there was loud shouting, screaming, arguing and fighting coming from John Montgomery's house... however as soon as the enormous bang happened that felt like their bedroom wall was about to cave in... there was complete silence coming from John Montgomery's house... and then they heard the back door quietly open and close ... which was first time that that door was ever opened and close without being slammed for the last couple of years since they lived next door to John Montgomery's house..... John Montgomery had given sworn evidence at his sons trial that after his son grabbed a bread knife from his kitchen draw and ran out the back door after Thomas Allwood, who was unarmed when he left the house a few minutes before, and that his son Kyle Montgomery came back into the house a few minutes later with blood on the bread knife admitting to his Dad, John Montgomery, that he had just done something bad... John Montgomery then said he took to bread knife with blood on it from his Son, Kyle Montgomery and calmly placed it back into the draw still with the blook on it... then Kyle Montgomery left the house and John Montgomery calmly had another drink and then fell asleep on the lounge and did not wake up until the police turned up and arrested him at about 5 am on the 21st June, 2012... another person who was at John Montgomery's house that early morning on the 21st June, 2012 was a lady known as Maggie whose name is Margaret Shedden (Galloway being her birth name- a very well connected and influential family in Scotland with a famous politician George Galloway and a Freemason Scottish Police OfficerHugh Galloway of 7 Tower Place Johnstone Renfrewshire Renfrewshire 791being member of the family)...John Montgomery's family also are well connnected and respected in Scotland with war heros in the family and a Freemason Police OfficerAlexander Montgomery 51 Parkhead Rd Glen Village by Falkirk Stirlingshire 484
also a member of the Montgomery Family.... so it does not seem believable that John Montgomery would not have been awake and/or woken up with the enormous bang coming from his house at about 3.15 that the next door neighbours say was the loudest bang they had ever heard from John Montgomery's house and felt like their bedroom wall was going to cave in... so this clearly indicates along with other evidence that John Montgomery had lied on the witness stand and in doing so has implicated his Kyle Montgomery as the person who was likely to have made a fatal six inch stab wound in the right chest of Thomas Allwood through cloths with a bread knife that would have cerated edge and no sharp point for stabbing anyone through clothing which is only suitable for a sawing acting rather that a stabbing action...however at the same time implicating Kyle Montgomery as the likely person who made the fatal six inch stab wound in Thomas Allwood's right chest that cut through a main archery causing the death of Thomas Allwood... John Montgomery gave evidence which is believed by the jury could get his son off the murder charge his Son Kyle Montgomery was facing and to try and convince the jury that his son
Kyle Montgomery was only guilty of culperable homicide... which is like an accident homicide crime that resulted in the death of a person without intent in a drunken fight that got out of hand ... even though the bar maid gave evidence at the trial that Thomas Allwood was only drinking soft drinks that night... and Kyle Montgomery had been alcohol drinking heavily since about 1pm on the 20th June, 2012.....and so was his father John Montgomery drinking alcohol heavily since at least 8pm and likely most of the day since he received his government benefit cheque that day... in fact the jury based mainly on his father's evidence... very conveniently for all those Scottish Government officials involved in the investigation into the murder of Thomas Allwood.... and others... found Kyle Montgomery not guilty of the murder of Thomas Allwood and found Kyle Montgomery guilty of the lesser charge of Culperable homicide (accidental death) of Thomas Allwood....now the evidence that came out at the trial of Kyle Montgomery seems to clearly indicate that there were at least four people... maybe more in the house of Kyle Montgomery from 10pm on the 2oth June, 2012 and about 3.30 am on the 21st June, 2012... and in fact at least voices coming from John Montgomery's house that night and early morning were heard by the next door neighbours ....these seem to include...Thomas Allwood, John Montgomery, Kyle Montgomery and Margaret Shedden (Galloway being her birth name) and maybe others who did not want to make themselves known and kept reasonable quiet while at John Montgomery's house... the evidence seems to clearly indicate that at 2am to 2.30 am on the 21st June, 2012 when John Montgomery states was the time frame when his son Kyle Montgomery was meant to have gone out the back door and meant to have stabbed Thomas Allwood with a bread knife and came back with blood on the knife admitting he has just done something bad...making it fairly obvious to the at least three people left at the house which at the least included John Montgomery, Kyle Montgomery and Margaret Shedden (Galloway being her birth name)... that Kyle Montgomery had just stabbed Tomas Allwood outside in the back yard and/or a nearby street .. and that Thomas Allwood would be likely have been badly hurt from a stab wound and would have needed urgent medical attention.... regardless if was considered that stabbing of Thomas Allwood by Kyle Montgomery deliberate and/or in self defense... either way it would have been clear to these three people and anyone else that may have been at John Montgomery's house at that time, that they should call an ambulance and the police immediately to make sure that Thomas Allwood obtained urgent medical attention which if had been done then could well have saved the life of Thomas Allwood... sure the fact that neither of these people bothered to ring the police and/or an ambulance to try and get urgent help for Thomas Allwood at around 2.20-2.30 am...if what John Montgomery says id true.... they all should be charged with being responsible for the murder and/or death of Thomas Allwood as they seemed to just let him die on the street or the back yard.. and under Australian law could well be charged as accessories after the fact and at least charged with some serious charge that resulted in the death of Thomas Allwood... very similar to walking away from a serious car accident where it is clear someone had been seriously hurt and not calling the police and/or an ambulance....
Now... when one looks at the evidence of the two next door neighbours that say they both heard and felt an enormous bang on their bedroom wall that felt like their bedroom wall was about to cave in...coming from John Montgomery's house at about 3.15 am on the 21st June, 2012.... which was the loudest bang that they had ever heard coming from John Montgomery's house... then the more believable truth is that at about 3.15 am Thomas Allwood was king hit by someone and/or some people with either a fist or fists and/or a hard object that was enough to knock out Thomas Allwood.. then the body of Thomas Allwood was carried outside while Thomas Allwood was still unconscious ...then someone stabbed Thomas Allwood... not with a bread knife but a sharp pen knife which made the deep six inch stab wound into the right chest of Thomas Allwood that cut a main archery so that Thomas Allwood was never wake up and would bleed to death... and then quietly they carried Thomas Allwood body to the next streets Clarkson and Pyothall Roads and quietly left the body there at about 3.30 am where the body was found at about 4.45 am by three boys walking past at that time...the neighbour that had a window open looking right over where Thomas Allwood's body was found says you can hear a pin drop in her street and there was not one sound or noise in her street that early morning... and the only noise that was heard was the sound of the police at about 5am looking at the body and the murder scene... so it is clear that there was not fighting in her street that morning at 2.00-4.00 am where the body was found that morning and so screaming or cries for help from Thomas Allwood in her street that morning at 2.00-4.00 am where the body was found that morning.. why?... because Thomas Allwood was obviously carried and left there and was already unconscious having been knocked out before he was stabbed with the six inch stab wound and then stabbed and then carried to to the next streets Clarkson and Pyothall Roads and quietly left there... private investigators employed by friends and family of Thomas Allwood have a strong belief that the evidence clearly suggests that Thomas Allwood was not murdered and/or even killed by Kyle Montgomery with a bread knife but was murdered by a contract killer well trained to know where and how to stab a person with one six inch stab wound with a very sharp and pointed pen knife which is designed to be able to kill some with just one stab wound.... the people in the world that are well known to be able to know how to murder someone with just one stab wound are agents and/or assets of MI5, MI6 and Mossad... and it is well known they work as agents for the state of the United Kingdom and the UK Prime Minister's Office to carry out murders of people like Thomas Allwood who was an undercover INL News Investigative Journalist who was working on a story to expose state of the United Kingdom and the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron and their Treasury Solicitors and Barristers for knowing being involved with having a false and fraudulent UK Border Agency document and having that false and fraudulent document presented to the High Court of Justice to stop Thomas Allwood from successfully claiming £500 million in damages claim for the wrongful arrest of USA Comedian Ronnie Prouty by the UK Border Agency on the 27th April, 2011 as a favour for the powerful Rupert and James Murdoch and their all powerful media group News Corporation as a way of commercially sabotaging the planned filming of the pilot fo the Fringe Shows Have Talent TV Show in Edinburgh in April- May 2011 being co-produced by Thomas Allwood, Stephen Carew-Reid (the author of the well known bboks The Triumph of Truth -Who Is Watching the Watchers? and the original founder of the INL News Group-formerly known as the Australian Weekend News Publishing Group) and the INL News Group to create an international showcase of talented entertainers that perform at the 60 year old Edinburgh Fringe Festival each year... which has become the biggest arts festival in the world with over 3,000 Fringe shows being performed during August each year in Edinburgh....
Below is some the transcripts of what was said at a court hearing in London's High Court of Justice heard on the 24th July, 2012 where applications were originally listed to be heard by Thomas Allwood prior to his murder on the 21st June, 2012 in Broxburn, Scotland for criminal contempt applications to be heard against David Cameron the UK Prime Minister, George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, the UK Government, the UK Border Agency and their treasury solicitors for knowingly having prepared a false and fraudulent UK Border Agency document and presenting such false and fraudulent UK Border Agency document to the High Court of Justice to try to stop Thomas Allwood from suing David Cameron the UK Prime Minister, George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, the UK Government, the UK Border Agency for £500 million in damages caused to the filming of the Fringe Shows Have Talent TV Show by the wrongful arrest of USA Comedian Ronnie Prouty on the 27th April, 2012 at Heathrow Airport as favour David Cameron and George Osborne's good friends at the time...Rupert and James Murdoch and their all powerful multi- billion media group known as News Corporation..the murder of Thomas Allwood on the 21st June, 2012 meant that would stop Thomas Allwood continuing with his criminl contempt applications against suing David Cameron the UK Prime Minister, George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, the UK Government, the UK Border Agency and their treasury solicitors and well as other criminal contempt applications taken out against barristers and solicitors involving another legal fight Thomas Allwood and his de-facto partner Valerie Butler where involved with at the High Court of Justice in their fight over their 25 acre family farm known as Haywicks Farm, Haywicks Lane, Hardwicke, Gloucester in the UK... where Thomas Allwood alleged that powerful and well connected s Freemason solicitors and barrister in Gloucester that Thomas Allwood called the Gloucestershire Legal Mafia (GLM) were involved with the preparing a false will in the name of Valerie Butler's father Herbert Butler and presenting that false will for a wrongful grant of probate so that partners of the Gloucestershire Legal Mafia (GLM) could wrongly obtain the title deed of their 25 acre family farm known as Haywicks Farm, Haywicks Lane, Hardwicke, Gloucester in the UK which they had planned to turn into a multi-million luxury real estate development ... Thomas Allwood also had a firm belief and was not scared to openly say...that Valerie Butler's father Herbert Butler was also murdered as part of the conspiracy he alleged to defraud his de-facto partner Valerie Butler of her rightful ownership of Haywicks Farm..
Some of the reasons why the Private Investigation Team employed by friends and family of the late Thomas Allwood to investigate who and why Thomas Allwood was murdered on the 21st June. 2012 in Broxburn, Scotland strongly believe that the powerful agents of the State of the United Kingdom such as MI5, MI6 and/or Mossad and/or some other professional contract murdered was and/or were involved in the murder of Thomas Allwood on the 21st June, 2012 include:
1. The Scottish Lothian Borders Police and the Scottish Prosecution known in Scotland as the Procurator Fiscal's Office and the world's media are clearly not looking closely enough the evidence brought out at the recent trial of Kyle Montgomery heard from the 19th November to the 26th November 2012 in Scotland's High Court in Livingston,who had been charged by the Scottish Lothian Borders Police for the murder of Thomas Allwood ... seem to be risking their worldwide good reputation by quite openly protecting those at the house of John Montgomery on the evening of the 20th June, 2012 and the early morning of the 21st June, 2012 who according to the evidence of John Montgomery, and including John Montgomery knew that Thomas Allwood was likely badly wounded from a stab wound at about 2.20 am and did niot ring the police of an ambulance and simply went to sleep and left Thomas Allwood to die on the road just a street away from John Montgomery's house
2. Why is there a complete worldwide media block out.. except for one lone Scottish Journalist Vic Roderick who was the only journalist to cover the trial... who has now been silenced by the world mainstream media with what is called a "D Notice" on the reporting of the murder/death of Thomas Allwood who was an undercover INL News Investigative Journalist, Poet and TV Shows producer of the Fringe Shows have Talent TV Show...
3. Why is the a mentally sick person such as Kyle Montgomery whom the locals say is a well known Scitzophrenic which is capable to believing and/or repeating any story he is told is the truth.. being made a patsy for the death of Thomas Allwood.. .at about 2.20 am when the evidence clearly indicates that Thomas Allwood was knocked unconscious in the house of John Montghomery at about 3.15 am on the 21st June, 2012 and then carried out of the house and then stabbed with a six inch wound in the right chest cutting a main archery nd then carried to be let to die on Clarkson and Pyothall Road, Broxburn
With the more believable truth is that at about 3.15 am Thomas Allwood was king hit by someone and/or some people with either a fist or fists and/or a hard object that was enough to knock out Thomas Allwood.. then the body of Thomas Allwood was carried outside while Thomas Allwood was still unconscious ...then someone stabbed Thomas Allwood... not with a bread knife but a sharp pen knife which made the deep six inch stab wound into the right chest of Thomas Allwood that cut a main archery so that Thomas Allwood was never wake up and would bleed to death... and then quietly they carried Thomas Allwood body to the next streets Clarkson and Pyothall Roads and quietly left the body there at about 3.30 am where the body was found at about 4.45 am by three boys walking past at that time...the neighbour that had a window open looking right over where Thomas Allwood's body was found says you can hear a pin drop in her street and there was not one sound or noise in her street that early morning... and the only noise that was heard was the sound of the police at about 5am looking at the body and the murder scene...
so it is clear that there was not fighting in her street that morning at 2.00-4.00 am where the body was found that morning and so screaming or cries for help from Thomas Allwood in her street that morning at 2.00-4.00 am where the body was found that morning.. why?... because Thomas Allwood was obviously carried and left there and was already unconscious having been knocked out before he was stabbed with the six inch stab wound and then stabbed and then carried to to the next streets Clarkson and Pyothall Roads and quietly left there... private investigators employed by friends and family of Thomas Allwood have a strong belief that the evidence clearly suggests that Thomas Allwood was not murdered and/or even killed by Kyle Montgomery with a bread knife but was murdered by a contract killer well trained to know where and how to stab a person with one six inch stab wound with a very sharp and pointed pen knife which is designed to be able to kill some with just one stab wound.... the people in the world that are well known to be able to know how to murder someone with just one stab wound are agents and/or assets of MI5, MI6 and Mossad...
Part of the transcripts of hearing before Justice Vos at High Court of Justice in London on the 24th July, 2012
Miss Love: The Border Agency matter.
Mr Justice Vos: I know, but I do not have any of the core papers in the Border Agency matter. What is the action no?
Miss Love: My Lord, it is HC11C04395
Mr Justice Vos: You see that is why, I have been through all the cases, and I do not have any papers in that except your letter and the correspondence.
Miss Love: Right
Mr Justice Vos: If I just pick it up. I have this much stuff on the UKBA, but it really is just your letter and a lot of historical material, and material concerning the famous INL News Group.
Miss Love: Mr Lord, we can remedy that situation _ I am sure your Lordship does not particularily want further copies of the correspondence, but certainly of the original claim form_
Mr Justice Vos: That is what I would like. So there was an application, was there, in that matter that was returnable today?
Miss Love: There was....
Mr Justice Vos: To do what?
Miss Love: If I could just start the procedural history, the claim by Mr Carew-Reid, which in essense was apparently a claim for damages in respect of treatment by the UK Border Agency of an individual known as Mr Prouty was issued on 9th December, 2011...
Page 6:
Miss Love: as you will see, it appears to be some hybrid of striking out and appealing the order of Master Bowles, an application for the cross-examination of myself and Mr Spanton, who was acting Treasury Solicitor and a generalised, if I might respectfully say so, rather difficult to grasp criminal contempt application..
Mr Justice Vos: It is another criminal contempt
Page 8:
Mr Geis: But the point was that Mr Prouty was refused entry into the UK and I've seen the forms that Mr Carew-Reid had, and there was one form which did not have a signature on. Now, I think this does cause for a bit of alarm and I think you should carefully consider this point and. if necessary, make an adjournment.
Mr Justice Vos: Thank you, Mr Gies...
Miss Lean: My Lord may have seen in the more recent correspondence from Mr Reid and INL that clearly they have concerns that this was a murder effected by MI5 or Mossad and/or other agents of the State, but as far as we are aware it is being dealt with as a criminal murder charge (murder of Thomas Allwood)
Mr Justice Voss: Yes, and who was Mr Allwood- apart from being a party to litigation, did he occupy some important position?....
Miss Lean: My Lord, for completeness, I should mention I am afraid among the many letters and emails from members of the INL News Group I do not have that one. I think I have seen some reference in the correspondence to Mr Allwood being involved with the INL News Group in some capacity so that may be the...
Mr Justice Voss: Right, but he was a associate and friend of Mr Carew-Reid, that is what it comes to?.... Right, thank you. Well Mr Carew-Reid himself says he was a friend of Mr Carew-Reid's side, I do not think we need to go further than that.....
Jacintha Saldanha's Death: Australian DJs Behind Royal Prank May Face Police Probe
The two Australian DJs who pulled the prank call on the U.K. hospital where Kate Middleton was staying are now in hiding and may soon have to face police after the death of a nurse caught in the hoax.
This morning, there are also new questions about whether DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian, radio shock jocks at Sydney's 2Day FM broke laws after they recorded the private conversation when they pretended to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles.
British police have also contacted Australian police about a possible probe into the prank call, The Associated Press reported Sunday.
Rhys Holleran, CEO of Southern Cross Austereo, the parent company of Sydney's 2Day FM radio station said no laws were broken. The prank had been cleared by the Australian radio station's lawyers. Holleran said the DJs followed the company's procedures before broadcasting the call. "I think the more important question here is that we're very confident that we haven't done anything illegal. Our main concern at this point in time is what has happened is incredibly tragic and we're deeply saddened and we're incredibly affected by that," Holleran said Saturday. The hoax has caused public outcry after the death of a nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, who connected the pair to the Duchess' room.
Saldanha was found dead Friday morning after police were called to an address near the hospital to "reports of a woman found unconscious," according to a statement from Scotland Yard. Circumstances of her death are still being investigated, but are not suspicious at this stage, authorities said earlier. Lord Glenarthur, the chairman of King Edward VII's Hospital, the U.K. hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was receiving treatment, condemned the prank Saturday in a letter to the Max Moore-Wilton, chairman of Southern Cross Austereo, the Australian radio station's parent company.
Glenarthur said the prank humiliated "two dedicated and caring nurses," and the consequences were "tragic beyond words," The Associated Press reported. Max Moore-Wilton, the chairman of Southern Cross Austereo, said in a letter to Lord Glenarthur Sunday that the company is reviewing the station's broadcast policies, the AP reported. "I can assure you we are taking immediate action and reviewing the broadcast and processes involved," Moore-Wilton said in the letter. "As we have said in our own statements on the matter, the outcome was unforeseeable and very regrettable." Saldanha came to England from India nine years ago, with her husband and two children. On Facebook, her 14-year-old daughter wrote this weekend, simply: "I miss you, I loveeee you."
Saldanha worked as a nurse at King Edward VII private hospital for four years. Her family lives 100 miles away in Bristol, but while on shift she slept in a residence for nurses. With no receptionist on duty overnight she answered the prank call and put it through. The hospital called her a "first-class nurse" and "a well-respected and popular member of the staff" and extended "deepest sympathies" to family and friends, saying that "everyone is shocked" at this "tragic event."
The duchess spent three days at the hospital undergoing treatment for hyperemesis gravidarum, severe or debilitating nausea and vomiting. She was released from the hospital Thursday morning. The hospital apologized for the mistake.
A man who stabbed a photographer to death in a drunken street brawl was caught after police found a blood-stained knife in a cutlery drawer.
A man who stabbed a photographer to death in a drunken street brawl was caught after police found a blood-stained knife in a cutlery drawer.
Kyle Montgomery, 24, denied murdering Thomas Allwood after a late-night drinking session but was found guilty of culpable homicide by a jury on Wednesday.
Jurors at the High Court in Livingston took four and a half hours to return a guilty verdict on the lesser charge.
Sentence on the first-time offender, of Winchburgh, West Lothian, was deferred until December 20 for background reports.
Mr Allwood, a 56-year-old photographer who worked for the Australian-based INL News Group, was stabbed in the chest during an incident on June 21.
Giving evidence in his own defence, Montgomery claimed he grabbed the knife to frighten Mr Allwood after being attacked by him at a house in Broxburn, West Lothian.
He said the killing was an accident and that he did not know the blade had sliced through the victim's chest and severed a major artery as he struggled with the victim.
Police who were called to the scene followed a trail of blood from Mr Allwood's body to Montgomery's father’s home. They found the knife, still stained with blood, in a cutlery drawer.
Montgomery was detained as he returned to the house from a nearby shop.
Mr Allwood was a photographer with the Australian-based INL News Group. Although he was born in Scotland, his family emigrated when he was a child and he spent most of his live in Australia.
A MAN accused of murdering an Australian journalist has claimed he must have stabbed the victim to death by accident.
Kyle Montgomery admitted that he armed himself with a kitchen knife and squared up to 56-year-old Thomas Graham Allwood.
He claimed in evidence at the High Court in Livingston that the blade was for his own “protection” and he had no intention of using it.
After being attacked twice by the victim, he said he just wanted to “scare him off” with the knife.
He struggled with Mr Allwood, who was armed with a metal pole or iron bar, but said he was unaware of inflicting the fatal blow which severed the main artery above his heart.
Montgomery, 24, from Winchburgh, West Lothian, denies murdering Mr Allwood in Broxburn on June 21.
In his closing speech yesterday, advocate depute Martin Macari asked the jury to convict Montgomery of murder. He said: “Whatever happened between those men, Kyle Montgomery had returned to the house to get a weapon.”
Derek Ogg QC, defending, said: “If he didn’t realise he’d caused that injury, he could not and did not have any criminal intent towards Mr Allwood.”
Judge Lord Doherty was due to deliver his charge to the jury this morning.
Comment from INL News Reader: Mary Gleeson
I have read all the published stories on the trial of Kyle Montgomery who was charged with the murder of INL Journalist Thomas Allwood, and all other previous media reports I could find on the web since Thomas Allwood was first reported on the BBC website on the 22nd June 2012 that he had been murdered in Broxburn, Scotland and that Kyle Montgomery was charged with Willfull murder of Thomas Allwood... and I have come to the conclusion that the way the evidence has presented at the trial of Kyle Montgomery and what evidence has been given by the witnesses the dots simply do not add up... and the trial has created more questions than answers..... when it seems clear that this Maggie lady, described as a female friend of Thomas Allwood and tJohn Montgomery, the father of the accused ..according to John Montgomery's evidence were in the house when Kyle Montgomery deliberately went outside to chase after Thomas Allwood with a bread knife... rather than jut locking lall the doors and windows of his father's house t make sure Thomas Allwood can not get back into their house....because they were meant to be in fear of him... then ring the police and say that Thomas Allwood was threatening Kyle Montgomery and had attacked Kyle Montgomery in John Montgomery's house ( all according the John Montgomery) and was continuing to bang on their door ... then the police would have come around immediately and arrested Thomas Allwood... who would then have spent the night in the police lock up.... where he would have woken up the next morning alive and be able to explain to a magistrate and/or the police what happened that night... no it all did not happen that way... John and Kyle Montgomery both claim that having removed Thomas Allwood from John Montgomery's house.... and expecting Thomas Allwood to have been unarmed....deliberately ran out of the back door of the house to the back garden for the purpose to chase Thomas Allwood with a bread knife in his hand.... instead of staying safe in his dads house and ringing the police.... now I read in the above article the unbelievable claim by Kyle Montgomery that Thomas Allwood "was armed with a metal pole or iron bar" and thus was acting in self defence after delieberately going outside to look for Thomas Allwood to attack him with a knife... other purpose would he have grabbed the knife and run outside with it for... it can only be to stab Thomas Allwood who he thought was unarmed... now Kyle Montgomery seems on the evidence had been drinking heavily since bout 1pm at his dads house and would have been very drunk by 2am the next morning and Thomas Allwood looks like a big man and Kyle Montgomery looks like a small thin boy... and thus could easily be over powered by Thomas Allwood even without Thomas Allwood have a metal pole or an iron bar to defend himself with from a vicious knife attack... we also heard from John Montgomery who said that Thomas Allwood had his son Kyle Montgomery pinned on the floor with his foot on his chest... which shows that Thomas Allwood had no problem in over powering Kyle Montgomery without any weapon of any sort.... then se have the unbelievable story of John Montgomery that at the same time the Thomas Allwood had his son Kyle Montgomery pinned to the floor by having his foot on his chest... Thomas Allwood was meant to have his hands around Kyle Montgomery's throat trying to strangle Kyle Montgomery... this is simply physically impossible for a tall big man to do at the same time as standing up with his foot on the person's chest....it is simply also unbelievable that that Thomas Allwood was armed outside with a metal pole or iron bar because if that was the case having already being told by John Montgomery that Thomas Allwood had no problem about being able to overpower Kyle Montgomery without any weapon, the how the hell is Kyle Montgomery going to be able fatally stab Thomas Allwood with just one six inch stab wound with a bread knife ( bread knife do not have pointy tips and just a cerated edge for a sawing action for bread or meat but not a stapping action) through clothing knowing the exact place to stab (single handed) a big man to kil him with one stab wound in the front chest ( not in the back) who is well aware that of the identity of the attacked and that the attcked is likely to attack because of a previous disagreement in the house.... and Thomas Allwood is also now armed with a metal pole or an iron bar.... which in one swing would have knocked small frail drunk Kyle Montgomery for six ... there is no way Kyle Montgomery is going to have any chance of being able to make that one fatal stab wound all by himself.... no normal jury is going to beleive this story.. so there seems no doubt what ever happened that morning Thomas Allwood must have been unarmed and Kyle Montgomery would have have to hav had some helpers... if it was really Kyle Montgomery that handed the fatal stab wound on Thomas Allwood...at about 2.15 according to the timing given by his father John Montgomery... then John and Kyle Montgomery and the lasy Maggie have to explain what the enmormous bang against the wall of the next door neighbours bedroom that cam from John Montgomery's house at about 3.5 to 3.15 am that felt to them that their bedroom wall was abourt to cave in... then after there being constant arguing, shouting and fighting etc before this enormous bang at about 3.05 to 3.15 am on the 21st June 2012.. everything from John Montgomery's house suddenly went quiet and for the first tikme ever... the back door was opened and wht and the door was not slammed which indicated clearly that someone or some people went out the door of John Montgomery's very silently and quietly... and the only logical deduction as to what the enormous bang against the wall was just before that nearly push the wall in from John Montgomery's side... was someone king hitting Thomas Allwood with a fist or a heavy object.. making him unconscious....then carrying Thomas Allwood out the door while he was unconscious... then may be making soem more bruses on his boy and then the one fatal stab wound ... all while he was unconscious.... and then carrying the body of Thomas Allwood quietly to where he was found on Clarkson/Pyothall Roads... at about 4.45 am by passers by... However if one is to discount that theory and ignore the enormosu bang at 3.05 to 3.15 am coming from John Montgomery's house... and just still to what John Montgomery sated on the witness stand under oath.. that his sone Kyle Montgomery grabbed a bread knife from the kitchen draw and ran out the back door( obviously to go to try and stab Thomas Allwood or at least chase after himw ith the knife) then coming back ten minutes later with blod on the knife and admitting he had done something bad... and John Montgomery not asking any more questions and calmly oputting the knife woth the blood on it back into the draw... having one more drink,,, the son leave the house and he falls asleep on the lounge...and is woken uop at about 5am by the police arresting him... so why didn't John Montgomery, Kyle Montgomery and/or Maggie ring the police and/or an ambulance at about 2.20 am which would haved saved the life of Thomas Allwood..
A man who stabbed his victim in the chest, resulting in his death has today been convicted.
At the High Court in Livingston today, Kyle Montgomery was found guilty of culpable homicide after killing 56-year-old Thomas Graham Allwood during a disturbance in Broxburn in the early hours of Thursday 21st June.
Members of the public found Mr Allwood's body in Clarkson Road and alerted police who launched a major investigation to identify his killer.
Detectives quickly traced and arrested Montgomery and charged him in connection Mr Allwood's death.
The 24-year-old is due to be sentenced on Thursday 20th December at Edinburgh High Court.
Detective Inspector Stuart Houston, who led the investigation said: "It is my sincere hope, that following today's verdict Mr Allwood's family can begin to move on with their lives and put this horrendous ordeal behind them.
"I would also like to thank the members of the community who came forward and assisted with this investigation.
"Lothian and Borders Police are committed to tackling violent crime and by working closely with our partners at the Crown Office, ensure that offences of this nature are investigated thoroughly and those responsible are removed from our communities."
Thomas Allwood was born in Scotland but spent most of his life in Australia
First offender Kyle Montgomery will be sentenced next month for the killing
The monster who stabbed Thomas Graham Allwood in the chest in Broxburn, which resulted in his death, has been convicted.
Kyle Montgomery was found guilty of culpable homicide the High Court in Livingston. He killed 56-year-old Allwood during a disturbance in the early hours of Thursday, June 21.
Members of the public found Mr Allwood's body in the Clarkson Road/Pyothall Road area and alerted police. A major investigation to identify his killer was launched.
The 24-year-old is due to be sentenced on Thursday, December 20 at Edinburgh High Court.
Detective Inspector Stuart Houston, who led the investigation, said: "It is my sincere hope, that following today's verdict Mr Allwood's family can begin to move on with their lives and put this horrendous ordeal behind them.
"I would also like to thank the members of the community who came forward and assisted with this investigation.
"Lothian and Borders Police are committed to tackling violent crime and by working closely with our partners at the Crown Office, ensure that offences of this nature are investigated thoroughly and those responsible are removed from our communities."
Kyle Montgomery found guilty of killing journalist Thomas Allwood
A man who stabbed a journalist to death in West Lothian has been convicted of culpable homicide.
Kyle Montgomery, from Winchburgh, denied murdering 56-year-old Thomas Allwood in Broxburn in June.
A jury at the High Court in Livingston took four-and-a-half hours to find the 24-year-old guilty of the lesser charge.
Sentence was deferred until 20 December at the High Court in Edinburgh for background reports.
Montgomery had said he grabbed a knife to scare off Mr Allwood after claiming he was attacked by him at a house in Broxburn.
He said the killing was an accident and that he did not know the blade had sliced through the victim's chest and severed a major artery during the struggle.
After the attack, Mr Allwood, who was a journalist with the Australian-based INL News Group, was found on Clarkson Road by members of the public.
Police who were called to the scene followed a trail of blood from his body to Montgomery's father house.
They found the knife, still bloodstained, in a cutlery drawer. Montgomery was detained as he returned to the house from a nearby shop.
Mr Allwood was born in Scotland but his family emigrated to Australia when he was a baby and he spent most of his life there.
He was involved in producing a TV show called Fringe Shows Have Talent, to showcase entertainers performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Det Insp Stuart Houston, who led the Lothian and Borders Police investigation, said: "It is my sincere hope, that following today's verdict Mr Allwood's family can begin to move on with their lives and put this horrendous ordeal behind them.
"I would also like to thank the members of the community who came forward and assisted with this investigation.
"Lothian and Borders Police are committed to tackling violent crime and by working closely with our partners at the Crown Office, ensure that offences of this nature are investigated thoroughly and those responsible are removed from our communities."
Killer who stabbed man to death had bloody knife in cutlery drawer
STV 28 November 2012 16:45 GMT
Associated Press/Carolyn Kaster, File - FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2012, file photo, President Barack Obama acknowledges House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio while speaking to reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, as he hosted a meeting of the bipartisan, bicameral leadership of Congress to discuss the deficit and economy. Admnistration officials say President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner met Sunda, Dec. 9, 2012, at the White House to discuss the ongoing negotiations over the impeding "fiscal cliff." Spokesmen for both Obama and Boehner said the two men agreed to not release details of the conversation, but emphasized that the lines of communication remain open. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
Stock market is a wild card in fiscal cliff talks
By By CHARLES BABINGTON | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress and the White House can significantly soften the initial impact of the "fiscal cliff" even if they fail to reach a compromise by Dec. 31. One thing they cannot control, however, is the financial markets' reaction, which possibly could be a panicky sell-off that triggers economic reversals worldwide.
The stock market's unpredictability is perhaps the biggest wild card in the political showdown over the fiscal cliff.
President Barack Obama's re-election gives him a strong negotiating hand, as Republicans are increasingly acknowledging. And some Democrats are willing to let the Dec. 31 deadline pass, because a rash of broad-based tax hikes would pressure Republicans to give more ground in renewed deficit-reduction negotiations.
A chief fear for Obama's supporters, however, is that Wall Street would be so disgusted or dismayed that stocks would plummet before lawmakers could prove their newfound willingness to mitigate the fiscal cliff's harshest measures, including deep, across-the-board spending cuts that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says could significantly damage the nation's military posture. SomeRepublicans believe that fear will temper the president's insistence on a hard bargain this month. Obama and GOP House Speaker John Boehner on Sunday held their first meeting between just the two of them since the election, and spokesmen for both emphasized afterward their lines of communication remain open.
The so-called cliff's recipe of major tax hikes and spending cuts can actually be a gentle slope, because the policy changes would be phased in over time. Washington insiders say Congress and the White House would move quickly in January or February to undo many, but not all, of the tax hikes and spending cuts.
Financial markets, however, respond to emotion as well as to research, reason and promises. If New Year's headlines scream "Negotiations Collapse," an emotional sell-off could threaten the president's hopes for continued economic recovery in his second term, even if Republicans receive most of the blame for the impasse.
"Nobody can predict the markets' reaction," said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.
Some Republicans are surprised that the White House has not made clearer efforts to reassure Wall Street that if the Dec. 31 deadline is breached, the worrisome pile of tax increases and spending cuts would not hit all at once.
A few liberal commentators are making just that case.
"If we go past the so-called fiscal cliff deadlines and all the resulting budget cuts and tax increases come into force, the administration can minimize the damage," Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote last week. "Obama can publicly announce he is delaying any cuts, on the theory thatCongress will eventually vitiate some of them. And he can make sure the bond markets know of his plans well in advance. ... Everyone (especially Wall Street) should calm down."
Some financial bloggers agree. "Although it would be bad to let the spending cuts and tax hikes fully go into effect, if this thing is addressed in early January, things will be okay," wrote Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal.
So far, the stock markets have stayed calm. The S&P 500 index is up 12 percent for the year.
That might be because investors agree that a temporary trip over the cliff wouldn't be too harmful. Chastened lawmakers, the thinking goes, would quickly minimize the economic damage with a deficit-reduction compromise that eluded them in December.
Or, it's possible that investors view the most pessimistic tones surrounding the fiscal cliff talks as posturing that will give way to a last-minute deal. If that is the thinking — and if the Dec. 31 deadline instead is breached — Obama's fear might come to pass: The expectation of a deal might produce a significant decline in stock prices if it doesn't occur.
As bad as that sounds, some liberals think it will be necessary to force many Republicans to drop their opposition to higher tax rates on the wealthy that Obama says are crucial to trimming the deficit.
Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat who says temporarily going over the cliff wouldn't be so bad, noted what happened on Sept. 29, 2008. The House surprised investors by rejecting a proposed bailout of the crisis-stricken financial sector. Republicans strongly opposed the plan despite then-President George W. Bush's support. The Dow plunged 777 points, its largest one-day point drop ever. Four days later the House, shaken by the market reaction, passed a slightly modified bailout bill.
Welch said a similar market meltdown next month, in the event of a fiscal cliff impasse, "is what will force members of Congress eventually to act." Few lawmakers in either party are eager to predict how the stocks and bonds markets would react to a failure to reach a fiscal cliff accord by year's end. "Let's not pretend the markets fully understand the politicians, or the politicians fully understand the markets," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who has served in Congress for 37 years.
How the 'Mayan Apocalypse' came from a New Age magic mushroom trip
The 'prophecy' does not stem from the Mayans at all. Instead, the beliefs come from two New Age books in the Seventies and Eighties, says a British academic.
Jose Arguelles, author of The Mayan Factor (Image: Wikimedia)
The so-called 'Mayan' prophecy actually comes from New Age writers in the Seventies and Eighties (Image: Rex)
People who are expecting the world to end on December 21 - the so-called 'Mayan Apocalypse' - should be in for a pleasant disappointment.
The 'prophecy' does not stem from the Mayans at all - or date from thousands of years ago.
Instead, the beliefs come from two New Age books in the Seventies and Eighties.
The two books predict outcomes as surreal as a 'upgrade' to human consciousness predicted by a spirit from the seventh century. The date itself comes from a prophecy based on a magic mushroom trip.
“December 21st will be just another Friday morning,” said Andrew Wilson, Assistant Head of Social Studies at the University of Derby. “A hippy guru called Jose Arguelles associated the date with the Mayan calendar in a book called The Mayan Factor in 1987. But it's an obsolete form of the calendar, which had not been used since the year 1100AD.”
“He claimed to be channelling various spirits, including the spirit of a Mayan king from the seventh century. He predicted a ‘shift in human consciousness’ - mass enlightenment.”
The actual date of December 21 first appeared in an earlier work - a 1975 book by Terence McKenna, a writer known for his descriptions of “machine elves” seen while under the influence of drugs.
The date appeared in McKenna's ‘Timeline Zero’ prophecy, and was based on McKenna’s own mathematics, the Chinese I Ching and a magic mushroom trip.
McKenna later met Arguelles and the two became, Wilson says, part of a circle of New Age authors who cited each other’s work, lending the ‘prophecy’ an air of believability.
“The significance of December 21 2012 in ‘New Age’ circles emerged from the work of ‘ethnobotanist’ Terence McKenna as he travelled deep into the Amazon in the 1970s,” says Wilson. His calculations of a ‘zero time wave’ suggested the world would go through a large change on December 21.”
“Arguelles, who had a long-held interest in Native American spiritualties, was inspired by McKenna’s work. He popularised the date in connection with the ‘long count calendar’ of the Mayan people in his new-age circles.”
As the belief has evolved, it has become associated with other, wilder predictions - such as the idea that Earth will be hit by a ‘rogue planet’, Nibiru, or swallowed by a black hole.
“There is no central belief,” says Wilson, “It varies from the ideas that Earth’s magnetic poles might shift, to the idea of a ‘galactic council’ visiting Earth. There’s no one, definite idea - it mirrors the New Age beliefs from which it comes.”
“It’s become part of a lot of religious movements. For instance, ‘The Galactic Federation of Light’ believes that ‘Planet X’ will make a close pass by the earth in 2012 – causing a deep transformation of human life on Earth.
“What this and other apocalyptic dates have in common across new religious movements is that they are often predicted to occur within a believer’s lifetime - making their beliefs urgent and important,” said Wilson.
“However, most people who believe in the significance of December 21 2012 have tempered their predictions of an apocalypse to, instead, signifying some significant change in humanity. Whether that is a change in culture or a world-wide event - most believers in an apocalypse won't be preparing for an earthly end but looking forward to an imminent transformation."
“A lot of people look to this story for reassurance - about the financial climate, or even about fears of, for instance, the Large Hadron Collider.”
“What’s been popularised is the dramatic stuff - but I am definitely still doing my Christmas shopping as normal this year.”
Wilson’s paper, ‘From Mushrooms to the Stars’, will be published by Ashgate in 2013.
Georgia details nuke black market investigations
By By DESMOND BUTLER | Associated Press
This June 24, 2012 photo shows the Hotel L Bakuria in Batumo, Georgia, Black Sea coast near the Turkish Border. In April 2012, three men gathered in secret at the hotel to talk about a deal for radioactive material for sale. The Georgian seller offered cesium, a byproduct from nuclear reactors that terrorists can use to make a dirty bomb.But one of the Turkish men made it clear he was after something much more dangerous: Uranium, the material used to make a nuclear bomb. The two Turks and the seller businessman Soslan Oniani, were convicted in September, 2012 in a Georgian court, according to officials, and sentenced to six years in prison each. Despite years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the fight against illicit sale of nuclear contraband, the black market remain active in the countries around the former Soviet Union. (AP Photo by Desmond Butler)
This undated handout photo provided by the Georgia Interior Ministry shows components for four cylinders containing radioactive substances seized in Batumi, Georgia on April 10, 2012. Police, who have been tracking Georgian Businessman Soslan Oniani, for over year, monitored him in a hotel room meeting with two Turskish citizens, trying to sell to sell the cylinders with the materials which included cesium-137 and strontium-90. The two Turks and the seller, Oniani, were convicted were convicted in September, 2012 in a Georgian court, according to officials, and sentenced to six years in prison each.
Associated Press/Georgia Interior Ministry - This undated photo provided by the Georgia Interior Ministry shows part of a seizure of radioactive substances including iridium-192 and europium-152. Police in Kutaisi, Georgia arrested two people involved in the smuggling in February 2011. The investigation led police to track a third man, Soslan Oniani, who would be arrested in April 2012 trying to sell radioactive material to two Turkish men. Despite years of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the fight against the illicit sale of nuclear contraband, the black market remains active in the countries around the former Soviet Union. The radioactive materials, mostly left over from the Cold War, include nuclear bomb-grade uranium and plutonium, and dirty-bomb isotopes like cesium and iridium. (AP Photo/Georgia Interior Ministry)
BATUMI, Georgia (AP) — On the gritty side of this casino resort town near the Turkish border, three men in a hotel suite gathered in secret to talk about a deal for radioactive material.
The Georgian seller offered cesium, a byproduct of nuclear reactors that terrorists can use to arm a dirty bomb with the power to kill. But one of the Turkish men, wearing a suit and casually smoking a cigarette, made clear he was after something even more dangerous: uranium, the material for a nuclear bomb. The would-be buyers agreed to take a photo of the four cylinders and see if their boss in Turkey was interested. They did not know police were watching through a hidden camera. As they got up to leave, the police rushed in and arrested the men, according to Georgian officials, who were present.
The encounter, which took place in April, reflected a fear shared by U.S. and Georgian officials: Despite years of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the fight against the illicit sale of nuclear contraband, the black market remains active in the countries around the former Soviet Union. The radioactive materials, mostly left over from the Cold War, include nuclear bomb-grade uranium and plutonium, and dirty-bomb isotopes like cesium and iridium. The extent of the black market is unknown, but a steady stream of attempted sales of radioactive materials in recent years suggests smugglers have sometimes crossed borders undetected. Since the formation of a special nuclear police unit in 2005 with U.S. help and funding, 15 investigations have been launched in Georgia and dozens of people arrested. Six of the investigations were disclosed publicly for the first time to The Associated Press byGeorgian authorities. Officials with the U.S. government and the International Atomic Energy Agency declined to comment on the individual investigations, but President Barack Obama noted in a speech earlier this year that countries like Georgia and Moldova have seized highly enriched uraniumfrom smugglers. An IAEA official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to comment, said the agency is concerned smuggling is still occurring in Georgia.
Four of the previously undisclosed cases, and a fifth — an arrest in neighboring Turkey announced by officials there — occurred this year. One from last year involved enough cesium-137 to make a deadly dirty bomb, officials said.
Also, Georgian officials see links between two older cases involving highly enriched uranium, which in sufficient quantity can be used to make a nuclear bomb. The AP's interviews with the two imprisoned smugglers in one case suggested that the porous borders and the poverty of the region contributed to the problem. The arrests in the casino resort of Batumi stand out for two reasons: They suggest there are real buyers — many of the other investigations involved stings with undercover police acting as buyers. And they suggest that buyers are interested in material that can be used to make a nuclear weapon. "Real buyers are rare in nuclear smuggling cases, and raise real risks," said nuclear nonproliferation specialist Matthew Bunn, who runs Harvard's Project on Managing the Atom. "They suggest someone is actively seeking to buy material for a clandestine bomb." The request for uranium raises a particularly troubling question.
Mr Wijat's friend Magic Rabbit 
Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken from picture library
The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy
Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine
Britain's former Prime Ministers - Baroness Thatcher and Tony Blair talk as they line up during a formal salute
A sand sculpture of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made by sand artist Sudersan Pattnaik at the Golden Sea beach in Puri, about 65 kilometers from the eastern Indian city of Bhubaneswar (Picture: ASIT KUMARSTRDEL/AFP/Getty Images)
Revellers with posters and bottles of milk and wine to celebrate the death of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Brixton, south London (Picture: REUTERS/Olivia Harris)
Margaret Thatcher with Jeffrey Archer in 1998.
Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron at the Great Briton awards
Margaret Thatcher with her twins, Carol and Mark
Baroness Thatcher on the steps of 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister David Cameron (Picture: Eddie Mulholland)
Floral tributes to Baroness Thatcher are laid on the pavement outside her Chester Square residence in London (Picture: Anthony Upton)
First offender Kyle Montgomery will be sentenced next month for the killing
