Monday 9 May 2011

WE IN SCOTLAND WILL CONTRIBUTE TO HER IN ENGLAND'S STATE FUNERAL

According to The Mail on Sunday (OK 'niff said) the Westminster government has agreed to meet the full cost of a state funeral for Mrs Thatcher.

The paper announced that it will take place at St Paul’s Cathedral, at her own request. (Imagine being so self important as to ASK for a state funeral). Apparently it has not yet been decided if she will lie in state in Westminster Hall.

This means that a woman who destroyed the fabric of our society by encouraging greed and denying the existence of that very society (presumably because she had no part in it), tearing communities apart, wrecking the industrial base of the country, concentrating all the UK’s talents in the finance and insurance industry (great idea with hindsight, eh Maggie?) and setting the path for the rich getting obscenely more rich, and the poor getting third world poorer, will be honoured in the same way as Winston Churchill (whom she liked to pretend she knew), Nelson, Wellington, Palmerston and Gladstone.

Even the Queen Mother was not accorded a state funeral.

What a joke!

Plans are well afoot, it would seem, as Thatcher is getting more and more frail. Organization is in the hands of Malcolm Ross, former Master of the Royal Household (as opposed to mistress of it, which was the job of Mrs Parker-Bowles). He apparently organized the funerals of Margaret and the Queen Mother so he's good at it.

According to the paper the reason that Thatcher is to have money we don't have lavished upon her is that she reversed Britain’s post war decline (really?); she was a woman (really?) and she won three elections (against Neil Kinnock? I could ahve done that), and that she won the Falklands War (although it was only a conflict at the time, despite the fact that she thought it put her on the same level as Winston)

So... given the situation we are currently in, and were in during most of her premiership, I’m disinclined to think much of the first reason; the fact she’s a woman is a bit loose, allowing another 30 million or so people to apply; winning three elections also puts Blair in the frame, and as far as the war is concerned, I don’t remember seeing her in the Falklands until it was all over, so I’m wondering how she managed to win it. I do remember that she claimed full credit for sinking the Belgrano ... and the taking of 323 young lives. Well done Mrs T, you must be proud.

I hope that the government has considered the security threat that this funeral will pose; and the fact that it will give people all over the country the opportunity to demonstrate...unless of course, like at the Royal wedding, the police decide in conjunction with the palace, that peaceful demonstration will be illegal.

One thing I'm glad about. Clearly if we can afford another extravaganza like the wedding, we must have more of less paid off the deficit, so hopefully VAT and petrol duty will come down in the next few weeks.

32 comments:

  1. Maggie stole my free milkMay 10, 2011 12:02 am

    Frankie Boyle's idea for Maggie was quite good.
    Give every Scot a spade so we could all start digging now and so be able to hand her over personally to Satan.

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  2. LOL LOL LOL

    He probably won't want her... Imagine the mess she would make of Hell!

    She might make it into Britain...after all she managed the other way round well enough!

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  3. Lady Thatcher contributed to her country, and she deserves a state funeral.

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  4. A State funeral in England, a Public Holiday in Scotland; that seems fair to me.

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  5. So did a lot of other people Dean: soldiers, businessmen, doctors, nurses, philosophers, educators, volunteers, indeed even members of the royal family and they don't get state funerals.

    The reasons for her elevation to head of state status are pathetic:

    She was a woman: big deal, women have done many other, much more difficult jobs and there had been other female premiers in other countries a little less backward;

    She won three general elections, so what? Her own party ditched her in the end, because she was a liability;

    She won the Falklands “war”: As I said, she didn’t win it, she didn’t battle plan. The soldiers won it. The one thing that she boasted was that she made the controversial decision to sink a ship that was sailing away from the “exclusion zone”. In short she shot a man in the back. A cowardly thing to do, killing 300+ men, because their kill figures were better than ours, and that put us in the lead. If we are proud of that heaven help us;

    She changed the country, yeah, for the worse. Yes, she halted the malaise that was 1970s’ Britain where people were so miserable about their lives and jobs that they went on strike because the toilet paper wasn’t soft and the soap was unkind to their hands, and the management was too inept to deal with it. But she didn’t do it by sorting the underlying problems. No, she did it by making the laws tighter and tighter, good at first, then becoming less and less good, until she squeezed the life out of trade unions. She put millions of people out of work and then changed them to “sick” because the figures were an embarrassment to her. She used Scotland’s oil money to finance this fest of sickness. She replaced “real men’s” jobs with call centre work that they couldn’t do. She hated Europe but was so stupid that she signed up to everything that Mitterrand and Kohl wanted. She left a divided country, which as I said above, even the Tory party couldn’t stand, and so THEY did our job for us and dumped her.

    I’ve never actually met anyone who had a good word to say about her, and that includes Tories. I haven’t met the Noble baron Forsyth, but even he laughed with Malcolm Rifkind at her “We in Scotland” condescension to us.

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  6. I'd go with the public holiday in Scotland Conan.

    And if the Tories want to pay for her "lying in state" let them. (They will need 3/4 of the army to stop the riots.) I'd damned if I see why I should help pay for her planting.

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  7. Mmm Maggies time in power.

    Failed to defend the Falkands properly resulting in thousands of deaths. At least Lord Carrington had the honour to resign in disgrace.
    Used our oil money to close down the mines, shut down Scottish industry and pay us dole money.
    Oh and build up the SE of England's 'finance hub' ( spiv city' at Canary Wharf etc.
    Sold off our major assets like power, steel and telecoms companies. Mostly owned by foreigners now who charge us what they like as we have no alternative but to pay up.

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  8. Hugh:

    Mr Carrington is a gentleman. Mrs Thatcher was not the female equivalent.

    Scotland should own all electricity, gas, and water...and come to that public transport. I'm sick of things being run for the profit of the management, and not for the benefit of the customer.

    Gas prices about to go up again, just when, counter to all the b*****d promised pre-election, they are reducing winter fuel payments at a time when the weather seems to be getting colder and the winters more severe.

    Inflation rises only should be allowed and pensioners’ payment reinstated.

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  9. Anyone who dares to riot at her state funeral should be immediately arrested. A comprehensive crack down on such scum.

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  10. Riot, yes.

    Anyone who riots anywhere is breaking the law.

    But loud peaceful protest? Why not?

    Or should we just cover how we collectively feel about her?

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  11. Tris.

    Oh dear Tris that's two in a row now. Two dinosaurs from the past. First it was Lord creepy Forsyth and now Thatcher! Where are you digging they relics up from?

    When Thatcher finally kicks the bucket I will happily pay for the vault and cement and reinforce concrete just to make sure this creepy crawly never surfaces again.

    She might deserve a state funeral in the minds of some but no way is this decision universally accepted.

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  12. Interesting! Has it already been announced that a state funeral for Mrs. thatcher will be held? I'm thinking that a state funeral in Britain requires an act of Parliament, as an act of Congress is required in the US.

    State funerals are also rare in the US. Except for a few other VERY prominent individuals, US state funerals are reserved for Presidents, whose families want them. Two very prominent presidents who didn't have state funerals were George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In early American history, state funerals were never held, since this was considered to be too much in the British tradition. And when FDR died in 1945, the pomp and ceremony of a state funeral was considered inappropriate in wartime. Only a relatively small service was held for FDR in the East Room of the White House.

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  13. "We are all in it together"??

    Fancy asking for a state funeral!

    And we thought security for the royal wedding was expensive! They will need hundreds of guards round the old trout's coffin to prevent someone painting a swasticka on it!

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  14. I am sure a few slurry spreaders could drive past in respect good for the daises.

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  15. The old shite should be buried at sea a la Bin Laden.

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  16. Garlic and a stake through the heart Allan... that's all we need!

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  17. Well Danny, I take my information from the Daily Mail, which means that it comes with a health warning "The information contained within may or may not have any foundation in truth, may cause the skin on the top of your lip to become permanently wrinkled and your eyes to narrow, and eventually a heart attack."

    It may well be that an Act would be required, but I think it can be done here by royal prerogative, which means the Queen says it will happen, so it happens.

    If it did need an Act, then it would be a very quick one, or possibly even a Privy Council decision, I'm not sure. It doesn't happen that often.

    It never occurred to me that presidents of America go through all this daft rigmarole. But apparently Thatcher requested it. Stuck up, self important old bitch. However once again, I repeat that this was sourced from the Daily Mail.

    What Thatcher did do (and what makes me think she did ask for this) was get the Queen to give Dennis (her now dead husband) an hereditary knighthood, something that had been in abeyance for decades. He got this for being married to her, and whilst I admit that must have been a miserable experience, I hardly think it was worth a knighthood, never mind an hereditary one. (Then only people who get hereditary titles now are the royals, and those who are in the line of succession to them. No new ones are created...except for Dennis and the royals.)

    And then for nothing in particular, except being a successful businessman, racist and drunk.

    It does mean that her worthless, stupid, criminal son gets to call himself sir Mark...something that with his lack of intellect, charm, ability and just about anything else, he would never have achieved for himself in 5 billion years.

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  18. Hmmm. I hope Libya's over then Munguin, because they will need these people back here.

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  19. LOL CH.... Glad that's not my fence.

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  20. KBW:

    Do you not think that Bin Laden would object to keeping company with a pig.

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  21. Ironically, Baroness Thatcher is highly regarded in the USA. Americans, generally with no knowledge of her domestic policies in Britain, remember her as a cold warrior who, hand in hand with Ronald Reagan, defeated the "Evil Empire." (That's our story, and we're sticking to it...LOL.)

    Although in ill health, she attended Reagan's state funeral in 2004, and gave a moving pre-recorded eulogy. She was seated by Mikhail Gorbachev during the service at Washington Cathedral. (He kept a brave face as the various speakers talked about Reagan "winning" the Cold War.)

    After the funeral service in Washington, she boarded the plane with Nancy Reagan and other major dignitaries, and made the long six hour flight to California to attend the burial ceremony.

    She and Ronnie were tight. And that was one fantastic state funeral, historically speaking. Once again, ironically, if Britain didn't give her a state funeral, the Americans probably would. ;-)

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  22. Danny,

    She did work on the international stage to help bring down the USSR. Their two foreign policies where built on the same stuff. I like that.

    But her domestic policies are a different matter entirely. All I will say is that her foreign policy is a brilliant chapter in British and western history.

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  23. May the bitch rot and her cadaver's funeral be paid out of her own estate's expense.

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  24. Dean,

    And I'm reminded of Churchill, who is revered in America, apart from his long and checkered political career in Britain, for the wartime alliance and personal relationship with FDR.

    It doesn't hurt that his mother was American either I suspect. His maternal parentage was commemorated during his state funeral by the playing of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

    BTW, FDR enjoyed driving his car, equipped with hand controls, around his Hyde Park estate. He liked to drive around the large estate at considerable speed on the narrow roads high above the Hudson River. One time, Churchill was asked when, during World War II, did he feel that he was in the most personal danger. He replied that it was while driving with FDR at Hyde Park. :-)

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  25. Danny:

    It's interesting how "leaders" of countries may be highly regarded abroad and hated with passion at home.

    Gorbachev is such an example. I think he was well regarded as a sensible reformer in the West, but he was disliked in the USSR and humiliated by the madman Yeltsin.

    I suppose if you don’t have to live under the jackboot of right of the Tory Party, you might have thought a deal more of her than if you had had your country stripped of its economic base by her and you oil stolen to pay dole money.

    The heading, by the way, relates to her attempts to sound as if she had some connection with Scotland. She used to come here occasionally and when she did she would talk about “we in Scotland”

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  26. Well, David, "in these straitened times" for "hard working British families", "up and down the country","on the door step", the rich bitch should fork out. I completely agree.

    How's Japan, btw?

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  27. Tris....In the "interesting history" category, I found this picture taken in the Washington Cathedral at Reagan's state funeral service. Gorbachev seems genuinely happy to see the "Iron Lady"....LOL.

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Mulroney_Thatcher_and_Gorbachev_at_Reagan%27s_funeral.jpg

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  28. PS...Ex-Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney too.

    This picture in the Capitol Rotunda during the Lying in State, also got a lot of play in the states.

    http://www.presidentsrus.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/reagan-coffin-thatcher.jpg

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  29. Dean said..

    All I will say is that her foreign policy is a brilliant chapter in British and western history.

    Supported Botha and apartheid in South Africa.
    Supported mass murderer Pinochet
    Supported Yvonne Fletchers killers and sent them back to Libya
    Sent our troops in Kwuait and Iraq final demands for their poll tax as they lay in their foxholes.
    Failed to protect the Falklands resulting in a thousand deaths to retake them.
    Supported any treaties to hand power over to Europe.
    Etc

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  30. Danny, I think the three of them seemed to find some measure of understanding and although the two big players were the USSR and USA, I guess that Mrs T played some sort of role, even if it was making the coffee.

    I think however, that the hero in all of this was Gorby. If it hadn’t been for the drunken fool that ousted him, the whole business of transforming the Soviet Union into a modern society would have been much smoother

    Gorby probably fancied Thatch. Reagan clearly did, and Mitterrand admitted that he found her mouth appealing (yeuch). Kohl absolutely hated her and did his best to escape her on every occasion.

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  31. Bang on Hugh. She was none to bright about most of the foreign policy, despite being involved in the end of the Soviet Union.

    As I said, I think that was good luck that she was there, and that all the blokes involved fell for her womanly charms....

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