h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've read statistics which seem to show that the Wilson government closed down more mines and made more miners redundant than Thatcher ever did. Can anyone please put this into context? Should Wilson be remembered as the person who started to shut down the mining industry, with Thatcher as the one who simply finished the job?

I am at my Mother's in Harrogate and I have just spotted the front of The Harrogate Advertiser.

At the top there is an advert for a feature inside:-

'Tribute to Baroness Thatcher'

The newspaper headline?

3,000 on council housing waiting list.



PP.

I agree that people who didn't experience things won't understand them as well as those that did, however the counterpoint here is that those that were around tend to only remember the parts that affected them. And memory is never as clear as we think it is.

Seen on a wall in Belfast - IRON LADY - RUST IN PEACE

... those that were around tend to only remember the parts that affected them ...

but isn't that the point? Thatcher affected them, affected their lives and their children's future? You can't criticise them for their feelings in reaction to the impacts of Thatcherism upon them ... it is human and shouldn't be ignored or swept under the carpet or passed off as "irrational behaviour".

"And memory is never as clear as we think it is."

True. People I know remember her as a horrible, hateful homophobe that brought in the only anti-homosexual legislation of the 20th Century. That's just their memories being muddled.

Oh.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10201248991293468

"Children are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life.”

The woman made life miserable for millions in this country. If you tell them that doesn't matter because of her good points, and you weren't even there at the time, of course you're going to get a bollocking.

Was there for her full term, never impressed. She stood alone and failed to encourage a successor. The reason we have a shortage of plumbers and fully trained tradesmen is because she destroyed the industrial base. She never finished the job of demolishing the unions, just the major trade unions, and Scargill helped her do that. The whole job was done too viciously and too quickly.

The kid wasn't there, but never claimed he was. He'd basically said that he wanted unbiased facts. Can't fault that surely?

That's not what he said. He said "All we're getting is hype and faded memories."

That's the sort of thing you say about The Beatles, not about the years someone spent on the dole before you were born.

Without a great deal more background on the family we can only speculate on what led up to either of them saying what they did and why the father was upset enough about his son's comment to give him a public bollocking. The kid might have just become fed up with all the press coverage, and I sure can't blame him for that, particularly if he has no experience of the times, or perhaps his father might have gone over the top in excoriating Thatcher in the days since she died and his son got tired of hearing about it.

We don't know what happened to the father during the Thatcher years, but when I was a kid I had plenty of schoolfriends whose parents, whether they were civilians or in the forces, wouldn't have anything to do with Germans or anything remotely connected to Germany because of what had happened to them in the war, and some who had been out east felt the same way about Japan. For them it was still a very raw and open wound, figuratively speaking, and if you have parents of the same generation of mine you might have heard stories.

What makes something like that especially difficult to deal with is that it wasn't like an act of violence by a single person or in the heat of the moment, it was done systematically and with intent by a group. In the case of the war it was the Nazis, a group far removed from the average British citizen, but in the case of Thatcher it was our own government who did all the things that have caused so many people this past week to show such joy at the death of someone in a way I don't recall seeing too many times before, and never for such a prominent British politician. That says something very profound about how Thatcher divided the country and blighted people's lives and communities with her policies, and if that's what happened to the father I honestly can't blame him for letting his emotions get the better of him the way he apparently did.

I think when a kid is being given quite a humiliating public bollocking, the background becomes kind of irrelevant, it's simply poor parenting.

Hear hear, Mr D.

Am I alone in wanting to remind Carol Thatcher she has a brother? An arms-dealing, coup-supporting brother but still a brother. In her interviews she seemed to forget, made it seem like it was all about her.

I don't think you can make that judgement with any certainty Mr Dreadful, not without knowing a lot more about it. I'm not going to criticise either of them.

I really do think I can. There is no justification I can think of for treating a kid like that, especially not in public. So what if the dad had had a raw deal under Thatcher? A lot of people did and very likely don't dismiss their sons' opinions as 'pissy little comments' just because they're not conforming to their own view of the world.

You're making your judgement based on a description by a third party of of a brief, minuscule even, moment in two peoples' lives. None of us know what led up to it or what the relationship between father son has been these past however many years since the kid was born. It may be the first time the father has ever done anything like that and be out of character, it may not, I don't know so I'm not going to comment on his parenting skills.

One of the first rules of command that I was taught is that you NEVER correct others in public!

It only embarrasses them and produces resentment.

I remember one time, when I was a very young man, I had an arrogant European checking my drawing. He marked several things wrong that were actually correct. They were new standards that he was not familiar with. Rather than patiently explaining our differences, I launched into a tirade about how correct I was. He calmly replied 'maybe I don't sign your drawing'.

At that moment I realized that it was far more important to get my way than to make others admit that I was right. In hindsight one leads to the other anyway


F S

"One of the first rules of command that I was taught is that you NEVER correct others in public!"

Something Thatcher never learned, If she hadn't humiliated some of her most loyal cabinet ministers the rest of us would have had to endure at least two more years of her.

>> there was a dad having a go at his teenage son. Really berating him for posting a "pissy little comment" on the dad's Facebook page. <<

The son posted something on the fathers Facebook page opposing the fathers view (according to Pastey's account). That was the issue. As I mentioned that indicates an intergenerational power struggle between father and son.

Blimey. Seriously. Try not to lose much sleep over it, all