Remembering the Thatcher years, a BBC video to mark the former PM's 85th birthday

Comments

[Richard Drake]

Remembering the Thatcher years and the optimism that filled each day back then only leaves me miserable now. It was a particularly cruel false dawn. Today when I walk out of my house to see my neighbourhood being steadily colonised by the middle east I can't help thinking what it was all for. A moderately happy birthday Lady Thatcher.

[Sally Roberts]

Well I wish the Great Lady a VERY Happy Birthday!

[Ryan]

Happy birthday to the finest peacetime Prime Minister of the 20th Century. Many happy returns Lady Thatcher.

[Tom Greeves]

Many happy returns to the best Prime Minister ever.

[JCS]

I hope the lady has a very happy birthday but I am afraid she was not a very good Prime Minister. She never managed to get control of inflation or interest rates, inflation still being in double figures when she left office and of course unemployment was always high throughout her time in number ten. I also think she divided the country and brought about much of the social problems we have today by making people more selfish and materialistic than they were before she came to power.She changed the character of the nation and not for the better. People should resist the urge to look back with rose tinted glasses.

[Martin Marprelate- A Man in the Street!]

Like Sally Roberts above I too wish a very Happy Birthday to Lady Thatcher. Would that we had a "Thatcher" leading us now!

[David J]

A very Happy Birthday to Lady Thatcher - our finest peacetime Prime Minister.

[robert]

Margaret Thatcher a true patriot and a fine Prime Minister. Happy Birthday.

[Martin Day]

Margaret H Thatcher is an evil witch. Still alive after all the pain and deaths she caused, supporting Pinochet's regime - who killed hundreds of thousands of young left-wing students. Never forgive, never forget.

[Martin Marprelate- A Man in the Street!]

Of course Martin Day, Labour are all plaster saints who have never been complicit in backing regimes such as that of the "Black Hitler" Robert Mugabe who is culpable of crimes against humanity and genocide in his own country? God alone knowns how many people he had had killed or let die by his callous indifference such as during the Cholera epidemic a few years ago.

Like all human beings, Lady Thatcher had her faults and her qualities. History will judge her against each. God will judge, as he will all of us, you, me, Thatcher, Mugabe, after we die and will called upon for an account of our stewardship

[dorsetdumpling]

A very, very happy birthday to our greatest peace time Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher. How said that Labour supporters such as Martin Day cannot express their views without resorting to use of selective memory. May we have a reminder of the many ways Labour in recent years have been complicit in backing very dubious regimes?

[jack c]

Banquo's Ghost: Of course any support of Mugabe is disgusting. The Blair government looked favourably on the Mugabe regime until the 2000 land reform in Zimbabwe. After this they changed their stance. As far as I know Thatcher has never backed down from her support of Pinochet. That is the difference.

[Benjamin]

"The Blair government looked favourably on the Mugabe regime until the 2000 land reform in Zimbabwe."

Which means that it looked favourably on a man who had alread, killed more than 2000 civilians in Matabeleland in the early eighties in the space of six weeks. Most of the dead were killed in public executions involving between 1 - 12 people simultaneously. That was incomparably worse than anything that took place in apartheid S.A. By contrast at Sharpeville only 69 people were killed, and most of them not in cold blood. One thing which everyone in Africa knew but which foreign liberals were entirely ignorant of, was that NOBODY, treats Africans worse than they do themselves. It was the first thing that I realised when I went there. Africans themselves know that, which partially explained why they flooded into apartheid SA at every opportunity and at great personal risk.

Often makes we wonder why there was so much selective condemnation of South Africa. Granted blacks were not permitted to own land outside designated areas and were excluded from the political system, deprived of various other rights, subjected to rough justice etc etc. yet comparatively few people were directly killed by way of the system itself unlike in many African countries and Africans had it much better there than almost anywhere else in the continent.

..... ah wait! Of course – the South Africans were white! Silly me. I forgot, only whites are racists. Same reason why the Israelis get such attention while non-whites can continue slaughtering away in peace.