Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Not all Labour voters hated her TANKER. Tony Blair is attending her funeral as a mark of respect.

harry their are far to many people in the uk it is full
the schools are struggling to teach because they can not speak english
the nhs is at breaking point
to want to control immigration is not RACIST just common sense

db myself i do not care my posts are just giving the other side of the story .

MPs can claim up to £3,750 on expenses to fly home to pay tribute to Baroness Thatcher in the Commons
All 650 MPs told they can receive up to £3,750 after Parliament was recalled
Labour MPs say debate could have been delayed until next week


disabled people to get cuts to their benefits and then above makes me feel sick
WE ARE ALL IN IT TOGETHER YOU CAN NOT MAKE IT UP

harry db do you think this just

You've got a serious chip on your shoulder imo gf. As CC said a while back and I agree, your investment/chart threads are excellent. Best to stick to what you are good at, imo.

And your a clever bustard harry. Watch what you say to me in future. Get your facts right before opening your big gob.

gf . they are not worth answering they never answer a question.

The 'poll tax' (and that wasn't its name) was an excellent idea. Why should one old woman living by herself pay as much as a house with 4, 5 or more wage earners, especially when that may also include a few more children. The bigger household consumes far more local services than the single person. Its real problem was that Thatcher did not sell the policy to the public in advance.

gold what ae your views on BP would like your views i have over 45000 of them

The travel cost of MPs is £2,437,500.

Consider this waste in light of the situation - many people are jobless, unlike Mr CAMERON.

Is Mr Cameron happy to pay from his own salary?

hay so why did she do a U TURN ON THE POLL TAX

AHOJ familys struggling to pay for food and the you see that MPs greed it makes me feel sick

"...Watch what you say to me in future.".....or what? This is a discussion board. Deal with it.

Isn't it in the UKIP manifesto that they intend to double or triple MP's salaries and expenses allowance, Tanker?

The travel cost is UP TO that figure. Many will not be claiming and most claiming less.

Harry,

I'd be very careful. Goldfinger's just as likely to set his mate Willie Eckerslike from the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club onto you if you carry on like that.

"...Watch what you say to me in future."

I see 'goldgrabber' is getting delusions of grandeur. He is becoming borderline psychotic. He is likely to claim to be Napoleon at any minute.

To blame Margaret Thatcher for today's problems is to misunderstand history

The real story: Manufacturing rose under Thatcher and fewer mines shut in the 1980s than the 1970s

While many of her reforms fortunately live on, she can be held responsible neither for the state of today’s manufacturing sector, nor for the financial crisis. To claim otherwise is to misunderstand history, her own philosophy and the nature of our present problems.

She inherited a basket case of an economy, crippled by obsolete state-owned firms, a legacy of decades of poor policies. Management was insular and demoralised, the workforce used as pawns by militant union leaders who would call strikes at every opportunity, customers treated like dirt and production techniques stuck in the past.

Productivity was appalling, overmanning the norm and the quality of UK-made goods notoriously poor. Britain was sclerotic, anti-entrepreneurial and anti-innovation, often specialising in industries with no long-term future.

Yet it is a little-known fact that manufacturing output actually went up during her time in office, despite the necessary liquidation of so many unviable plants. Even the uncomfortably high pound, which shot up as a result of North Sea oil, wasn’t enough to throttle the recovery.

British factories boosted their output by 7.5pc between the second quarter of 1979 and the third quarter of 1990, when she left Downing Street, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Output had grown another 4.9pc by the start of 1997, when the Tories were booted out. Given the bitterness of the 1980s’ recession, caused by the desperate need to wring out extreme levels of inflation from the system by using high interest rates, it shows just how effective her supply-side reforms turned out to be.

The real decline happened under Labour: in the second quarter of 2010, when Gordon Brown left office, the output of UK factories was fractionally lower than it was when Thatcher took her last, tearful ride in that ministerial Jaguar. It was significantly lower than when John Major left. Total industrial production including coal rose even more substantially under Thatcher than just manufacturing, thanks to North Sea oil. Far more miners lost their jobs, and far more mines were shut, in the 1960s and 1970s than during Thatcher’s time in office. Britain is suffering from a bout of collective amnesia.

Today’s ultra-efficient car industry, and its record exports, is a direct product of the Thatcherite revolution. Any government would eventually have had to tackle unproductive or loss-making industries, and manufacturing as a share of GDP has collapsed in all wealthy economies. Thatcher simply got the blame; it would have been more damaging to keep zombie firms alive, and in the absence of the Thatcherite medicine, we would have ended up with a far smaller economy and even less of a factory base. It is preposterous to claim that she actually enjoyed shutting factories or mines, or that she hated industry. Of course she didn’t; but there was never any genuine choice between preserving unviable mines or low-skilled manufacturing jobs, or growing the financial and professional services sector of the economy. The former would have vanished anyway; the latter would have ended up being provided abroad.

It is equally wrong to claim that her reforms were the root cause of the present financial crisis. Most of her changes still make sense today, and are incorrectly blamed for problems that have nothing to do with her, but were caused by a pre-Thatcherite philosophy that took hold many years after she left office. She was right to slash income tax, to repeal capital controls and to shake up the City of London (LSE: CIN.L - news) with Big Bang. Most of her reforms to retail banking, including allowing banks and building societies to compete with one another, were spot-on.

LOL. Did Napoleon get a fancy funeral?

Napoleon had a huge funeral, bigger than anything seen ever in the UK.