You don't find many with that level of courage and determination. She'll be missed.

Yep.

I feel neither disrespect nor respect

Great politician, terrible economist.
It proves a point though, you can't run the UK economy like your dad run his corner shop, and taking advice from an American actor on monetary policy was a recipe for disaster.
Sadly there was nobody strong enough within the Conservative Party to walk alongside her politically and those that dare question her were dealt with swiftly and decisively.
I think former Labour Leader John Smith said of his Mrs Thatchers years that 'history will not judge her kindly' and looking back I think he was probably right.
Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher#Sourced

Second best British Prime Minister of the 20th century.

@Nigee: I don't know what your smoking, but English GDP doubled while she was Prime Minister, if that is considered failed economics, what economic policy isn't a failure?

China and India are the only two countries that presently have economic growth that could match Britain's during the 1980s. So I guess China and India are failing economically right now.

Forgive me, my previous comment was wrong, GDP didn't double, it tripled.

English GDP 1978: 325.2 Billion
English GDP 1990: 1 trillion

Fasces - is that adjusted to inflation?

A great lady, and a great leader. She will be missed.

Probably not, its GDP of the United Kingdom according to google.

GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power:
1980: 8366.83
1991: 16580.07

So even if we use GDP, adjusted for population growth, inflation and purchasing power, she still doubled Britain GDP.

Not as impressive as my original post, but still hardly failed economics.

Depends if you consider GDP to be a good measure of economic success.

There are many things of which GDP is not a good measure, but it would be difficult to argue that economic success is one of them.

What I mean is that she doubled GDP at the expense of many people living in appalling conditions, as well as causing civil unrest. A poor yet harmonious society is arguably more of a success than a rich and broken society.

It sounds like you're arguing that she was an economic success with serious human rights and civil liberties violations. At least, I'm pretty sure you'll have more success arguing it that way than saying that she was an economic failure.

I, for one, will not mourn her, having considered assassination in the 80s.
She destroyed any form of social cohesion we may have hoped to achieve. She broke the British society apart. If England was once Blighty, she was the blight who destroyed it.
Rest In Purgatory, ma'am

If she was so bad why did you reelect her all the time

trolololol

Oh, balderdash.

One woman didn't do that. What did that was opening up your borders.

If the average person is twice as rich as they were 10 years ago, I am willing to bet that a majority of the poor are significantly richer as well. Especially consider we all know (given how much politicians talk about it) that income equality was much better during the 80s then it is today. I can't find the stat for Britain, but for America in 1991 the 1% had 13% of the after tax income in the country, compared to the 24% today. Assuming Britain is more equitable then America (because it probably is), then for GDP to double, a majority of that wealth gain would have to come from the middle and lower classes.

Anti-thatchers first claim that she made the country poorer, when the actually statistics are thrown at them, they say she was bad for the poor, again when the statistics are given to them they talk about civil unrest and breaking society. Unfortunately there are no statistics that measure the merit of that argument.

All I can say to that though, was if she was as unpopular as people make her out to be, she probably would have lost an election, rather then won 4 straight majorities governments.

Please note, I agree that her popularity is insignificant when judging how valid her actions are. I'm just refuting the claim that she was unpopular.

A great leader who, at least temporarily, halted Britain's slide into the status of a third-tier world power. She will be missed, but she was very old and had been sick for a long time, so this was probably a relief to her. I just wish she had died while I was studying abroad. Bitter leftwingers are gonna throw some awesome parties in the next few days.

I'm also seriously thinking of muting Timur. Call me old-fashioned, but assassinating leaders who you happen to disagree with politically is never acceptable. What a nutcase if his claim is true, which I doubt.

Are you sure Invictus? I would say it's a very patriotic thing to do, if you're the kind of person who believes in Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience".

@Fasces,
The linked paper would disagree with your hypothesis that salaries for the poor grew during the 1980s. The bottom 5 and 10th percentiles were, according to figure 2.4 (page 9) regressing ever year from 1978 to 1990, and the bottom quartile were stagnant.

http://www.econ.umn.edu/~fperri/papers/uk2.pdf

Can't vouch for the paper. It was just the first thing that came up on my google search that had a .edu or .gov domain.

If you really believe that Thatcher was a dictator worthy of tyrannicide, SYnapse, then you're so far divorced from reality that it's not worth talking to you. In your own way, you're as delusional as the Tea Partiers who throw out the Jefferson quote about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants because they don't like Obamacare.

I don't but if he truly believed it then he would have a civic duty to assassinate her.

John Hinckley truly believed Jodie Foster would fall in love with him if he killed Reagan. Just because someone believes something doesn't make it true or right.

Yes, but that is why insanity is a defence to murder.

We are digressing. Your point "Call me old-fashioned, but assassinating leaders who you happen to disagree with politically is never acceptable" is fundamentally wrong. I don't want to Godwin this conversation, but, well, you know.

It's not wrong. If a leader is oppressing people along the lines of an Assad or Hussein or Mao or the Shah or name-your-Latin-American-caudillo then that's a different issue and a right to revolution may exist. But killing Thatcher because she's a Tory and you're some kind of leftie isn't a legitimate excuse. It saddens me that you don't see this as self-evident.