Margaret Thatcher....

[passedit]

Margaret Thatcher dead: Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead tops download charts after campaign by late PM's critics
9 Apr 2013 20:03

The Judy Garland version of the Wizard of Oz song has raced to number 1 on the Amazon charts and number 2 with iTunes users

Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead has soared to the top of the download charts after an online campaign by Margaret Thatcher's critics.

The Judy Garland version of the Wizard of Oz song tonight raced to number 1 on the Amazon charts and number 2 on the iTunes charts.

While many mourned the former Prime Minister who died aged 87 yesterday, many others saw her death as a cause for celebration.

The latest figures from the Official Charts Company - which compiles sales from all online and high street retailers - were released yesterday.

Those showed Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead had reached number 54 within 12 hours of the death of Baroness Thatcher being announced.

Given its continuing success with users of Amazon and iTunes, two of the biggest online music stores, the song is expected to have climbed much higher when sales figures are updated.

The Official Charts Company midweek sales chart will be released tomorrow and then on Sunday evening the traditional top 40 chart will be revealed.

In the 1939 musical Dorothy, played by Garland, sings the song with the Munchkins and Glinda the Good Witch after the death of the Wicked Witch of the East.



There had been some speculation that the track might be too short to qualify at just 51 seconds, but chart bosses say it is eligible.

In 2007 the track The Ladies Bras by Wisbey made the chart despite lasting just 36 seconds.

But Garland's version is not the only one to be selling: A version by Ella Fitzgerald is at 146 and one by the Munchkins is at 183.

A spokesman for the Official Singles Chart told the Mirror today: "If the sales of all three were combined, the song would be in 40th place today, with almost 2,500 sales."

The Facebook group campaigning for Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead to hit the top of the charts now has over 4,000 members

There had not been a post for three months until the news broke this morning that the former Prime Minister had died.

The divisive former PM's death has also led to a burst of sales for Elvis Costello's track about Baroness Thatcher - tr**p The Dirt Down.

The song, from his 1989 album Spike, was at number 85 in the iTunes chart this afternoon.

Respect MP George Galloway referred to the track in a message on Twitter in the wake of her death.

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[theskull1]

Seems to me that we're in for the mother of all street parties here, when the likes of Paisley and Adams shuffle off this mortal coil, now that the precedent has been established. We'll probably end up with another quango to sort it all out, The Street Party Commission

That would be a bit too close to home IMO

[LeoMc]

Edit, antidote to Orwellian shit like this


Parliament recalled so a few patsies can line up to tell the world what a great person she was.

War is Peace

So the Respect MP doesn't want to show respect

[johnneycool]

Respect has to be earned Leo and Thatcher wasn't overly concerned about respecting people herself so its good enough for her.

I was never so sure about the street partying but it has brought into focus the ill she brought upon a lot of people which may have been airbrushed out of history if the media had been given a free hand to report as they say fit.

I think it was Johnny Vegas on Ryan Tubridy the other morning talking about how she devastated communities and left nothing to replace these industries she was set on destroying and remembers his father dragging a piece of scrap metal for miles to a scrap yard to get a few quid, its no wonder she's a hate figure to so many in England let alone the shoot to kill policy, two faced dealings with the hunger strikers and what not over here.

On a similar vein it was either Shirley Williams or Ken Livingstone on Newsnight pointed out that in the light of George Osbournes comments on the Philpotts the previous week that indirectly Thatcher was the creator of the benefits culture when you create an economy heavily reliant on the finance sector (coupled with Scottish Oil) then you are accepting of having 2 to 3 million unemployed as a consequence.

I thought that was a very valid point not being discussed about her 'legacy'.

[magpie seanie]

Seems to me that we're in for the mother of all street parties here, when the likes of Paisley and Adams shuffle off this mortal coil, now that the precedent has been established. We'll probably end up with another quango to sort it all out, The Street Party Commission

They wouldn't be in the same league as Thatcher for most people I'd imagine.

[glens abu]

WHEN Mark Thatcher went missing in the Sahara while taking part in an international motor race in January 1982, his ashen-faced mother, upset and distressed, appeared on television close to breaking down. She prayed to God that Mark wouldn’t die, that he would be rescued.

Six months earlier, Rosaleen Sands appeared on television, interviewed in the car park of Long Kesh, and prayed for her son, Bobby, and asked Margaret Thatcher to compromise and resolve the hunger strike. We all know how Thatcher answered, and the mountain of suffering that nationalists in the North experienced under her premiership.

Ironically, this is the day, 32 years ago, that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Thatcher’s mantra to republicans before that was: “‘How can I talk to you, you don’t have a mandate.” But when Bobby got elected (with almost 10,000 more votes than Thatcher got in her constituency!), the British Prime Minister rushed through an amendment to the Representation of the People Act to prevent any other prisoner being elected in his place.

When Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and I were elected to the Assembly in 1982, Thatcher issued exclusion orders against us, banning us from entering Britain on pain of a five-year prison sentence. My ban lasted 13 years. In 1988, she introduced the Broadcasting Act banning Sinn Féin elected representatives from being interviewed on radio and television. Yes, she was the ‘Queen of Democracy’ for sure.

I remember the 10 men who died on hunger strike but also women and children her forces killed with impunity and immunity, people like:-

•  14-year-old Julie Livingstone, shot dead by the British Army the day Francis Hughes died in jail;

•  11-year-old Carol Ann Kelly, shot dead a week later while getting milk for a neighbour;

•  And on the morning of Joe McDonnell’s death in jail, my childhood friend, Nora McCabe, a mother of three, shot dead seconds after going to buy a packet of cigarettes to calm her nerves.

These are just some of the names. The list runs to hundreds when we add to it those killed by loyalist groups that were rearmed and reorganised by British Military Intelligence, which reported to Prime Minister Thatcher until her resignation.

Thatcher sanctioned the use of supergrass trials which completely undermined the justice system. She authorised the shoot-to-kill policy and her colleagues subsequently undermined the attempt by Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker to get to the truth. She authorised the attacks on republican funerals and created an atmosphere of hatred and bitterness which ultimately led to the attempt on her life by the IRA in the Brighton bombing in 1984.

Of course, she also destroyed proud working-class communities in Britain with her social and economic policies. And over lunch one Sunday she ordered the sinking of the Argentinian vessel Belgrano during the Malvinas/Falklands War even though it was outside the 200-mile exclusion zone and was sailing away from the area of conflict. More than 323 sailors died, many of them teenage cadets.

When Carol Thatcher, Margaret’s journalist daughter, travelled to the Malvinas/Falklands and Argentina to make a documentary on the 25th anniversary, one woman whose son died on the Belgrano said to her: “I never saw him again because your mother killed him.”

In 1986, she and US President Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya, which took the lives of over 130 civilians.

Some have argued that Thatcher stood up to the unionists when she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985 and should be given credit. But her motives were two-fold: she expected extradition to be made easier and increased security collaboration in the fight against republicanism. She was, indeed, also responding to the warnings from then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald that something needed to be done to halt the electoral rise of Sinn Féin.

In reality, it was the suffering and determination of the Northern nationalist community which forced change.

When Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979 we know that on her desk was a secret assessment of the IRA by the British Army’s Brigadier James Glover, commander of land forces in the North. He said the IRA would continue with its war until there was an acceptable political settlement.

He rejected the official propaganda line which was the basis for the treatment of the men in the H-Blocks and the women in Armagh Jail. He said that IRA Volunteers were not criminals but were talented and dedicated.

Thatcher put my community through hell and her policies unnecessarily protracted the conflict. When it came to a political agreement on Good Friday 1998, the prisoners in the H-Blocks were given early release (an ‘amnesty’) which was recognition that the British knew they were political prisoners all along.

I was in jail (again as a result of her dirty war and use of agents provocateurs) when she resigned in 1990. One newspaper told this story:

“‘The bad news,’ said a voice over the public-address system in a north London railway station, ‘is that a signal failure means another delay. The good news is that Thatcher’s resigned! Hip, Hip, Hooray!’ Most of the commuters cheered.”

I once might have cheered her passing. But now I am indifferent — though I will never forget what she did, and all those who died on her watch.

• This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner by Danny Morrison

[Nally Stand]

Respect has to be earned Leo and Thatcher wasn't overly concerned about respecting people herself so its good enough for her.

I was never so sure about the street partying but it has brought into focus the ill she brought upon a lot of people which may have been airbrushed out of history if the media had been given a free hand to report as they say fit.

I think it was Johnny Vegas on Ryan Tubridy the other morning talking about how she devastated communities and left nothing to replace these industries she was set on destroying and remembers his father dragging a piece of scrap metal for miles to a scrap yard to get a few quid, its no wonder she's a hate figure to so many in England let alone the shoot to kill policy, two faced dealings with the hunger strikers and what not over here.

On a similar vein it was either Shirley Williams or Ken Livingstone on Newsnight pointed out that in the light of George Osbournes comments on the Philpotts the previous week that indirectly Thatcher was the creator of the benefits culture when you create an economy heavily reliant on the finance sector (coupled with Scottish Oil) then you are accepting of having 2 to 3 million unemployed as a consequence.

I thought that was a very valid point not being discussed about her 'legacy'.

Shoot-to-kill, collusion, death squads, brutality, supergrass trials, diplock courts... all under her watch. It makes the blood boil to stop and think of what life was like here during her time. And to listen to a successive line of Irish politicians, from the likes of Brid Rodgers of the SDLP to FF "republicans" like Gerry Collins, Stephen Kearon etc, lining up to excuse her policies here and talk about the Anglo-Irish Agreement being her lasting legacy and how she sewed the seeds for eventual peace!! Then in today's Irish News, we hear about Alan "Londonderry" Shatter lambasting Gerry Adams for stating that Thatcher had a negative impact here and Stephen Collins in The Irish Times proclaiming that "Thatcher did more for Ireland than other UK leaders"! My little quote from Christy Moore at the foot of my posts seems so f***ing apt sometimes.

[passedit]

http://www.fsf.org.uk/latest-news/view/fsf-statement-on-a-minutes-silence-for-margaret-thatcher

"The FSF backs the decision made by the football authorities not to impose a minute's silence across all fixtures this weekend to mark the death of Margaret Thatcher. Should individual clubs wish to hold a minute's silence or commemorate the passing of Margaret Thatcher in their own manner that is a matter for them.

"We would expect that most fans' thoughts this weekend will turn to the friends and families of those 96 fellow supporters who lost their lives at Hillsborough 24 years ago."

Malcolm Clarke, FSF Chair

[deiseach]

While I thought Gerry Adams' comments were measured and generally stuck to the facts, anyone who can't see even a small sense of irony in his observation that she "did great hurt to the Irish and British people" needs to get out more.

[deiseach]

I see London Irish fans are going to be asked to observe a minute's silence as part of their match against Exeter. Should be . . . interesting. Fair play to David Mellor for his sense of realpolitik.

[theticklemister]

****Tony Blairs comments about the revelers made me think about their actions in a different way........Imagine using a mass murderer like him as a moral compass.

Good point. Listening to the spluttering outrage in his voice at such a crime against humanity . . . rancid.

Is he not the peace advisor for the UN in the middle east???

[Declan]

Fair play to David Mellor for his sense of realpolitik.

Jaysus his understanding of peacetime must be different to mine!

Mellor, the first person to fulfil the role of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said: "I think it's a hopeless request.

"I see both sides of Margaret Thatcher, but it doesn't matter if she was the greatest peacetime prime minister, there is no point in asking football to have a minute's silence that lots of people will not observe.

[deiseach]

Jaysus his understanding of peacetime must be different to mine!

Mellor, the first person to fulfil the role of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said: "I think it's a hopeless request.

"I see both sides of Margaret Thatcher, but it doesn't matter if she was the greatest peacetime prime minister, there is no point in asking football to have a minute's silence that lots of people will not observe.

It sure is.

[passedit]

This is well worth 10 minutes of your time.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/thatcher-westminsters-last-authentic-class-warrior.2013043781

  Thatcher: Westminster's last authentic class warrior
Ian Bell
Columnist
Tuesday 9 April 2013

MARGARET Thatcher did not believe in consensus.

She made no bones about that. Criticism, antagonism, even contempt, seemed to invigorate those fixed, sparking eyes. She was the last authentic class warrior in Westminster politics, and she gloried in the combat.

Mrs Thatcher treated dissent as affirmation. Accusations of divisiveness were taken as proof: she was right; they – a multitude – were wrong. There was her Britain – conterminous, despite all denials, with a mythologised England – and there was the rest. One way or another, she turned a great many people into "the enemy within". By the end, there were a lot of us about.

Never enough, however. Mrs Thatcher won her elections in 1979, 1983 and 1987 fair and square. If the ability to succeed at the polls is the definition of political stature, she stood as high as any Westminster figure in the 20th century. If the ability to generate abhorrence counts as an achievement, meanwhile, she was an over-achiever. But she was, undeniably, a winner.

For all that, the map of Britain traced by her popularity was an odd, distended affair, the true blue leeching away with each minute of latitude, south to north. On May 4, 1979, she stood on the steps of Downing Street and paraphrased the so-called Prayer of St Francis ("Where there is discord, may we bring harmony ... Where there is despair, may we bring hope"). For most of Britain north of Watford her policies meant the opposite, in every particular.

This was nowhere more true than in Scotland. Few of the eulogies below the Border will mention the fact she single-handedly destroyed a Conservative tradition once embedded in Scottish life. The myth persists she was rejected because of her Englishness – her predecessors encountered no such prejudice – but in truth she was inimical, by conviction. She was detested for her actions, not her accent.

Mrs Thatcher was a lucky prime minister. She had the luck to see the Social Democratic Party born in the spring of 1981, stripping support from Labour when her approval ratings were dire. She had the luck – and it was often touch and go – to win the Falklands war, despite 1000 deaths and the gratuitous sinking of the Belgrano, as a prelude to the 1983 election. She had the luck that bequeathed a 90% North Sea output tax when her "productivity miracle" required four million unemployed, and when dole money was due.

She had more vastly luck than her predecessor, Ted Heath, with the press. Mrs Thatcher gave extraordinary, still-unexplained, latitude to the ambitions of Rupert Murdoch, and helped him at every turn, generally by bending then-existing media ownership rules. Favours were returned. We have lived with the lurid consequences, the capsizing of democratic pretence, ever since.

Despite her elocution class manner, this millionaire's wife was the first tabloid prime minister. Jingoism; judicious racism ("The British character has done so much for democracy, for law, that if there is any fear it might be swamped, people are going to react ..."); a visceral dislike of unions; a contempt for the public sector; a veneration of wealth and a hatred of tax; a suspicion of culture and "permissiveness"; latterly the use of "Europe" as a cipher for xenophobia ... redtop culture fitted "Maggie" – never to her face – like a glove puppet.

Long before her death, Mrs Thatcher's admirers were insisting on her greatness. They said she had saved Britain, indeed the western world, with her stubbornness and self-belief. Her enemies, meanwhile, called her a blind ideologue, and heartless with it. Both descriptions were wide of the mark.

Ideologues must think: Margaret Thatcher never bothered. Her tendency to translate the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek and the monetarist "Chicago school" into the language of the Grantham grocer's shop did no service to either. Despite the ravages of her "economic experiment" – manufacturing output cut by one-third, botched privatisations, mass unemployment – she never did balance the books. Contrary to legend, government spending increased in real terms during the 1980s. Income tax cuts, of special benefit to the better off, were not free.

Nor did Mrs Thatcher do much – for how could she? – to bring down the Soviet "evil empire". The bankruptcy of the USSR was self-inflicted, hastened by a futile arms race with the United States. In welcoming Cruise missiles to Greenham Common, and in purchasing the Trident missile system at extraordinary cost, Mrs Thatcher sealed Britain's subservience to America. Whether her peculiarly intense relationship with Ronald Reagan counted as self-reliant patriotism – the bizarre invasion of Grenada aside – is a matter of partisan opinion.

Nevertheless, her ideology, like her geo-political activities, never approached consistency. Mrs Thatcher's politics was a visceral thing, formed of a belief in a natural order, in the assumption Britain needed restoration, and in a nostalgia for some never-defined golden age. She was, in the purest sense, a reactionary politician. Hence her failure, for long decades, to take apartheid seriously, and her willingness to dismiss Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. Hence her revulsion at the very idea of trade unionism. Hence her embrace of the casino economy.

She had the streak of vanity usual in prime ministers, one enlarged by three election victories. Her statements, in power and after, suggest Mrs Thatcher believed herself indispensable. She enjoyed the unlikely idea of the Iron Lady, a suburban Britannia, the politician who was "not for turning". She felt entitled to invoke Churchill, as though "Winston" had been a blood relation. In truth, her sense of destiny was near-Gaullist. And she had no sense of humour: laboriously, her speechwriters had to explain the Python dead parrot joke.

You can judge her, as is customary, by her legacy. The Thatcher years altered Britain for good, if not for better. Part of her bequest was an unthinking complicity, as an article of foreign policy, in America's adventures. Tony Blair could have followed the example of Labour's Harold Wilson during the Vietnam years, and spared Britain the Iraq debacle. Instead, Blair, like John Major, did as "Maggie" would have done, and went to war under American command.

Mrs Thatcher's heirs had neither the wish nor the desire, meanwhile, to unpick her privatisation programme, that mass transfer of wealth from the public realm to the private. In the case of the utilities, state assets were exchanged, often at absurd prices, for monopoly capitalism. The myth of choice and a "share-owning democracy" did not outlast her premiership. But the idea the private sector will always perform more efficiently than the public became tenacious thanks to Mrs Thatcher.

Modern Britain is in large part her creation. Banking gone bust? Those excesses can be traced to the deregulation of the financial sector, the "Big Bang", of 1986 and after. The tabloid press run amok? The privileges allowed to Murdoch count as exhibit A. All hope of an independent foreign policy gone? Maggie thought she had a duty, no less, to Ronnie, leader of a foreign country.

Housing bubbles and housing crises? Mrs Thatcher believed council schemes bred socialist councils. She sold the houses cheap – but raised £20 billion in the process – and turned property into a British obsession, and generated a froth of asset bubbles. Her economic reforms were parasitic, at every turn, upon the public's state-secured estate. She put nothing in its place.

Her allies and patrons said she "put Britain back on its feet". The evidence is thin. Those of Mrs Thatcher's class prospered greatly from her tax cuts in the 1980s. Those in and around the City of London luxuriated in easy money. But wealth, however "created", did not often trickle down, as theory demanded. The poor paid.

Inequalities, narrowing before her arrival, became a fact of British life in the Thatcher years. There were riots, a glut of heroin, and hopelessness. Her insistence on "management's right to manage" served only to demonstrate, meanwhile, British management left something to be desired. To her slim credit is the fact she opposed rail privatisation. A despiser of trains, she sensed a debacle in the making.

History takes a shorthand note. It says: miners, then a poll tax, then (for a northern minority) a prime minister who reneged on the promise of devolution. So official memory and folk memory diverge. Two dozen profitable pits were shut simply to make a point, and kill a trade union. The British state was put at risk just to ease Scottish Tory complaints over ratings valuations, and establish all must "pay their way". And Scotland was lost, in irredeemable constitutional terms. Mrs Thatcher did not apologise.

Commentary upon her funeral will lose that detail. Mrs Thatcher broke Britain. Thanks to her madcap deregulation, the banks went bust in 2008. Thanks to her taste for confrontation – with her own people, to labour the point – trust in the British state was dissevered. Thanks to her indulgence towards redtop papers, media corruption flowed. Her poll tax was class war in bold caps. After Mrs Thatcher, no prime minister enjoyed trust for long. And gross domestic product did not improve.

Hindsight will call her comical figure. She destroyed every enemy, and made herself ridiculous. At the end, her ego vast, she called her overthrow "betrayal". But the truth was mundane: she was less popular than her party; Labour would certainly have won a general election; her rhetoric had become risible. In the last days of 1990, the bombast of 1979 had become unseemly, even among the erstwhile Tory acolytes. The moment had passed.

By the end, there were a lot of us about. The unreconciled, the persecuted, the insulted, the poor, or those who simply took it for granted – strange to remember – the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was mad. That's a legacy. The fact that eccentricity became institutionalised was telling, too. The idea that impersonating Mrs Thatcher was a sane and inevitable course, as an electoral ploy, Labour or Tory, is another of history's shorthand notes.

She picked a fight. Those she conscripted will speak well of her, no doubt. Those who stood on the other side, on painted lines at pitheads, in the reeking Wapping mist, when the City casino echoed like a fair, when the Greenham women were being carted off, when pensioners were intimidated to bolster community charge propaganda, provide other memories. Truth persists.

Mrs Thatcher's every victory was a defeat, as it happens. She altered Britain merely to end Britain. In demanding respect, she never dared hope for love. Her economic miracles left us where we are now: a second-rate power, with Third World debts, and a banking class stripping £14bn in self-awarded bonuses from the commonweal.

Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, no-one even thinks that a crime. In a grubby, disturbed, discontented country, her spirit prevails.

The dirt needs no tramping.

[Tony Baloney]

Saw graffiti, huge lettering, behind St Mary's teacher training college this morning

"Rot in hell Tatcher scum"

Was probably one of the Ranchers did it too