Talk:Margaret Thatcher

References?

The following appear to be unreferenced;

• "The privatisation of public assets was combined with financial deregulation in an attempt to fuel economic growth. Geoffrey Howe abolished Britain's exchange controls in 1979, allowing more capital to be invested in foreign markets, and the Big Bang of 1986 removed many restrictions on the London Stock Exchange. The Thatcher government encouraged growth in the finance and service sectors to compensate for Britain's ailing manufacturing industry."

• "After the two-year negotiations, Thatcher made concession to the PRC government and signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing in December 1984, handing over Hong Kong's sovereignty in 1997."

• "Thatcher's government provided military forces to the international coalition in the build-up to the Gulf War, but she had resigned by the time hostilities began on 17 January 1991."

• "In March 2002, Thatcher's book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, dedicated to Ronald Reagan, was released. In it, she claimed there would be no peace in the Middle East until Saddam Hussein was toppled, that Israel must trade land for peace, and that the European Union (EU) was "fundamentally unreformable", "a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure". She argued that Britain should renegotiate its terms of membership or else leave the EU and join the North American Free Trade Area. The book was serialised in The Times on 18 March."

Please either remove those unreferenced claims, or at least tag them as unreferenced for later removal.

88.104.20.198 (talk) 04:15, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Y I've added {{Citation needed}} tags to all these statements. --Stfg (talk) 13:25, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

@Eric Corbett: I've restored the {{citation needed}} on the one in the 3rd bullet. What needs citing is the whole sentence: the statement that her government provided forces during the build-up, and that her resignation preceded the start of hostilities. --Stfg (talk) 14:50, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Rubbish. That her resignation preceded the start of hostilities ought to be obvious even to you. Eric Corbett 14:55, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

@Eric Corbett: How sweet! Actually it is obvious to me, because I know when hositilities started, but not everyone does, and the edit requester asked for that sentence to be referenced. And the fact that her government provided military forces to the international coalition in the build-up also needs citation for those who don't know it already. Now stop behaving like a supercilious jerk and address the issue. --Stfg (talk) 15:55, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

I have addressed the issue, by once again removing your stupid tag. Eric Corbett 15:59, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

For what it is worth: I started to service this request yesterday and had planned to ask the requester to explain the reason for #3. The resignation date is available elsewhere in the article and the date of hostilities is in the sentence, so the second half of the sentence is unremarkable and I'd agree with Eric. If the requester meant the first part, that the troops were sent during the build-up or that Thatcher's government sent them, then it may not be as obvious and a citation might be reasonable, so I think it was reasonable for Stfg to have simply added the template. The {{citation needed}} template has a 'reason' field to avoid just this sort of confusion and it seems reasonable for the requester to provide that. Just my two cents. Celestra (talk) 19:39, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Re #3 - yes, you're correct. 88.104.18.246 (talk) 20:31, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Not a yes or no question, actually. What is your concern about the sentence? A reasonable editor might replace the tag with a reference which confirms the date of hostilities. To avoid that, you need to supply a reason for the {{citation needed}} template. Thanks, Celestra (talk) 22:06, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Legacy

There is no mention of the demonstrations on her demise ("Ding dong" etc). Is this not notable in showing an enduring aspect of her legacy? --TraceyR (talk) 14:04, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Nothing to do with legacy, but see the Death section, where it is mentioned. Eric Corbett 14:12, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

The legacy aspect shows in the "deep divisions" mentioned in the cited source. Have there been other British politicians whose death invoked the "vitriol" mentioned in the source? --TraceyR (talk) 19:49, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

What has that to do with legacy? Eric Corbett 19:54, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

A legacy does not have to be positive. Leaving a society deeply divided so many years after resigning from office is also part of her legacy.--TraceyR (talk) 10:57, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Find a decent source and we can see if it's worth putting into the article. --John (talk) 23:08, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Improving the article to near FA-quality

This article is well-sourced, well-detailed, and well-written. Why is this article not a Featured Article Candidate? --George Ho (talk) 01:59, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

How Thatcher helped Saddam commit genocide

Posted by: Andrew David Harrison Written on April 17, 2013 by Editor in History, Kurdistan, UK By Harem Karem:

Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

The death of Margaret Thatcher has reminded everyone of her divisiveness, in Britain and abroad. As Britain’s longest-serving Prime Minister (1979-90) in recent times, Thatcher was loathed and loved simultaneously and her passing has caused both mourning and celebrations. Today her supporters will appreciate her publicly-funded £10 million funeral ceremony with appropriate military trappings.

Margaret Thatcher accelerated the decline of British manufacturing industry, focusing instead on financial services and armaments, and causing much misery in Britain and across the world. Her domestic legacy is condemned by millions, especially from former mining communities, trade unions and inner cities.

Globally, Thatcher is lauded by some as a ‘champion of freedom’, although her friends included ruthless dictators such as Chile’s Pinochet, Indonesia’s Suharto and Pakistan’s Zia. She also favoured South Africa’s apartheid regime and denounced the imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela as a ‘terrorist’.

Thatcher was coyer about backing Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein. However, Saddam’s brutal regime was sustained by the covert military aid it received throughout the 1980s, especially from her government and Ronald Reagan’s US administration.

This support cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Arabs and Persians. When Saddam finally ‘overstepped the mark’ and threatened Western interests by invading Kuwait in 1990, the US and Britain then decimated an Iraq army that, until recently, they had helped to equip. For the arms companies, it was all good business.

Under Thatcher, Britain became the world’s number two arms exporter. Her biggest arms deal was the Al-Yamamah contract with the Saudi Arabian dictatorship in 1985 and 1988, which was one of the largest in history, worth about £40 billion to recently privatised British Aerospace and other companies.

Iraq was another important arms sales target for Thatcher. In December 1981, she chaired a meeting of her cabinet’s Overseas and Defence committee to discuss how to “exploit Iraq’s potentialities as a promising market for the sale of defence equipment”. Although her government had voted for a UN Security Council resolution calling on all countries to maintain their neutrality during the Iran-Iraq war, the committee decided to interpret this “as flexibly as possible” (1).

In March that year, junior minister Thomas Trenchard had sent her a secret letter describing a meeting with Saddam which “should produce both political and major commercial benefits”. Thatcher wrote by hand at the top of the letter that she was “very pleased” with this progress (2).

Through the eighties, £1 billion public money was given to UK arms companies to facilitate their delivery of military equipment and technology to Saddam. These consignments were always camouflaged – for example, by routing them through neighbouring Jordan and Saudi Arabia or disguising them as ‘non-lethal’ supplies. They included tank spares, Land Rovers, radar equipment, command and control systems, rocket technology, materials that could be used in Saddam’s nuclear programme and possibly even some ingredients for chemical warfare.

Internationally-banned chemical weapons were used by Saddam, first against Iranian conscripts and then Kurdish civilians. In March 1988, 5,000 Kurds were killed in a chemical attack on Halabja, and many more were condemned to lives of pain and suffering.

This atrocity was well-documented and thousands of British citizens wrote to their government urging action against Saddam. Halabja was part of the Anfal campaign during which 4,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed, one million people were displaced and perhaps as many as 182,000 were killed. However, instead of halting the arms sales to Saddam, the Thatcher government took the August 1988 ceasefire between Iran and Iraq as a cue to increase them – even though they must have known that some of this weaponry was likely to be used against the Kurds.

Thatcher and her ministers did not care. Their only concern was business. In October 1988, senior foreign office official William Waldegrave argued in a memorandum that, “I doubt if there is any market on such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed” (3).

Matrix Churchill was a British company that was effectively taken over by the Iraqis. In November 1989 the CIA reported to the White House and the State Department that it was part of “Iraq’s complex procurement network of holding companies in Western Europe for its chemical, biological and ballistic missile development programmes” (4).

Following the 1991 Gulf War, three British Matrix Churchill directors were put on trial at the Old Bailey for supplying equipment to Saddam during an official arms embargo. But the case collapsed after maverick Tory minister Alan Clark admitted in court that the government had known all about it.

This led to the Scott Enquiry which delivered a million-word report broadly critical of the government’s duplicity. Thatcher, now retired, appeared as a witness and claimed to be ignorant of the details of how government policy had been implemented.

At the time journalist Paul Foot lambasted Sir Richard Scott for pretending to believe her. “He swallows wholesale the fantastic notion that Lady Thatcher, the most interventionist prime minister in modern times, who was fascinated above all other things by arms sales and intelligence matters, did not know that three junior ministers, all of whom worshipped or feared her, changed the whole policy of defence sales to Iraq without her ever hearing of it”, wrote Foot. “Major too (Thatcher’s foreign minister and then her successor as prime minister – KT), according to Scott, knew nothing about anything, and gets off on that score”.

Last Sunday’s Observer carried previously unpublished extracts from a book by the mercenary Simon Mann, indicating that the Thatcher leopard never changed its spots. A decade ago, Mann plotted to oust the oil-rich government of Equatorial Guinea with Thatcher’s son Mark, a not notably talented ‘chip off the old block’ who has made millions from arms deals.

Mann claims to have met Margaret Thatcher in London in 2003 when she wished him well in his ill-fated African coup attempt and urged him to join a conspiracy to overthrow the elected Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. According to Mann: “She looked at me with her imperial gaze. ‘We must always look after our friends, Simon … as I’m sure you know’”.

For years Saddam Hussein was Margaret Thatcher’s ‘friend’ and Kurds paid a price for this secret alliance.

British Kurds have stepped up their efforts lobbying the British government to recognise Saddam’s 1988 Anfal and Halabja campaign as an act of genocide. Following debates in the British and Scottish parliaments, MPs recently voted in favour of this.

However, the government is holding out on giving formal recognition, possibly because it knows this could lead to a substantial compensation scheme.

Thatcher’s legacy indeed.

References:

   ‘Spider’s Web – Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit’, Alan Friedman, 1993, Faber & Faber, page 78
   Financial Times, ‘UK secretly supplied Saddam’, Michael Stothard, 30 December 2011
   ‘Spider’s Web’, page 167
   ‘Spider’s Web’, page 247

Andrew David Harrison (talk) 14:15, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

...and the point of this garbage article is...? Picking up just a few points-

1. Writing about support for Saddam without mentioning 1980s Iran & the Ayatollah and the Iran-Iraq war; these actions taking place simply because the ministers 'didn't care' is pure twerpdom.

2. Chemical weapons or rather their precursors? Which country did they come from, idiot? Here's a clue- that country has a much bigger engineering and chemical industry than Britain does.

3. Thatcher accelerated the decline of Britain's manufacturing industries? This would be after the 1970s- a zombie-zone of dying and dead industries embalmed by the socialists & subject to necrophilia by the trades unions. The author hasn't got a clue.

Gravuritas (talk) 14:36, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Just like to point out that according to the ONS, manufacturing grew by 7.5% in real terms under Thatcher. It declined by 5% under the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The idea that Thatcher destroyed British industry is a left-wing myth not supported by facts or reality. Who do you think got the Japanese car giants to build factories in the North? Wasn't Labour that's for sure.--81.109.72.78 (talk) 12:40, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Economic Policy

The explanation of Thatcher's economic policy regarding tax levels of all kinds, government spending, deficit spending, and the battle against the '364' economists is unclear and does not allow the reader to draw conclusions on their own. The goal here should be to present the facts, and then allow the reader to draw their own conclusions on different economic policies. For instance, this article implies that the 364 economists wrote Thatcher, arguing that she should not raise taxes during the recession of the early 1980's. This is a poor explanation of the letter they wrote, and I am including a source of a more detailed explanation of the letter. What the economists wrote, and where they disagreed with Thatcher, was in their economic school of thought. Similar to today's austerity vs fiscal stimulus debates. The economists were mostly Keynesians, who wanted more deficit spending. Thatcher disagreed. Below is a link to a good explanation of the situation.

http://www.cato.org/blog/margaret-thatcher-battle-364-keynesians — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.196.165.252 (talk) 15:35, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia should, as you say, "present the facts, and then allow the reader to draw their own conclusions on different economic policies", but I'm not sure there is the space or the need for it in this article. Premiership_of_Margaret_Thatcher#Deflationary_strategy, perhaps? Mr Stephen (talk) 18:20, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

@74.196.165.252. Your source is a rather poor quality opinion piece from an organisation with its own agenda. Eric Corbett 18:29, 19 December 2013 (UTC)