Maggie Thatcher – why all the hate?

 

Well, here’re my reasons:

1. She implemented monetarist economic policy in a way which destroyed the mining, steelworking, shipbuilding & car industries in the UK. 
2. She replaced the manufacturing sector with service industry jobs that were less well paid, and with financial services industry jobs. The communities where she’d destroyed their local manufacturing didn’t benefit from this – her reign saw a great concentration of wealth in London & precious little anywhere else.
3. She gave council house tenants the right to buy the houses they rented, swelling the sub-prime mortgage market in the UK.
4. She didn’t use the money raised from this sell off to replace the social housing lost in this way.
5. She used the police as a political tool to squash dissent & break strikes.
6. She cut defence spending such that the Argentines thought we no longer cared about the Falklands, having removed the one ship we had there. She then made war on the Argentines to take the islands back. Through her lack of strategic planning we had a much harder job re-taking the islands – a war that was totally unnecessary.
7. She armed Saddam Hussein & prolonged the Iran-Iraq war, so is responsible for thousands of deaths.
8. She was a friend to Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile whose regime abducted, tortured, raped & killed thousands of its own people.
9. She was a friend to Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia whose right-wing economic policies killed 1 million of his own people through starvation & poverty.
10. She sent the SAS in to Cambodia in 1980, not to fight the Khmer Rouge, who had been driven into the jungle by the Vietnamese army. The Vietnamese had invaded because the KR were committing genocide against ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia, as well as killing a greater proportion of their own people than any dictator has managed to do anywhere. The SAS were sent there to train the Khmer Rouge. To train a guerrilla army who had committed such atrocities they are a byword for evil. 
11. She discussed the possibility of ethnically cleansing Northern Ireland, sending the Irish Catholics to the South.
12. She gave approval to her son Mark’s failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.

That’s all I can think of right now, but if more turns up I’ll add it to the list.