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She's dead

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I don't think any country in the World allows free speech. The UK certainly has not allowed free speech for a number of years as exceptions are in place as part of the Human Rights Act

Protesting at a funeral, any funeral, is quite obviously going to cause 'alarm or distress or a breach of the peace'.
 
If they are in public they are heavily policed to make sure that they remain peaceful. The same will happen with Thatch's funeral. Peaceful protests won't be stopped.
 
TheThingIs said:
Protesting at a funeral is distasteful, IMO.

I don't mind some of the celebrations around the country, that's fine - but a funeral, regardless of it being state-funded or not, is a chance for those who loved her to mourn and say goodbye. All thoughts and considerations should be with them.

Not with a bunch of sad cunts trying to make a point.
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Agreed. Not sure what protesting at someone's funeral is meant to achieve.
 
If the government hadn't decided to put the boot on a pedestal and give her all the pomp for her funeral nobody would be that arsed about protesting. She should have a private funeral paid for by her estate. I don't agree with protests at it BTW. Regardless, she doesn't deserve the sendoff she's being given.
 
Sunny said:
If the government hadn't decided to put the boot on a pedestal and give her all the pomp for her funeral nobody would be that arsed about protesting. She should have a private funeral paid for by her estate. I don't agree with protests at it BTW. Regardless, she doesn't deserve the sendoff she's being given.
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So they are protesting about the public cost of the funeral by creating even more public cost in the form of policing?
 
No, they are protesting so the world knows what this country really thinks of the cunt, which this huge faux outpouring in the media & ridiculously elaborate (& yes expensive) funeral does not show.

If this were a private service & people caused trouble I'd think it were wrong.

As it is I hope some protest group manage to cover the funeral car in a few truckloads of shit.
 
Richey said:
So they are protesting about the public cost of the funeral by creating even more public cost in the form of policing?
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Or maybe if she wasn't a massive witch who destroyed lives who a few upper and middle class tools decided they had an unjustifiable need to spend millions of public money hero worshipping nobody would feel the need to protest in the first place
 
http://www.independent.ie/sport/oth...ney-silence-that-speaks-volumes-29194846.html

EAMONN SWEENEY – 14 APRIL 2013
In August 1989, just four months after the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool supporters died, Margaret Thatcher was presented with a memo from a senior civil servant telling her that Home Secretary Douglas Hurd planned to welcome the Taylor Report which would criticise the behaviour of the South Yorkshire Police and almost entirely exonerate the Liverpool fans.
​
​
The British Prime Minster was worried. Not about the dead fans but about the criticism of the police. And she was determined not to back that criticism. In the margin of the report she wrote, "What do we mean by 'welcoming the broad thrust of the report'. The broad thrust of the report is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome? Surely we welcome the thoroughness of the report and its recommendations."
Thatcher wasn't concerned about the truth. She believed that the criticism of the police, which has been substantiated time and again and was the central point of the report, should be glossed over. In doing so she took the side of the police, who'd perpetrated a shameful cover-up, over the lives of the innocent dead. And that's why it would have been an obscenity, and a spit in the face of the friends and relatives of the Hillsborough victims, had football teams marked her death with a minute's silence this weekend.
There are suspicions that Thatcher's role in the investigation of the Hillsborough tragedy went a bit further than pencilling notes in the margins of memos. She and Hurd visited the ground and met the South Yorkshire Police the day after the deaths but no documentation about the visit or the meetings was ever furnished to the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose report last year painted such a vivid picture of the police cover-up.
Sheila Coleman of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign says they hope that "now she is dead at least those who have protected her should do the decent thing and release all documentation relating to the Hillsborough cover-up. She was instrumental in the cover-up. We call on the government to release all documentation about her involvement."
And Margaret Aspinall, chair of the Hillsborough Support Group, points out, "We know that she had sly meetings the evening of the disaster and the morning after at the ground and that is when the cover-up started. I think it's a disgrace that she is getting a state funeral."
We probably haven't heard the last about Margaret Thatcher's role in the Hillsborough cover-up. So it's unbelievable that there were those who felt she should be accorded a minute's silence. And guff about 'not speaking ill of the dead' is a bit rich considering that the Hillsborough tragedy was followed by a concerted campaign to do just that in relation to the Liverpool supporters who'd lost their lives.
It's possible of course that Thatcher had nothing to do with the cover-up. Last year's inquiry found no evidence of her involvement. Yet it did find that many of the disgraceful slurs on the Liverpool fans had originated with Tory MP Irvine Patnick. Given the tributes last week to Thatcher's thoroughness, it beggars belief that she didn't know what Patnick and the South Yorkshire Police were doing.
She certainly didn't seem to disapprove of either the cover-up or the vicious allegations made about the Liverpool supporters in The Lying Rag. There was ample opportunity for her at the time and afterwards to condemn the paper and its vile toad of an editor Kelvin MacKenzie yet she didn't do so. Instead she continued to regard The Lying Rag as an ally.
And it was. Because MacKenzie and the Tories in general knew that any sympathy for the victims of Hillsborough would reflect badly on Thatcher. So they continued to fly in the face of the facts and lay the blame on the victims. Boris Johnson did it in 2004 when blaming the disaster on drunken Liverpool fans fighting their way into the ground. And as recently as January Thatcher's former press secretary Bernard Ingham was still insisting that the 'tanked-up mob' theory propagated by police and since proven conclusively false is, as The Lying Rag would put it, 'the truth'.
Then again back in 1996 Ingham wrote to Graham Skinner, a Liverpool fan who'd lost a friend in the tragedy, "Liverpool should shut up about Hillsborough . . . it will do Liverpool no good whatsoever in the eyes of the nation if, egged on by ambulance-chasing lawyers, those who saw their relatives killed at Hillsborough now sue for compensation for the 'trauma'."
Those quotation marks around 'trauma' are great aren't they? The implication being that seeing your relatives being killed actually doesn't constitute trauma at all and that the families of the Hillsborough victims are interested not in justice for their loved ones but in getting handy compo. Ingham was one of Thatcher's closest allies and most trusted friends. When journalists wanted to know what the Prime Minister really thought about something they went to him. And I'd hazard a guess that his view of Liverpool fans, a bunch of yobs whose campaign for justice was irritating beyond belief, was shared by his former boss. Again, let's have less nonsense about respect for the dead when it was something Thatcher and her allies never deigned to display for anyone else.
At least Ingham is being honest. He knows that it's impossible to feel sympathy for both the Hillsborough victims and Margaret Thatcher. You have to choose which side you're on. Because you can also argue that Margaret Thatcher and her government's determination to treat football fans as pariahs, demanding that they alone among English people carry special identity cards, led inexorably to Hillsborough. Demonising and dehumanising supporters led to a situation where South Yorkshire Police refused to listen to the entreaties of Liverpool fans who knew their lives were in danger if they were forced into the already overcrowded Leppings Lane End.
South Yorkshire Police's self-image as a kind of untouchable paramilitary-style force, built up when they'd been given the kind of carte blanche normally unseen in a democratic society during the miners' strike, may also have contributed to the disaster. It was certainly at the heart of the cover-up.
Just five years previously the force had to pay out £500,000 to 39 miners falsely arrested at Orgreave, just outside Sheffield. The road to Hillsborough went through Orgreave. And it was built by Margaret Thatcher.
Given all this, the suggestion by the chairman of Reading John Madejski and the owner of Wigan Athletic Dave Whelan that Thatcher's passing be marked with a minute's silence bordered on bringing the game into disrepute, not least because yesterday was just two
days before the 24th anniversary of Hillsborough. Madejski's intervention was particularly insensitive given that Reading hosted Liverpool yesterday. The idea that Liverpool fans above anyone would be enjoined to show their respect for Thatcher is a colossal lapse of taste on Madejski's part.
Meanwhile, Whelan said that by holding a minute's silence football fans could persuade the rest of society that they were not "a scum lot," suggesting, despite his protestations to the contrary, that he may hold this very opinion of the game's followers himself. John and Dave can take comfort in the fact that no silence is necessary as they've already paid fitting tribute. Two extremely rich men trying to get their own way by trampling on the feelings of others, what could be more Thatcherite than that? I'm sure she's smiling up at them.
Yet they didn't get their way because although Maggie once declared that there was 'No such thing as society,' there remains a bond of community in the football world, one which would have seen the honouring of the Baroness as an insult not just to Liverpool but to the game as a whole. The football authorities ruled out a minute's silence because they knew the fans wouldn't stand for it. Which is a great credit to the independent spirit of the football fans of England. They're not a scum lot at all.
The scum lot were the people in high places who slandered both the dead of Hillsborough and those who sought justice for them. Now they want football fans to honour their heroine. They've some neck.
Meanwhile, Cricket Ireland are threatening to discipline international player John Mooney for tweeting that he hopes Margaret Thatcher suffered a slow and painful death. I completely disagree with him. I wish she died quickly years ago. You know who did die a slow and painful death? The 96 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough. And I doubt if Thatcher ever lost a wink of sleep over them.
If you're a Thatcher fan, my apologies. I hope I didn't cause you any 'trauma'.
 
The best column I read about her was by Russel Brand, believe it or not.

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children'

The actor and comedian recalls a bizarre recent encounter with the Iron Lady, and how it prompted him to think about growing up under the most unlikely matriarch-figure imaginable​
Margaret-Thatcher-the-yea-010.jpg

Margaret Thatcher, the year she became leader of the Conservatives, and the year Russell Brand was born. Photograph: Keystone France
One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.
My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.
When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating familyof porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Margaret-Thatcher-visits--010.jpg
Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken from picture library
Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.
Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.
When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.
When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.
Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.
The-Orgreave-miners-strik-010.jpg
The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy
"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutelyMargaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.
It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.
I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud.
There were sporadic resurrections. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.
Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness?
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.
I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.​
 
I've read one or two good pieces by him before.

He's a bit of an idiot but clearly quite a witty and articulate one.
 
I am a caring kind of guy . I will sleep better if I know you are getting your vitamins . You may not be used to an Aldi diet .
 
The first time I got called a quiffer on here (by Vlad) i did that same google and thought the same thing... as in my case it's true.

But it doesn't mean that. Not on here.
 
cloggypop said:
I just googled that and apparently it means I like to sniff bicycle seats . I am still taking it as a compliment though . I am in a boss mood .
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It means to repost something that's already been posted in a thread, usually caused by not reading back amongst the thread.

Vlads Quiff was the poster who came up with the need for a term, so it's named after the great man.
 
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