I am much obliged to Dr. Sean Gabb at the Libertarian Alliance for his trenchant analysis of the general awfulness of Margaret Thatcher.
Impressed by the mountains of rubbish and unburied corpses left by her Socialist predecessors, I made the mistake of voting for her party in 1979, and have never forgiven myself for so doing.
I started off trying to list those of her crimes which Dr. Gabb failed to mention, but it is so damnably depressing a project that I think I won’t bother.
Neither will I ever vote Conservative again, and that’s a promise. Those who think that any of the two-and-a-half socialist parties can offer anything to the libertarian have only themselves to blame for the consequences.
There is no realistic chance of any government that is not labour or conservative being formed in the next few decades.
Refusing to support the conservatives is simply tacitlysupporting labour.
Dammit, Current, I’m a member of the LPUK. How can I possibly support the Conservatives? They are no more libertarian than any of the others, though I grant that they may *claim* to be so rather more often than their competitors.
well I for one like the lady in question. But than again I come from a country were people like Gordon Brown grows on trees.
Supporting Thatcher is about like beeing tortured only for 30min instead of 2hrs and claiming that a victory, but I cannot help it. She always have nice wee place on my good side.
They do say that every Prime Minister (and also every Home Secretary) makes the last one look like an angel.
Hmm.
Wonder who we’ll get next then!
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Hardly bears thinking about. The idiot with the banana, perhaps, unless some EU Directive requires, doubtless for the sake of the preservation of endangered native cultures, that he be returned to his village forthwith.
Which will murder Caesar? Which will speak at his funeral? And which will get off with Cleopatra VII? Watch next week’s exciting episode.
I understand that you support the LPUK.
But, I don’t think that supporting them really helps. They are unlikely to ever be elected. That is the nature of democracy, a small party is not like a small business. It cannot grow due to good management, because elections are mostly all-or-nothing deals.
I mostly share your libertarian viewpoint. But that doesn’t really change much.
What we must do if we are to encourage liberty is firstly to talk about it. Secondly, we should support those who can improve things.
That doesn’t mean supporting libertarians, they will never be a major political force. It means supporting the least worst of the major parties. Only that way can there ever be improvement.
If we try to “keep ourselves pure” we ensure that we’ll be perpetually irrelevant and we’ll hand the world over to socialists.
Well, that’s certainly a fair point, and I don’t exclude the possibility of tactical voting. However, I’d much rather vote for a candidate put up by my own party than one put up by another.
Historically I gather that it is possible for a minor party to become a major one, and vice versa; the descent of the Victorian Liberal party into a socialist offshoot, and the rise of the Labour party from very modest beginnings, are examples.
I find it simply too depressing to consider that the 2½ major parties we have now are all that we shall ever have. On this basis I don’t suppose I’d bother to vote at all.
It is certainly true that the Labour party arose. However, they are really the only group to have done so since parliament started sitting regularly after 1688. That means it’s happened once in ~320 years.
I agree that it’s depressing that that 2.5 major parties we have are unlikely to change. But I think that it is a realistic view of the next ~50 years at least.
I’m not sure that ‘realistic’ is much of a qualification any more. If one were to return in one’s time machine to, say, 1979, and tell people the way things were in 2009, I don’t think they’d consider one’s predictions to be ‘realistic’.
To suppose, in any event, that there is no possibility of political change in the next 50 years is simply too depressing. I prefer the Gerry Anderson approach: ‘Anything can happen in the next 30 minutes’.
I’m not saying that nothing will change. I’m just saying that not much can change. The best we can hope for is a few improvements, such as a small retreat of the database state.
I think that quite a lot *could* change; it rather depends on what happens.
Regarding Thatcher, I think that despite the logic of Sean Gabb’s demolition of her record, history will be kinder to her than we are being now. This may take some time, but it will come.
It is true that she failed on many counts to push forward the frontiers of liberty. It is also true that, under pressure from assorted strutto-mountebankist-leftistas both in her government and outside, she helped to advance a broadly-based GramscoFabiaNazi-Incremental agenda.
But with an initial majority of only about 40 seats, what was the alternative? And furthermore, we had no innate TyrannoEuropeanist tradition of a State-terror-Police that would be at the behest of whichever party was in power either ( but we do now, sadly, and the wrong Gramstato-droids are in power over ordinary human beings.)
We had to hope that she would do something to help.
Taxes did go down (a bit.)
We didn’t go to war (well, not very much anyway) – not like now.
She did help to pull down the Soviet Empire (and yes, and yes and yes, it _/was/_ evil. It was. You bet it was. That’s why it had to go. It’s not her fault that Stalinists are bick in power in Russia.
But not enough radical liberal stuff was done early enough, say on the 5th of May 1979, while the enemy could be kicked in the face when he was still down..
It would probably be best if you and I were to agree to differ on points such as these.