It is customary not to speak ill of the dead – or at least those of recent demise.

However, in some cases it would be rank hypocrisy to follow that tradition. Today is such a day. (Only it’s not so much speaking ill as speaking the truth.)

Frankly, I was sickened by what I can only describe as an outpouring of smarm on the BBC News attendant on the announcement of Margaret Thatcher’s death. She may have been the longest serving but she was also the most contentious and divisive Prime Minister in recent British history. The second part of that assessment has been getting brushed over.

All this was after what can only be described as an ongoing softening-up process by the hagiographic treatment of Government papers relating to her premiership released under the thirty year rule. My previous thoughts on those are in some of the posts here and on Thatcher’s legacy here.

And I had to laugh when some Tory sycophant said she paved the way for Britain’s economic recovery. She it was who dismantled financial regulation, who encouraged not only “me”-ism but greed, short-termism and the pursuit of profit above all else. In many people’s eyes she turned selfishness into a virtue. As a result she set in train the conditions that made the banking crash of 2008 not only possible but inevitable. How can anyone in today’s economic circumstances mention “Britain’s economic recovery” with a straight face?

And this wasn’t the worst. The worst was she demolished that society which she said didn’t exist. The Britain I grew up in was a more caring, more compassionate place than the one she has bequeathed us. A symptom of that was the selling off of the social housing stock without any provision being made for – indeed a ban on – its replacement. The result was a continuing boom in house prices and, latterly, of private rentals making it all but impossible for young couples to buy a starter home or to rent at reasonable rates. Any present crisis of homelessness is directly traceable to that decision. I do not blame anyone for taking advantage of the opportunity to buy “their” council house, it made absolute financial sense for many who did so, but in effect it licensed the stealing of public assets for private profit – as was the selling off of nationalised industries.

Another commenter said private companies now compete to provide us with these sorts of services. Well they don’t. I have one electricity line, one gas pipe, one telephone line coming into my house. In what sense are they competing to connect me to their services? It’s utter bilge.

And I’ve not noticed any benefit to the consumer on the bottom line. Quite the reverse. But that, of course was always the object.

The country is now run for the sole benefit of profiteers and exploiters. All that can be laid at the door of

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (née Roberts,) 13/10/1925-8/4/2013. So; it goes.

I’ve never understood the credit Margaret Thatcher was given for sending British troops to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982.

The decision to send the Task Force was certainly a gamble but it was by no means brave. Had it failed she would have been gone as Prime Minister: no doubt.

But it was a gamble she simply had to take. Had the troops not been sent her position would have been equally precarious. She could not have sat back and allowed Argentina to keep the Falklands (the Malvinas as we would now know them) by force majeure. She would have been gone within months if not weeks. A British Prime Minister not able to defend British sovereign territory? The Tory party never would take kindly to that.

This was what I like to call the War of Thatcher’s Face. She had to send the troops, had to win, to save face, to preserve her position. Such a decision is the opposite of brave. It isn’t a decision at all. It was almost – but not quite – what in chess is called zugzwang (forced to move) except in Thatcher’s case there was the faint possibility of success.

That the Argentines would turn out to be pretty duff at fusing their bombs correctly and also at enthusing and supporting their soldiers in the field was by no means apparent when the decision had to be made.

It was gamble or die (politically die.) Without that choice she would have been nothing but an ignominious footnote in British History; as opposed to one of the most contentious PMs of recent times.

Nor did I understand the ecstatic reception she was afforded by the islanders themselves when she visited later that year.

If I had been a Falkland Islander I’d have been berating her for allowing the Argentine invasion to occur in the first place – even for encouraging it.

In the end she had no other decision to make – if only because the situation had arisen because she allowed it to.

Not only was Margaret Thatcher less than forthright in her testimony to the Franks committee, it now seems she intended to dismantle the welfare state. She apparently claims in her memoirs that she was only horrified at the proposal by the thought it might be leaked, but it was all of a piece with her known predilections.

Well, contrary to her dictum, I think that there is such a thing as society. I only wish it were more cohesive.

The country I knew and grew up in was devastated by her policies. The United Kingdom is a harsher, less compassionate, more squalid place as a result.

Her heirs and successors in the present Government are well on the way to completing the demolition project.

You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

I’ve been hearing all day on the news about Margaret Thatcher’s “shock” on being told of the intelligence about the imminent Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

Why is this being presented/spun as being to her credit? She is said not to have believed that the Argentines would invade. Yet this is despite the fact that she must have had advisers who had warned her of the possibility.

It was only some months after the war, during the Franks inquiry, that she said the things being quoted. She certainly professes shock. But then she had to. She also told the inquiry that immediately after the invasion no-one knew whether Britain could retake the islands. “We did not know – we did not know,” she said.

May I provide a translation? “I’m afraid for my job here. If I don’t wriggle out of this I’ll have to resign.”

Never forget that it was her Government’s decision, for reasons of economy, to withdraw prematurely the Antarctic Survey ship HMS Endurance that sent the signal to the Argentines that Britain was no longer interested in its southern domains and gave them cause to believe the Falklands were theirs for the taking (and keeping.)

Many people at the time (some, like the good lady, still to this day) saw this as Thatcher engineering the conflict. If she is innocent of this charge and that act was simple incompetence then she was – and is – still culpable. I well remember David Owen, Foreign Secretary in the previous Labour Government, saying in a television interview that they had at one time despatched a nuclear submarine to the South Atlantic to warn the Argentines off – a fact which must have been in the minds of Civil Servants in Thatcher’s time.

I also remember Mrs Thatcher quoting the Franks Report in her contribution to the Parliamentary debate following its publication that, “No-one could have foreseen that the Argentines would attack at that time and on that day.”

As I said at the time to whoever would listen: I cannot foresee the exact time and day that it will rain again; but I do know that it will.

I really don’t know what our esteemed Prime Minister, Mr Irresponsible, thought he was doing (beyond echoing Angela Merkel) when he said multiculturalism had failed in the UK.

To me he seemed to be saying that all minorities ought to become the same as the rest of us.

This demands the question, what rest of us?

For there is no single British culture. For a start there are four distinct national areas in the UK and the “culture” of each differs from the others. Even within each of the four areas culture differs from place to place. It differs within any city. Even within a town. Or village.

Now, I would agree that people who fail to learn English are going to struggle to come to terms with life in the UK and they should be encouraged to do so, by all means. (If I went to live abroad I would make every effort to learn the language.)

I would also agree that anyone who seeks to commit, or carries out, acts of indiscriminate murder (or murder of any stamp come to that) ought to be prosecuted – but that applies to anyone, not just to “minorities.”

In any case, the problem – if it is a problem – is not existential. A few disaffected, and misguided, youths are not a threat to the fabric of the UK nor to the British way of life; whereas laws implemented in over-reaction most certainly are. Neither have the 7/7 attacks on London Transport nor any subsequent actions been as extensive as those of the IRA were.

[By the way, we are all immigrants. There were no humans in Britain till our ancestors migrated via Europe from Africa. As a consequence, none of us has the right to say that others should not come to make their homes here. What we do have is the right to expect and insist that they obey our laws.]

As for the rest of it, the Prime Minister seemed to me to be suggesting that perhaps everyone should be (let’s take an example) members of the Church of England. This is a strange way to try to win over people who may be disaffected as a result of their perceptions of the prevailing attitudes of most Britons towards them and their religious affiliation. To tell them that to be accepted they must abandon what they think defines them is not going to persuade them that they are wrong. Quite the opposite.

This is a Tory playing to the Tory right – and giving succour to the more extreme right wing. I am strongly reminded of the remarks of Margaret Thatcher (of unblessed memory) about “swamping.”

I have two words here for David Cameron.

Guy Fawkes.

Four hundred years ago it was Roman Catholics who were disaffected and the terrorists of their day (albeit the then government knew every detail of the Gunpowder Plot.) Excepting Northern Ireland (and there any dissidents’ wishes are particular not general – and not in any case dedicated to the overthrow of the British state) most British RCs no longer have a grievance against the government – no more so than any other Britons anyway – and would not resort to violence to relieve themselves of it.

Just give it a few hundred years; problem solved.