With the announcement today that Sir Alex Ferguson will be retiring as manager of Manchester United at the end of the 2012/13 season after 26 years in the job, Left Foot Forward thought it fitting to look at some of Sir Alex’s best political quotes.
Amid the concerted attempts to reinvent the Thatcher years in recent days, an intriguing, counter-intuitive claim has been doing the rounds that rather than being the enemy of coal mining Margaret Thatcher was actually kinder to the industry than previous governments.
Going by a new poll from YouGov, the proposition that we are “all Thatcherites now” appears flawed: some of the central tenets of Thatcherism are deeply unpopular with the public.
Amidst the pomp and the circumstance of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral today, across the nations the sight of her coffin, draped in the union jack, is doing little to quash the bitterness felt towards her tenure at Number 10.
Considering so many divisive and controversial figures have in the past received a state funeral, why deny Margaret Thatcher one?
Writing in The Times yesterday (£), Nigel Farage claimed that if Margaret Thatcher was still leader of the Conservative Party there would be no need for Ukip. More specifically he said: “Had she still been in power in 1992, there would have been a referendum on [the Maastricht] treaty, and the need for UKIP would probably never have arisen.”
At some point during the past three years we’ve all heard the cliche that there’s “no money left”. Obviously there is – there’s never no money left or else the country would grind to a complete halt – but the phrase has become accepted wisdom due in large part to the success of the government in popularising the idea.
Much has been asked about Margaret Thatcher’s contribution to feminism during the past week. But what of lesbian and gay equality? Two moments last week made me wonder.
It is a curious irony that, with the death of Margaret Thatcher and the release of Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45, the two great ideological consensuses of the 20th century should return to sharp focus at the same time.
The Conservative Party has been in steady decline since the Second World War, as the graph below depicting the Conservative share of the vote since the turn of last century shows.
