dougiedanger

No, if you vote that way it will be because that's what most Tories will do. Don't dress it up as some trendy anti-nationalist stance.

The Craig was indeed a great playground, golf, football and tennis during the day, up again to watch some Welfare football at night, the Craig supporters some of the most colourful in the league. Hughie Douglas effing and blinding on the touchline. What about the great Welfare teams of yore?

Don't know if there has been a thread on this, but put yer memories of summers in Sneck right here, how ye all played out til the sun went down, on yer bogies, 20v20 games of footer, danger goalies, headers and volleys, swimming in the river/canal, BB camp, berry picking, getting p*shed on warm Tennents, the Green hut, the shows, etc, etc. Let's

Which was coolest: TORS or Christies? Used to sh*t masel going into either place. One time, asked in Christies for the new single by the Jam, "Stop."

Not sure what the moral of this tale is.

20 years next year, any plans to mark the anniversary?

Anyone mind the last game at Huntly? Was a sad day.

A young Fraser Taylor third from left, front row.

Way to not take the bait CB.

Aye, twitter are a good side.

Not always! My mum, aunt and granny all attended Telford St in the 50s. Woman did attend apparently but not in the numbers we see now. Certainly wasnt a family activity like we see today either. There was a link to a clip on here a while back, a game at Telford Street in the 50s/60s, and there were surprisingly high numbers of wummin there. And a surprisingly low standard of football.

No offence, Charles, but there are so many faults in your reasoning, and again no offence, but maybe if you weren't so smug about the whole thing, you wouldn't alienate so many potential supporters.

No offence, but it sounds like you are organizing a Sunday school outing. We'll be holding hands to and from the game next, naughty step for an inadvertent fart.

Wasn't his last game for Aberdeen at Telford Street in 1986, for the centenary game?

One more for the yes camp then.

Wish I hadn't clicked on that.

Reductio ad Hilterum. Regarding the cost of the funeral, I believe that Mrs Thatcher had said she didn't want a state funeral. I think David Cameron has a point when he says "I think people would find us a pretty extraordinary country if we didn't properly commemorate with dignity, with seriousness, but with also some fanfare ... the passing of this extraordinary woman. I think not only in Britain would people say, 'You are not doing this properly', but I think the rest of the world would think we were completely wrong." It's worth commemorating someone who had such an impact on the country. All other former Prime Ministers who have died recently have had memorial services.

100% wrong. Some of us remember what went before as our postings make clear, and don't feel the need to cut and paste the usual simplistic anti-Maggie leftie bullsh*t bingo from 'useful_idiots.com' or whatever. Who knew there were so many Tories on this site? Knock yourself out, but out of curiosity, which parts of the Bell article would you class as "anti-Maggie leftie bullsh*t bingo from 'useful_idiots.com' or whatever"?

I suspect those lining up to laud her did not live or were quite young during her rule. It was a truly grim time in every way. Anyway, here is a piece by Ian Bell from The Herald. -------- MARGARET Thatcher did not believe in consensus. She made no bones about that. Criticism, antagonism, even contempt, seemed to invigorate those fixed, sparking eyes. She was the last authentic class warrior in Westminster politics, and she gloried in the combat. Mrs Thatcher treated dissent as affirmation. Accusations of divisiveness were taken as proof: she was right; they – a multitude – were wrong. There was her Britain – conterminous, despite all denials, with a mythologised England – and there was the rest. One way or another, she turned a great many people into “the enemy within”. By the end, there were a lot of us about. Never enough, however. Mrs Thatcher won her elections in 1979, 1983 and 1987 fair and square. If the ability to succeed at the polls is the definition of political stature, she stood as high as any Westminster figure in the 20th century. If the ability to generate abhorrence counts as an achievement, meanwhile, she was an over-achiever. But she was, undeniably, a winner. For all that, the map of Britain traced by her popularity was an odd, distended affair, the true blue leeching away with each minute of latitude, south to north. On May 4, 1979, she stood on the steps of Downing Street and paraphrased the so-called Prayer of St Francis (“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony … Where there is despair, may we bring hope”). For most of Britain north of Watford her policies meant the opposite, in every particular. This was nowhere more true than in Scotland. Few of the eulogies below the Border will mention the fact she single-handedly destroyed a Conservative tradition once embedded in Scottish life. The myth persists she was rejected because of her Englishness – her predecessors encountered no such prejudice – but in truth she was inimical, by conviction. She was detested for her actions, not her accent. Mrs Thatcher was a lucky prime minister. She had the luck to see the Social Democratic Party born in the spring of 1981, stripping support from Labour when her approval ratings were dire. She had the luck – and it was often touch and go – to win the Falklands war, despite 1000 deaths and the gratuitous sinking of the Belgrano, as a prelude to the 1983 election. She had the luck that bequeathed a 90% North Sea output tax when her “productivity miracle” required four million unemployed, and when dole money was due. She had more vastly luck than her predecessor, Ted Heath, with the press. Mrs Thatcher gave extraordinary, still-unexplained, latitude to the ambitions of Rupert Murdoch, and helped him at every turn, generally by bending then-existing media ownership rules. Favours were returned. We have lived with the lurid consequences, the capsizing of democratic pretence, ever since. Despite her elocution class manner, this millionaire’s wife was the first tabloid prime minister. Jingoism; judicious racism (“The British character has done so much for democracy, for law, that if there is any fear it might be swamped, people are going to react …”); a visceral dislike of unions; a contempt for the public sector; a veneration of wealth and a hatred of tax; a suspicion of culture and “permissiveness”; latterly the use of “Europe” as a cipher for xenophobia … redtop culture fitted “Maggie” – never to her face – like a glove puppet. Long before her death, Mrs Thatcher’s admirers were insisting on her greatness. They said she had saved Britain, indeed the western world, with her stubbornness and self-belief. Her enemies, meanwhile, called her a blind ideologue, and heartless with it. Both descriptions were wide of the mark. Ideologues must think: Margaret Thatcher never bothered. Her tendency to translate the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek and the monetarist “Chicago school” into the language of the Grantham grocer’s shop did no service to either. Despite the ravages of her “economic experiment” – manufacturing output cut by one-third, botched privatisations, mass unemployment – she never did balance the books. Contrary to legend, government spending increased in real terms during the 1980s. Income tax cuts, of special benefit to the better off, were not free. Nor did Mrs Thatcher do much – for how could she? – to bring down the Soviet “evil empire”. The bankruptcy of the USSR was self-inflicted, hastened by a futile arms race with the United States. In welcoming Cruise missiles to Greenham Common, and in purchasing the Trident missile system at extraordinary cost, Mrs Thatcher sealed Britain’s subservience to America. Whether her peculiarly intense relationship with Ronald Reagan counted as self-reliant patriotism – the bizarre invasion of Grenada aside – is a matter of partisan opinion. Nevertheless, her ideology, like her geo-political activities, never approached consistency. Mrs Thatcher’s politics was a visceral thing, formed of a belief in a natural order, in the assumption Britain needed restoration, and in a nostalgia for some never-defined golden age. She was, in the purest sense, a reactionary politician. Hence her failure, for long decades, to take apartheid seriously, and her willingness to dismiss Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. Hence her revulsion at the very idea of trade unionism. Hence her embrace of the casino economy. She had the streak of vanity usual in prime ministers, one enlarged by three election victories. Her statements, in power and after, suggest Mrs Thatcher believed herself indispensable. She enjoyed the unlikely idea of the Iron Lady, a suburban Britannia, the politician who was “not for turning”. She felt entitled to invoke Churchill, as though “Winston” had been a blood relation. In truth, her sense of destiny was near-Gaullist. And she had no sense of humour: laboriously, her speechwriters had to explain the Python dead parrot joke. You can judge her, as is customary, by her legacy. The Thatcher years altered Britain for good, if not for better. Part of her bequest was an unthinking complicity, as an article of foreign policy, in America’s adventures. Tony Blair could have followed the example of Labour’s Harold Wilson during the Vietnam years, and spared Britain the Iraq debacle. Instead, Blair, like John Major, did as “Maggie” would have done, and went to war under American command. Mrs Thatcher’s heirs had neither the wish nor the desire, meanwhile, to unpick her privatisation programme, that mass transfer of wealth from the public realm to the private. In the case of the utilities, state assets were exchanged, often at absurd prices, for monopoly capitalism. The myth of choice and a “share-owning democracy” did not outlast her premiership. But the idea the private sector will always perform more efficiently than the public became tenacious thanks to Mrs Thatcher. Modern Britain is in large part her creation. Banking gone bust? Those excesses can be traced to the deregulation of the financial sector, the “Big Bang”, of 1986 and after. The tabloid press run amok? The privileges allowed to Murdoch count as exhibit A. All hope of an independent foreign policy gone? Maggie thought she had a duty, no less, to Ronnie, leader of a foreign country. Housing bubbles and housing crises? Mrs Thatcher believed council schemes bred socialist councils. She sold the houses cheap – but raised £20 billion in the process – and turned property into a British obsession, and generated a froth of asset bubbles. Her economic reforms were parasitic, at every turn, upon the public’s state-secured estate. She put nothing in its place. Her allies and patrons said she “put Britain back on its feet”. The evidence is thin. Those of Mrs Thatcher’s class prospered greatly from her tax cuts in the 1980s. Those in and around the City of London luxuriated in easy money. But wealth, however “created”, did not often trickle down, as theory demanded. The poor paid. Inequalities, narrowing before her arrival, became a fact of British life in the Thatcher years. There were riots, a glut of heroin, and hopelessness. Her insistence on “management’s right to manage” served only to demonstrate, meanwhile, British management left something to be desired. To her slim credit is the fact she opposed rail privatisation. A despiser of trains, she sensed a debacle in the making. History takes a shorthand note. It says: miners, then a poll tax, then (for a northern minority) a prime minister who reneged on the promise of devolution. So official memory and folk memory diverge. Two dozen profitable pits were shut simply to make a point, and kill a trade union. The British state was put at risk just to ease Scottish Tory complaints over ratings valuations, and establish all must “pay their way”. And Scotland was lost, in irredeemable constitutional terms. Mrs Thatcher did not apologise. Commentary upon her funeral will lose that detail. Mrs Thatcher broke Britain. Thanks to her madcap deregulation, the banks went bust in 2008. Thanks to her taste for confrontation – with her own people, to labour the point – trust in the British state was dissevered. Thanks to her indulgence towards redtop papers, media corruption flowed. Her poll tax was class war in bold caps. After Mrs Thatcher, no prime minister enjoyed trust for long. And gross domestic product did not improve. Hindsight will call her comical figure. She destroyed every enemy, and made herself ridiculous. At the end, her ego vast, she called her overthrow “betrayal”. But the truth was mundane: she was less popular than her party; Labour would certainly have won a general election; her rhetoric had become risible. In the last days of 1990, the bombast of 1979 had become unseemly, even among the erstwhile Tory acolytes. The moment had passed. By the end, there were a lot of us about. The unreconciled, the persecuted, the insulted, the poor, or those who simply took it for granted – strange to remember – the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was mad. That’s a legacy. The fact that eccentricity became institutionalised was telling, too. The idea that impersonating Mrs Thatcher was a sane and inevitable course, as an electoral ploy, Labour or Tory, is another of history’s shorthand notes. She picked a fight. Those she conscripted will speak well of her, no doubt. Those who stood on the other side, on painted lines at pitheads, in the reeking Wapping mist, when the City casino echoed like a fair, when the Greenham women were being carted off, when pensioners were intimidated to bolster community charge propaganda, provide other memories. Truth persists. Mrs Thatcher’s every victory was a defeat, as it happens. She altered Britain merely to end Britain. In demanding respect, she never dared hope for love. Her economic miracles left us where we are now: a second-rate power, with Third World debts, and a banking class stripping £14bn in self-awarded bonuses from the commonweal. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, no-one even thinks that a crime. In a grubby, disturbed, discontented country, her spirit prevails. The dirt needs no tramping.

There were virtually no homeless people before her, no one begging on the streets, people had homes and jobs (yes, even in the big, bad 70s) and families could live, modestly, on one salary. The selling off of council homes may have been a good deal for those who benefited, but in most cases those homes were sold at prices well below their value, so the public assets were more or less given away, as they would be in the privatisations of the 80s, again public assets grossly undersold, and for the ultimate benefit of the corporations. Funds used from selling the people's assets were then used to pay for the tax cuts, which bought them their election victories, and this pile of sh*te is hailed as an economic miracle. The "welfare crisis" is but a result of the long-term unemployment that her government instigated and having generations of families who have never had a proper job. The people worked before her, and would do so again if there were proper opportunities.

Just as well yer no driving then.

Not a massive fan of George Galloway, but he pretty much nails it here: “Tramp the Dirt Down” This entry was posted on April 8, 2013, in Britain and tagged Blair, Ireland, Liberal Democrats, London, Manufacture Industry, Miners, New Labour, Poll Tax, Privatisation, Thatcher, Tory. Bookmark the permalink. The old saw that one shouldn’t speak ill of the recently dead cannot possibly apply to controversial figures in public life. It certainly didn’t apply to President Hugo Chavez who predeceased Margaret Thatcher amidst a blizzard of abuse. The main reason it must not preclude entering the lists amidst a wave of hagiographic sycophantic tosh of the kind that has engulfed Britain these last hours is that otherwise the hagiographers will have the field to themselves. Every controversial divisive deadly thing that Thatcher did will be placed in soft focus, bathed in a rose-coloured light, and provide a first draft of history that will be, simply, wrong. As is now well-known, I refused to do that today on the demise of a wicked woman who tore apart what remained good about my country, and set an agenda which has been followed, more or less, by all of her successors. I certainly wasn’t prepared to leave the obituaries to those who profited from her rule or those who have aped her ever since. So here is my own memory of Thatcher and what she did in her time on this earth. On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste. Before Thatcher, every primary school pupil received 1/3 of a pint of milk every morning. For some it was the difference between breakfast and no breakfast. I was sometimes one of those. I grew up in a brief period of social democracy in Britain, being dosed by the state with free cod-liver oil, orange juice and malt to build up my strength. Having been born in a slum tenement into a one-room attic in an Irish immigrant area, I needed all of that and more. And like millions I got it, until Thatcher took it away. She became the Conservative leader after Heath’s two electoral defeats in 1974 and his subsequent resignation. She was a new type of Tory leader, entirely lacking in anything resembling “noblesse oblige”. She was nasty, brutish and short of the class previously thought obligatory in Britain amongst leaders of the ruling elite. She was vulgar, money-worshipping, and blasphemous. She believed the important part of the Biblical story of the “Good Samaritan” was not that he refused to pass by the suffering on the other side of the road but that he had “loadsamoney”. In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was “no such thing as society”…”only individuals” As the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, in one of his better efforts, retorted: “No such thing as society? Only individuals? No such thing as honouring other people’s parents? No such thing as cherishing other people’s children? No such thing as us and always? Just ME and NOW? ME and NOW?” She was the living embodiment of Marx’s prediction that under capitalism “all that is solid will melt into air… all that is sacred will be profaned” Upon her election as prime minister (with just 40% of the vote, her position ensured by the treacherous defection from the Labour cause of the rats now squirming on the Liberal-Democrat ship) she set about “transforming” Britain allright. She privatised Britain’s key industries, enriching her friends, and robbing the public of their birthright. When she took over “Financial Services” represented 3% of the British economy; when she left office it was 40%. She destroyed the coal industry, the steel, car, bus and motor-cycle manufacturing, truck and bus-making, ship-building and print-industry, the railway workshops… she destroyed more than a third of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever achieved. She did this not just because she prefered the spivs and gamblers in the city -they were her kind of people. But because above all, she hated trades unionism, and was determined to destroy it. I was a leading member of the Scottish Labour Party at the time she came into office, and a full-time Labour organiser. Scotland was to become an industrial wasteland in the first years of her rule. I was also, from 1973, a member of the then Transport and General Workers Union, one of her key targets – especially our Docks section. Importantly, for me, I was an honorary member of the National Union of Mineworkers too. In all of these capacities I was a front-line short-sword fighter in the rearguard action against Thatcherism. I fought her at Bathgate, at Linwood, when she was sacking the automotive industry. I fought her at Wapping – every Saturday night when she destroyed the Print workers on behalf of her friend, the organised crime firm owner, Rupert Murdoch. I fought every day of the Miners strike when she destroyed the Miners Union and the communities they represented. I fought her at Timex in Dundee at Massey Ferguson in Kilmarnock, and at the aluminium smelter in Invergordon. I fought against her poll tax – imposed first in Scotland – as a refusenik of the most iniquitous tax in Britain since mediaeval times, the tax which ended in flames – literally – whilst I was on the platform at Trafalgar Square. And which finally produced her political demise. And I toured – as a political activist – the desolation in Britain’s post-industrial distressed areas which she left behind. The City of London – deregulated by her – boomed whilst the coalfields and steel areas sank into penury. I saw the rusted factories the flooded mines the idle shipyards and the devilish results of millions of newly and enforced idle hands. I faced her in parliament from 1987 as well, on these and other issues. You see it wasn’t just Britain that Thatcher made bleed. Her withdrawal of political status from Irish republican prisoners and her brutal, securocratic, militarisation of the situation in the north led to much additional suffering in Ireland. State collusion in the murder of Catholics became endemic during her rule. And ten young men were starved to death for the restoration of political status, before our eyes in her dungeons. She finally died on the anniversary of their leader, Bobby Sands, being elected to parliament as he lay on his death-bed. During the Falklands War, she sent hundreds of young Argentinian conscripts to a watery grave when she shot the Argentine warship the Belgrano in the back – as it was speeding away from the conflict. She mercilessly exploited the sacrifice of them, and our own soldiers sailors and airmen, to save her own political skin. A lot of brave men had to leave their guts on Goose Green to keep Thatcher in power. She pushed her alter ego – the semi-imbecilic US president Ronald Reagan – into Cold War fanaticism and burgeoning expenditure on more and more terrifying weapons – many of them stationed on our soil. She pushed his successor George Bush Sen into the first Iraq War. I was there, I saw her lips move, when she described Nelson Mandela as a “common terrorist”. She continued to recognise the genocidal and deposed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia – insisting that Pol Pot was the real and recognised leader of the Cambodians, even as they counted his victims in millions. And she was the author of the policy of military, political, diplomatic and media support of the Afghan obscurantists who became the Taliban and Al Qaeda. She even produced them on the platform of the Tory Party conference, hailing them as “freedom-fighters”. I was one of the last men standing in parliament opposing this immoral policy of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. On the eve of the triumph of these “freedom Fighters” I told Thatcher to her face; “You have opened the gates for the barbarians….and a long dark night will now descend upon the people of Afghanistan”. I never said a truer word. I hated Margaret Thatcher for what seems like all my life. I hated her more than I hated anyone – until the mass murderer Tony Blair came along. It would have been utter hypocrisy for me to have remained silent about her crimes today whilst the political class – including New Labour – poured honeyed words, lies actually, over her blood-spattered record. I could not do it. I believe I spoke for millions. The wicked witch is dead. Tramp the dirt down. George Galloway MP House of Commons

Oh FFS, we've unearthed the Scottish Tory.