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Edward Heath dies
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
As you will have heard, the former Conservative PM Sir Edward Heath died yesterday. His major achievement during his premiership was to take Britain into Europe.
Obituary
Any thoughts on the man? As Tory MPs (and PMs) go he was a decent chap I think...
And his "rejoice!" comments regarding Thatcher's ousting from office were vintage...
Obituary
Any thoughts on the man? As Tory MPs (and PMs) go he was a decent chap I think...
And his "rejoice!" comments regarding Thatcher's ousting from office were vintage...
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
Old old politics teacher once served him a pint though.
Unlike most politicians, he seems to admit as much in his later years.
To be honest though, in spite of all the "cannot-speak-ill-of-the-dead" comments in the past few hours, I think he was a bit of an irrelevance.
The 'troubles' in Northern Ireland got far worse under his leadership - partially due to his laissez-faire attitude and partially when he did get involved he seemed to make the worst possible decisions.
He brought us into the Common Market on such poor terms that even after being rengotiated the effects are still with us today, he failed to address economic decline. And on going into an election on 'Who governs Britian' he found out it wasn't him.
I'm sure he was a decent man, but he was a political failure and a pretty poor PM.
Although I liked and had a lot more sympathy for Jim Callaghan and he got a lot more coverage when he died earlier this year, it just seems a bit sad. Incidentally both men are covered in a module I just did under the heading "The Politics of Failure"! (Bit harsh IMHO)
It'll be like the Queen dying when Maggie pops her clogs though, they'll interrupt all normal programming and a good few acres of Amazon rainforest will go on stories about her.
was that because of him or the unions?
They'll probably be past there sell by date and won't explode.
RIP anyhow.
But he wasn't married. Probably a closet batty man.
What? The Prime Minister and top ministers lying to get us into an institution which the vast majority of people in the UK to some extent are suspisous off? And on terms so bad the next Prime Minister had to demand they be altered - with knock on effects for the next twenty years.
Even if joining the EEC (not the EU) was a good idea in principle, surely the handling off it by Heath was crass, undemocratic and devisive.
I'm not sure I've seen many other benefits to the UK.
Now if I was Southern Irish or one of the other historically poorer European countries I might see benefits. Wasn't one of the big selling point for Spain was that 3 in 10 roads were built with European (ie British, French and German) money? But as a Brit the benefits seem marginal to me and the economic advantages have to be weighted against the social and political disadvantages.