Thatcher: Leader who achieved harmony, faith and hope

From: Peter Neal, Oxford Court, Cleethorpes.

THE untimely and sad death of Margaret Thatcher has rightly brought tributes from her admirers the world over. Britain has lost its longest-serving peacetime Prime Minister and the most influential since Winston Churchill.

Britain has lost an outstanding, dynamic leader whose brand of popular capitalism and aspirational premiership transformed this country from the sick man of Europe in 1979 to leading the world by the time she left office in 1990.

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After the 1979 General Election success, Margaret Thatcher quoted famously from St Francis of Assisi: “Where there is discord may we bring harmony, where there is error may we bring truth, where there is doubt may we bring faith and where there is despair may we bring hope.”

Throughout her esteemed leadership she succeeded assiduously in achieving harmony, truth, faith and hope while consigning discord, error, doubt and despair to the past.

Dictators came and went as General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill were defeated by the resolve of the Iron Lady.

Margaret Thatcher was responsible for a unique brand of popular people’s capitalism turning the country into a property and share-owning democracy.

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Margaret Thatcher may have left us but she will never be forgotten.

From: Phil Hanson, Beechmount Close, Baildon, Shipley.

I FOUND the celebrations of the death of Margaret Thatcher in Goldthorpe and Easington both sad and one sided in the way the BBC in particular reported.

For while there were people in these villages who clearly have found life after coal hard to adapt to, they have had a lot of taxpayers’ cash to forge a new life after coal.

A look at the National Audit Office website clearly shows that in the years after closure, we spent £1.1bn to help the transition to new work.

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This is a massive amount of cash, so why are these people still looking back and worse still, living in the past? I suspect they are happier there than taking responsibility for their lives and moving on like the rest of us have over the years.

From: William Snowden, Butterbowl Gardens, Farnley Ring Road, Leeds.

MJ Thompson (Yorkshire Post, April 20) takes issues with Sir Bernard Ingham for describing those who celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher as having “crawled out of the woodwork”. I agree. It was unkind... to the comparatively innocuous woodlouse. Given the truly vile and repugnant nature of their behaviour, it would perhaps have been more apt to draw an analogy with the contents of a cesspit.

But the lady, in death as in life, was impervious to such filth.

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And yet, their shameless behaviour was, in a curiously perverse way, a testament to her enduring legacy: the ultimate defeat of the Left, which is now reduced to a pathetic, foul-mouthed rabble shouting abuse at the funeral cortege of a great Briton.

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