Why is Margaret Thatcher so hated?

Because she sold away our future and created a Britain for the rich.

She was good at PR and despite appearing to be a marvellous conviction politician, in reality a lot of her image was carefully contrived and manufactured, ranging from her voice and appearance through to her background (her lower-middle-classness was exaggerated) and solidity of her views (her speech writing teams often struggled to keep up with her frequent shifts of policy), so that the "Thatcher" one thinks of quickly is largely a result of production.

The real Maggie is still to come out and time will tell. At least part of what she did is now utterly misrepresented by the Tory Right. For example, she was actually quite pro-Europe in her policies and she initiated all of the current close integration with the EU. The banging on about getting rebates and saying no to those ghastly Europeans was just table-thumping for the Tory conference idiots, but to listen to right-wing Tory MPs now, you'd think she'd never agreed to Maastricht and ever-closer Union, which in fact she did.

She was also a bit less rampantly right-wing in some economic areas than she is portrayed.

It is true though that she was very anti-union and she constantly feather-bedded the City. Her circles of close friends were people like financiers, international wealthy, etc. She was, like Cameron, a representative of the more extreme parts of the City money-making machine, in hiding as a regular politician. Her primary goals, privatisation and relaxation of the City regulation, were carried through and were her proudest personal achievements. The Falklands and Europe-bashing were side-shows.

Let me guess......your someone who has never worked before and is currently a student at university?

When you leave your bubble and start working you will soon realise that being proactive and making money is one of the most important things of life. but as you are in a current bubble of everything anti - money, anti - city etc.. you will continue to be deluded. Time to wake up pal.

The primary problem was that she kept going for slightly too long, alientating her fans and making it so that people who would traditionally have defended her became tired of her as she became increasingly out of touch and bereft of the good ideas which she had brought at the beginning of her time in office. After 1988 she was still very popular, had won an election comfortably and was in a good position to give control over to her successor as her husband had suggested, but chose to remain in the job for as long as possible and so got 2 years which turned her from a very respected prime minister to one that no one was willing to support.

The issue was that she then started doing things which were very controversial which she believed in strongly, like the poll tax, and the problem became that her followers no longer had a strong reason to defend her, as she was supposedly going to go soon and it wasnt worth sullying their career as a result. That kinda failed though.

Another problem is that views on her are very geographically isolated. The southeast, which benefited massively and where many of the people who supported her ended up moving to, remains very positive towards her, while northern towns and scotland see her as something close to the devil. Neither side are really able to communicate, as her detractors see her supporters as selfish while the south is disgusted by the treatment and lack of respect accorded to a very old woman who made great personal and economic sacrifices for the nation.

I have heard people on the tube talking about how "bad" Thatcher was. When I asked them how was she bad, they were unable to say.

Sounds perfectly good to me to be honest.

Sure it's all well and good if you're bourgeois. If you're poor as ****, like me for example, or even just not well off, like the most of the population, you're much worse off.

No war but class war.

It's sad that many people take their parents views as their own rather than retaining an open mind (why would you only research the negatives and not the positives).

Thatcher may not have been perfect but she verged on brilliance.

By the time Thatcher came to power the unions had political control and we had vast inefficient publicly owned industries which employed people simply for the sake of hiding unemployment and were payed for by shafting the taxpayer. On a simplistic level many lefties hate her simply because she comprehensively won the argument for capitalism versus socialism, she crushed the unions, made Labour unelectable until they loosely adopted neo-liberalism and set in place the conditions for 'The Great Moderation'.

Many of the policies and ideas she had were great, based around greater private provision and lower taxes.

Her main failings in my mind were not seeing some policies through to the end result and two examples come to mind..

1) The right to buy was great in itself but no incentive to replace the houses coming off the market was made, this in part led to the supply issues we have today

2) Whilst manufacturing was hit there was again no incentive for it to modernise (too dependent on finance)

On the whole i am a big supporter of hers, some intellectual lefties will oppose her actual policies but most are blinded by flawed socialist ideals or closed mindedness.