Well it's number one on iTunes, and I imagine it's quite likely to be number one in the official chart at the end of the week. Unless they fix it like they did with God Save the Queen.
Insofar as celebrities make political statements every day, if one were to justify political threads in the TV/media forum on that basis, then this is essentially just another TNZ now.
The BBC has decided that they won't play the full song, just a small clip: "The BBC finds this campaign distasteful but does not believe the record should be banned. On Sunday, the Radio 1 Chart Show will contain a news item explaining why the song is in the charts during which a short clip will be played as it has been in some of our news programmes."
A telling phrase, the same one used when banning the speech of Sinn Fein representatives from being broadcast on the Beeb. Which ended up just being a nice boost for the VO actors. State subsidy! I see there's some feeble 'answer' effort in a song called (I'm In Love With) Margaret Thatcher by an outfit called The Notsensibles: I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher I'm in love ...with Maggie T I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher I'm in love ...with Maggie T Oh Margaret Thatcher is so sexy She's the girl for you and me I go red when she's on the telly 'Cos I think she fancies me I suspect she might be happier with 'Ding Dong'.
She had a lot of enemies in music, but all things considered, both they and the UK are far better off than being Greece, which pretty much is what the UK would look like if she hadn't radically changed its course: Little or no industry, unemployment at 27%, everyone dependent on state pensions and payments, and the government held hostage to union demands. I'm sure that any Greek politician who takes the harsh steps necessary to get that country back on track will become the most hated man in his own country, despised because he doesn't care about the people... unlike multi-millionaire rock stars who've snorted up half of Columbia and made a fortune bitching about Margaret Thatcher. ^_^ Case in point: link
I'm sorry, but avoiding the situation in Greece is not an excuse for what she did the United Kingdom. In fact, what she did made things even worse, for manufacturing is now (mostly) gone (except for a few firms like Honda, and Toyota) unemployment is just as worse as in Greece, and things generally are shit all over the UK-just like Greece. Thatcher was just a silly woman with no real idea of how to build anything except to do the same crap that Reagan/Bush and Byron Muldoon did, and I won't mourn her-I will mourn for the shitty way she destroyed a people and a nation.
^ Um, you realize that without her, or the much needed reforms, you'd be on par with Paraguay now? Thankfully, the UK now has a 7.8 percent unemployment rate. Greece has a 27 or 28 percent unemployment rate. Great Britain was the sick man of Europe, and all of Europe was sick. France, Germany, and most of the rest of it were also suffering huge drops in per-capita GDP the same years that punk rockers were blaming Thatcher for the pain. At the time, the government ran most of the major industries and the government was beholden to Marxist-run labor unions (which thankfully the US didn't have). Economically, the UK might as well started filling out a membership application for the Soviet Bloc. Look around the modern world economy. Do you see a bunch of big government manufacturing jobs or a huge demand for British coal? Britain had to grow up and enter the modern world economy.
Soem thoughts. Russell Brand is a hell of a lot smarter than I gave him credit for. Instead of the Oz version we should be using this version, it's much better: [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvDFTiHQfU[/yt] More love for that version! And finally a cartoon from the wonderfully vitriolic Steve Bell:
Most people don't object to the general idea that change was necessary from the setup in the '70s. It's the way in which entire communities were just basically switched off with no real eye to the very predictable fallout. You closed a pit and that saved the State money. But it also put ancillary businesses out of action and so more people in that area lost their jobs. With so much less disposable income in the community, even more businesses were hit and even more people in that area lost their jobs. Other countries around the world underwent deindustrialisation without anything like the same impact, because it's possible to plan ahead and make contingencies for the fallout. That's the real source of people's ire. There are other issues with Thatcher - the ambivalence about South Africa, the poll tax, the SAS training the Khmer Rouge, to name a few. tl;dr it's not necessary to think the NUM was right in order to think that Thatcher was wrong.
It takes two to tango, remember the unions had a part to play as well. Some where more militant than others when it came to reform. Did Thatcher get everything right of course not, no one does. But by the same token not everything she did was wrong. And something needed to be done when she became PM. So it's 1979 you've just become PM, the country is in dire shape. What to you do to fix it? Now know one knows if things had been done differently if the country would be in better shape today or if it would be in worse shape. As for the Community Charge (aka Poll Tax) it was based on the idea that every adult in the UK paid. So every adult within a local authority would pay the same rate, which in theory sounds fair. (and if you were unemployed/ a student/ low income) you would pay less. The system prior to it and what we have now is based on property, so with the community charge you might have paid more because there was 3 adults in the house. Now of course like with any tax system it had it's pros and cons.
Bollocks - it was a completely regressive tax and you are trying to whitewash history when you claim that you paid less if you were on a low-income - that is simply untrue, the only exceptions were students, OAPs and the unemployed.