There was a mass student revolt against Maggie, the students were being made to pay some thing towards public services and they did not like it one little bit. Maggie was there at the time she she was the one to blame with every thing that went wrong in a students life. The Miners did not like it as she had bested them for a change. Eddie Shah had broken the cosy printers monopoly on labour and cost when he brought in new print technology and broke the Fleet Street Unions.
The Dockers were fighting against the use of the big ship containers which they had no control over, and the run down of London Docks.
She stopped pouring money into Motor manufacturing so that the Unions could walk out at a drop of a hat.
She made many people take responsibility for them selfs which they did not like.
This is getting bloody silly. The bottom line is, she wasn't as popular as you make out, in fact she was hated with a passion by many people. As for the most popular PM's since Churchill, popular for whom? Certainly not the working people in Britain.
Thatcher along with hubby Denis and son Mark were involved in a lot of dodgy dealings.
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1991/06/thatcher199106?currentPage=5
Also in 1981, Denis and Mark Thatcher got embroiled in a controversial building contract in Oman. Mrs. Thatcher was making an official visit there during the same time that a British construction company, Cementation International, was bidding on a billion-dollar university complex. Mark, who was working as a consultant for Cementation, showed up as well. Mrs. Thatcher lobbied on behalf of the company, and after it won the contract, Mark reaped a sizable fee. For his part, Denis Thatcher was chairman of a company that had a 50 percent interest in a bid to subcontract to Cementation. After The Observer broke the story in 1984, Mrs. Thatcher and her government were criticized in Parliament for the striking conflict of interest. Later The Sunday Times revealed that Denis was a co-signatory on the bank account in which Mark’s fee was deposited.
These days, Denis, who spends one week out of four in the U.S., is in business with some heavily investigated characters. One of his major ventures—he serves as deputy chairman—is with Attwoods, a British waste-management concern. Municipal garbage contracts and landfills in high-growth areas like Florida are a lucrative business, and a substantial portion of Attwoods’ profit comes from an American subsidiary, Industrial Waste Services in Miami. When Attwoods acquired I.W.S. in 1984, it was owned by Jack R. Casagrande and Ralph Velocci and some of their relatives; as part of the sale, these relatives received Attwoods stock, and Casagrande and Velocci have joined Denis Thatcher on the Attwoods board. Casagrande and Velocci come from three generations involved in the garbage trade in New Jersey and New York, where another company Casagrande has an interest in was charged with price-fixing and illegal property-rights schemes. A 1986 report from Maurice Hinchey, chairman of the New York State Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee, stated that organized crime is “a dominating presence” in the state’s garbage industry.
“One of the great advantages for I.W.S. was to be subsumed under a British corporation which had the luster of the Thatcher name,” says Alan Block, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of a book on organized crime’s ties to the waste industry. F.B.I. reports refer to I.W.S.’s business dealings with convicted mob associate Mel Cooper, now serving twenty-five years in prison for racketeering. Cooper ran a garbage-equipment leasing operation in New York that was alleged to be a front for loan-sharking operations connected to the Gambino, Genovese, and Colombo crime families.
While Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, unofficial Downing Street and Attwoods sources would reportedly dismiss any news accounts of the company’s activities by asking the rhetorical question “Do you think British intelligence would allow Denis Thatcher to take a job that could be linked to the Mafia?” Hinchey claims that Scotland Yard, at least, did inquire about Attwoods and I.W.S. “I’ve seen documents from British authorities,” he says. “They knew about these things and were frustrated about it.” Yet British authorities apparently did not contact others who could have aided them. Says Robert Waters, at the time an assistant state attorney in Florida’s Organized Crime and Public Corruption Unit, “I was the one conducting the bribery investigation, and nobody from the British government ever contacted me or any of the detectives.”
Then we get to darling Mark Thatcher. As the saying goes, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Thatcher
Thatcher is alleged by a Saudi dissident, Mohammed al Khilewi, as well as by former Labour MP Tam Dalyell, and The Guardian newspaper, to have received a multimillion-pound commission on the £20,000,000,000 Al Yamamah arms contract with Saudi Arabia, which his mother signed in 1985 as Prime Minister. According to The Guardian, "Sir Mark has always denied receiving this payment or exploiting his mother's connections in business dealings."
In 1998 South African authorities investigated his firm for running loan shark operations. A company owned by Sir Mark offered unofficial small loans to hundreds of police officers, military personnel and civil servants. When they defaulted on the loans they were pursued by debt collectors and charged 20% interest rates, according to the Star of Johannesburg.
Other widely reported Thatcher embarrassments include allegations of U.S. tax evasion (a criminal case was eventually dropped) and a racketeering case in Texas which was settled out of court. According to The Daily Telegraph of 26 August 2004, "In 1998, he was at the centre of a scandal after he lent huge sums of money at exorbitant interest rates to more than 900 local police officers and civil servants in Cape Town. He admitted lending the cash but insisted that he had done nothing wrong. He is also thought to have profited from contracts to supply aviation fuel in various African countries."
On 25 August 2004, Thatcher was arrested at home in Constantia, Cape Town, South Africa. He was charged later that day with contravening two sections of South Africa's "Foreign Military Assistance Act", which bans South African residents from taking part in any foreign military activity. The charges related to "possible funding and logistical assistance in relation to [an] attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea" organized by Thatcher's friend, Simon Mann. He was released on bail of 2 million rand and spent a period of time under house arrest, but was bailed to London to live with his widowed mother while his wife and children moved to the family's home in Dallas, Texas.
On 24 November 2004, the Cape Town High Court upheld a subpoena from the South African Justice Ministry that required him to answer under oath questions from Equatorial Guinean authorities regarding the alleged coup attempt. He was due to face questioning on 25 November 2004, regarding offences under the South African Foreign Military Assistance Act; however, these proceedings were later postponed until 8 April 2005. Ultimately, following a process of plea bargaining, Thatcher pleaded guilty to negligence in investing in an aircraft "without taking proper investigations into what it would be used for". Thatcher admitted in court that he had paid the money, but said he was under the impression it was going to be invested in an air ambulance service to help the impoverished of Africa. This explanation was not believed by the judge and he was fined three million rand (approximately $500,000) and received a four-year suspended jail sentence.
On 3 April 2005, Sir Mark, then living with his mother in London, announced that his family home will be in Europe after he was refused a residence visa to live in the United States as a result of his guilty plea in the Equatorial Guinea affair. His children, he stated, will be educated in the United States.[citation needed]
Under the headline "Mark Thatcher — undesirable in Monaco?" French newspaper Le Figaro reported on 20 December 2005:
"Margaret Thatcher's son, the former British prime minister's nefarious offspring, will not be installing himself in the principality of Monaco as he hoped." A spokesman for Prince Albert told Le Figaro that Sir Mark's residency card would not be renewed. "He has a temporary residency card valid for one year. It will not be renewed when it expires in the second half of 2006 and he will have to leave." The spokesman, Armand Deus, added: "I cannot say why it will not be renewed. But the Prince made things very clear during his investiture in July when he said that ethics will be at the centre of life in Monaco."
In Equatorial Guinea in June 2008, Simon Mann claimed during his trial testimony that Thatcher, now resident in Spain, "was not just an investor, he came completely on board and became a part of the management team" of the coup plot.
I don't know whom you are trying to convince about the attributes of Thatcher and Thatcher ism, because you will never convince me in a million years that she was as popular as you think she was.
I have no doubt you will find some excuse for her and her family. Don't waste your time, I have neither the time nor the patience. If you want to argue politics, go the political forum.