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Rob Ford's Toronto

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MTown said:
I mostly said that because for my friends and I Churchill is a bit of a mythological cigar chomping, liquour swilling anti-Nazi. I wear a button of his bust imposed on a Union Jack on my skiing toque to give me special skiing powers. ;)
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He was definitely the right man, for the right time - a great man. But what did he accomplish in the 1950s? And he really screwed up in Malaya. On the other hand, after he was PM, and into his 80s, he returned to writing, with some very good material, including finally completing his epic "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples". Perhaps Attlee shouldn't have called the 1951 election (after winning the 1950 election), and Churchill should have stuck to writing! :)

Enough of discussing great leaders.

Back to the bottom of the heap. With his illness, and Rob Ford stopped beating his wife?
 
There might be more to discuss at the next council meeting, when he loses a bunch of 42-1 votes and wants everything to be recorded.
 
inyyz said:
Because it's better to reminisce than to start a discussion about UK politics? I suppose we are all just waiting for some actual "news"
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Yeah. It's nice to know people are still monitoring the thread. There will be news to discuss sooner or later.
 
AlbertHWagstaff said:
Yes, Rob saved us during the War on the Car: "We shall fight in the sidestreets, we shall fight on the expressways, we shall fight in the bike lanes, we shall never surrender!"
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For all his talk about the 'war on the car' and vowing to end it, Ford did surprisingly little to change anything about it, or anything else.

I'll say this much about Thatcher. I was no fan of hers while I was growing up in the UK in the '70s and '80s, but in hindsight she may have been forward-thinking in a way that was not recognized at the time. The coal and steel industries probably could not have survived and remained competitive (they probably ceased to be competitive some time in the '70s). Their time was up.

However, her obstinacy worked as much in her favour as it did to her disadvantage. Her solution to the problems in the car industry was to try to convince Ford to buy up BL/Austin Rover (which died a prolonged death, aside from the bits picked up by other manufacturers) and not much else. Privatizing the railways doesn't seem to have made things any better.

She didn't do much regarding the Northern Ireland situation other than exacerbate it out of sheer stubbornness, and she essentially dismantled local democracy in the greater London area out of spite.

She also had a mercenary streak - while many Brits would credit her at least with saving the Falklands (a place most had never heard of before), the conflict with Argentina came just a few years after her own efforts to secretly lease the islands to that very country!
 
the lemur said:
However, her obstinacy worked as much in her favour as it did to her disadvantage. Her solution to the problems in the car industry was to try to convince Ford to buy up BL/Austin Rover (which died a prolonged death, aside from the bits picked up by other manufacturers) and not much else. Privatizing the railways doesn't seem to have made things any better.

She didn't do much regarding the Northern Ireland situation other than exacerbate it out of sheer stubbornness, and she essentially dismantled local democracy in the greater London area out of spite.
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Well, I'll give you most of those. Though perhaps if they had sold Longbridge to Ford in the 1980s, then that would have been a better solution. Rover was still churning out some pretty decent cars - I was quite impressed by a 1997 Rover 800 I rented one trip. I'm not sure there was any saving it though.

Though did Thatcher hurt the car industry? If you look at British car production from the 1950s to 2010, it peaked in the early 1970s, and then collapsed through the 1970s, bottoming out in 1980 as Thatcher came to power. It then climbed steadily, before peaking again in 1999. Car production steadily climbed during Thatcher, and later Major's time. Looks more like Thatcher saved the UK car industry, if anything.

annual1_450x318.jpg
From blogs.thisismoney.co.uk/2009/09/chart-of-the-day-uk-car-manufacturing.html

Looks more like it's Labour that has the war on the car! :)
 

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AlbertHWagstaff said:
Yes, Rob saved us during the War on the Car: "We shall fight in the sidestreets, we shall fight on the expressways, we shall fight in the bike lanes, we shall never surrender!"
Click to expand...

Great, now I have to clean the keyboard! :D
 
nfitz said:
Well, I'll give you most of those. Though perhaps if they had sold Longbridge to Ford in the 1980s, then that would have been a better solution. Rover was still churning out some pretty decent cars - I was quite impressed by a 1997 Rover 800 I rented one trip. I'm not sure there was any saving it though.

Though did Thatcher hurt the car industry? If you look at British car production from the 1950s to 2010, it peaked in the early 1970s, and then collapsed through the 1970s, bottoming out in 1980 as Thatcher came to power. It then climbed steadily, before peaking again in 1999. Car production steadily climbed during Thatcher, and later Major's time. Looks more like Thatcher saved the UK car industry, if anything.

View attachment 40654
From blogs.thisismoney.co.uk/2009/09/chart-of-the-day-uk-car-manufacturing.html

Looks more like it's Labour that has the war on the car! :)
Click to expand...

No, Thatcher didn't really hurt the car industry. I'm sure she meant for it to do better, since BL was partly government-owned, but I'm not sure what she herself did to help. But where Ford and Vauxhall (GM) did what they needed to do to keep their Detroit overlords happy, BL/Austin Rover was really its worst enemy. Dozens of strikes (or 'industrial action' as it's still charmingly referred to) in the '70s and declining quality did it in, along with bizarre decisions that rendered it uncompetitive, like giving the same model to different brand divisions that actually didn't want to cooperate with each other, and designing cars intended to be hatchbacks and then copping out so they were actually slope-backed sedans. What really helped Austin Rover pull through for a while was working with Honda. Everything else was just cutting back to survive.
 
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