Mrs Thatcher could do it, so why can't Gordon Brown?

 

Mrs T realised that she had to save money by pruning the non-productive sector. So she did so ruthlessly as soon as she became Prime Minister.

One of her first moves on taking office in May was to start cutting Civil Service jobs. The Government machine needed cutting by at least 5 per cent, she insisted, but ideally closer to 20 per cent.

And she certainly was not to be turned by anyone.

Any minister who tried to block her was given short shrift. “This paper is much too sketchy and cannot possibly be included,” she wrote on a draft paper in which Christopher Soames, the Lord President of the Council, suggested that the mass redundancies planned by the Prime Minister were less than prudent. “What are we doing with 566,000 that can’t be done with 500,000?”

I wonder how she would treat the EU nowadays if she had only known what an Edifice of corruption and power it would become. Maybe she would have remembered this affair :

Mrs Thatcher’s forthright, if pragmatic, style was also evident in her dealings with Rhodesia after the April 1979 election, which resulted in a power-sharing arrangement that involved neither of the main nationalist parties. When it was suggested that Lord Harlech, emissary to Rhodesia, should meet the Patriotic Front there, she scribbled: “No! Please do not meet with the ‘Patriotic Front’. I have never done business with terrorists until they become prime ministers.”

But then again she didn't have to satisfy any Union Paymasters and their old style communist ideas

Thankyou to The Times