A person, not a something, has died and before he's even cold we're slagging him on a public forum - so apologies to his family if they happen to read this and it causes them even more upset than they no doubt are suffering at this moment.
Stalin once said ' if one person dies it's a tragedy, but if a million die it's just a statistic ' I think we should feel a little bit the same here for the sake of his family.
But I'm afraid I'm a little bit with OKC and others on this.
I'm German, lived down here for a couple of decades after a few years training and being based in the UK, still have relatives who are more or less British in the UK, never worked for BA, and had a reasonably profitable flying career until getting the elbow from the beancounters. So although perhaps I should keep out of this one, it's difficult not to join in.
Whether he was a good and likeable man in person, in business or in private, or whether he was a complete and utter sh*t I have no idea and will never know.....but to me he will always remain as one of the symbols of Thatcherism and all that was wrong with it. One of the chosen few of her friends and business cronies who made vast fortunes out of the suffering of the millions they threw on the scrapheap with their ' f*ck tomorrow' short-termism and ' on yer bike' economics and mentality....dogma....disrespect....and a basic lack of sympathy and decency to people whose lives were overturned in the name profit.....profit...... profit......
In retrospect, these people were the prototypes for what we have seen in the CIS the past decade and it would be interesting to draw up a list ( maybe it already exists ? ) of the millions and millions accumulated by these cronies as they were parachuted into these privatisations on a regular basis - I actually live close by three of them down here....all complete hoorays whose main asset appears to have been to have the 'front' to pay themselves increasingly huge bonuses for adding thousands to the unemployement lists.
OK, it seems the UK has been going forward whilst the rest of us here in Europe have been going backwards the past few years, and no doubt someone will reply ( welcomed ) that it's all based on what the Dictator-ess accomplished during those years, but in this particular case, was BA a better airline after their antics ?
Depends on whether you were lucky enough to have had enough spare social security to have become a shareholder when the company, like so many others, was sold for peanuts, or whether you were unlucky enough to have been one of those selected for the short walk with a wave of the finger, whether at BA, at Laker due to this man's ( lack of ) business ethics, at Dan-Air, at Air Europe et al, in the name of profit.....profit.....profit......