Back on topic - very interesting programme on citizen Arthur on inside/out on BBC north last night.

Seems even his own devotees are turning against him. Forging a letter from a dying man that is pretty low ball behaviour.

Some pretty damming accusations against him and his small troika. A massive slush fund from which the top NUM echelon awarded themselves loans, whilst the rank and file batted out a year on strike. His autocratic and secretive decision that he was entitled to a Redundancy package, and without informing, far less obtaining permission from the NUM, writes himself a large cheque in excess of £200k! And what about the hundreds of thousands he's cost the NUM over his antics with that London flat? The very same flat that he tried to buy under Maggie thatcher's Right to Buy legislation, whilst conveniently ignoring the fact it was owned by the NUM!

You have to have a measure of sympathy for the thousands who placed their faith in this guy, and years later find it was their own Union leaders, noses firmly wedged in a Animal Farm stylee in the NUM trough, who royally ed them up the booty.

Maggie must be wetting herself up there......

She wet herself when she got turfed out of No10.
Did you see the blubbering damsel?
Good old Art set the ball rolling.
Even a sacrificial lamb, as such, of the left.

But we got there.

There are side effects to every drug - I take a number for a heart condition and you can hardly get the pills in the packets for the list of side effects. Viagra was a drug discovered from a side effect

The questions about Vioxx:
1. Did the benefits of the drug outweigh the negatives i.e. did it helps millions - given the size of the sale it must have been widely used. There are plenty of drugs out there with some bad side effects.
2. How many of the 140k had heart attacks as a result of taking the drug and how many would have had them anyway?
3. The question must be asked of the licencing authorities as how a drug with such known side-efects got to market plenty fail at that stage - or did the side effects emerge post general use? Did the drug ever get licenced here?

Only one loser in that battle and it wasn't Maggie!!

As long as she's resting peacefully now, that's the main.

The FDA must take some blame here - 80 million people were prescribed this drug 99% of which suffered no side effects and probably enjoyed a much improved standard of 'living' i.e. reduced pain. Merck did hide some the side effects but what cannot be contested the drug did a lot more good than it did harm. If you asked the majority of the patients, knowing the potential side effects and the state of their health, I bet most would still have opted for the treatment.

By someone playing with a stacked deck...

That's like blaming the police for Harold Shipman and saying, well he was a good doctor to his patients besides the old lady's her murdered.

Most wouldn't take the treatment knowing the side effects, that's why once the drug was re-licensed most have stuck with a different treatment. We can easily analyse whether your statement is correct, if it were vioxx would be prescribed at similar levels to what it was pre scandal. It isn't, so they wouldn't. Because they didn't.

Your attempted justification of what Merck did, also shows the argument of why big Pharma is one of the industries where the free market simply cannot reign. It wasn't up to the FDA to catch them Merck lied and 60k people died. Merck exploited the limits of regulation and allowed people to die so they could make vast sums of money. The result of free market principles within the pharmaceutical industry is people who would otherwise have lived, dying. They simply cannot be trusted

It appears all his faculties are still pretty much working.
Not like that mad, starry, glazey eyed fooker who is being eaten by cockroaches and maggots as I type.
Mind, she was totally cuckoo well before she left parliament.
You'll even admit to that?

It is now historical fact that Thatcher lied, and communities died. It is fact they danced in the streets when she died. That is her legacy, When you and I are gone and historians look back, they will see a warmongering, poor hating, lying Prime Minister whose citizens danced on her grave, who made her party so nasty, and so hated that even a Global financial crisis and 17 years of Labour couldnt get her party re-elected. She will be the bogeyman of history, a modern King John. She may have won that battle, but she certainly lost the war and no amount of revisionism will change that.

It was 13 years of Labour, it just felt longer.
However, she did win, the only way she'd have lost is if she'd fallen down an open mine shaft in '84. She didn't, she beat the miners and Labour, it was her own party who showed her the door and when Labour won in '97, they lauded her and paraded her on the steps of No. 10.