"but the question I posed was should we give her a chance."
They've all had their chances a thousand times over - how many more times do we trust these maggots of society?
If we can't get a society for all, we need a say in our lives that puts an end to the slide into extremism.
Ake rants about socialism not being acceptable yet, following the war, probably the last decent Labour Government introduced a series of revolutionary changes to our lives - social housing, accessible health care for all paid or from our taxes and very limited nationalisation of industry, all violently opposed by the Tories... this was within my lifetime.
It made a tremendous difference to people like us - I could get treatment for my two bouts of diphtheria caused by the appalling two-room conditions we were living in in Anfield, my parents no longer worried about getting enough food to feed us, we eventually moved into our own flat in Speke and later into a house in Kirkby..... - not a revolution, but a totally new life for us and ours.
I suggest, for those who haven't already, try and see Ken Loach's magnificent documentary, 'The Spirit of '45'.
Later Governments, Labour and Conservative, allowed those gains to fall into disrepair (with the exception of health - which was a bone they could never take back) and along came Thatcher, who respectablised greed and formalised a divided society of haves and have-nots.
Even the most benevolent of the Tories ("The Wets"), were appalled a what she did; I still look back with admiration at Harold McMillan's description of her "selling off the family silver".
None of this happened because "the people were not ready for it" as Ake insists, but because Thatcher took Britain as far to the right as it has ever been, before or since.
Her admiration for Pinochet and her description of him as "a hero of democracy", was an indication of how far she was prepared to go if anybody got in her was 9in the end, even her own colleagues found her an EMBARRASSMENT
Those changes are needed again - things can simply not go on as they are without a radical shift - either to the extreme right or to the not-so-extreme left.
At least one contributor here has made his mind up on that one!!
Jim Carroll