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I think he might be more dirty a person than even Churchill.

Outspoken Morrissey tonight blasted Margaret Thatcher as "barbaric" and someone "without an atom of humanity".

The musician has been a long-time critic of the former Prime Minister and aired his views in songs like Margaret On The Guillotine.

Tonight, just hours after her death, he released a strongly-worded statement slamming the former Tory politician.

The former Smiths singer said: "Thatcher is remembered as The Iron Lady only because she possessed completely negative traits such as persistent stubbornness and a determined refusal to listen to others.

"Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the Ivory Trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own Cabinet booted her out."

Morrissey, whose first Smiths single Hand In Glove was released a month before Baroness Thatcher won her second term of office as Prime Minister in 1983, was highly critical of her role in the Falklands War.

He said: "She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone - and was sailing AWAY from the islands.

"When the young Argentinian boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs up sign for the British press. Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes.

"She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women's movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a Prime Minister could actually be female.

"But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it.

Outspoken Morrissey, who recently cancelled a series of shows due to ill health, went on: "Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death.

"As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity," he added.

I agree with you, mate. He used Australians as meat shields at Gallipoli so that British troops could go round the sides and when our ships were annihilated by the Ottomans he was said to have dismissed the whole thing, 'we have more soldiers'. Fuck that.