Right this should put the cat amongst the pigeons.....
Ive been watching an excellent programme about British modern history called Andrew Marr’s History Of Modern Britain and last night covered the "Maggie Years".
And just wondered who thought, as I do, that she took some tough and at times not very popular decisions that ultimately has led to the UK being the economic power it is today, or whether you see her has a typical Tory who was only interested in making middle England happy (and rich), at the detriment of the working class and the UKs (loss making) manufacturing industry.
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Welcome to the summer
Destroying the manufacturing industry and coal mining that really affected my family as my dad was made unemployed working in manufacturing. He was unemployed for a year and a half. So no tick there.
Had student grants back then so tick there - not like now shame on you labour government.
Tick for telling the Americans where to go.
No tick for still being in the EU.
i.m rubbish on polictics if i'm honest but i'm pretty sure that there will be a divide between the rich and poor regardless who is power?[/quote]
Yeah that's true unless living in a society of total equality ie communism. Unless there's that then there'll always be someone better off than someone else.
As for Thatcher i beleive it's a bit of both. She did destroy the working class and made mistakes (poll tax) but much of her reign was succesful (decent relationship with America, falklands, buying of council houses, economic prosperity after disaster under labour.)
Would the brutal changes have been managed better and with less misery than under her stewardship?
Much, if not all of what she set out to do, Ted Heath also tried to do in the early Seventies but failed.
As for the economic disaster of Labour in the Seventies, did not Thatchers government lead on to a similar disaster in the 90's?
Whoever had stewardship of our economy during the late seventies and eighties, they would have had to deal with the technological changes which have taken place since. Maybe if somebody else was in charge, we would still have a home grown motor industry like the Germans or French?
It's a complex issue, not easily answered in this kind of forum.
To be honest Bing- not sure it's easily answered anywhere, there will be people studying Political History many years from now trying to answer questions like this. But it's a good place to gauge opinions.
My own opinion is that, although her politics were far too right-wing for my liking- something had to be done to break the union's stranglehold on the workplace, which she did.
But she went on too long as Prime minister and it did seem that a sense of Megalomania set in.
Still Alive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_Thatcher
Reminds me of the joke- why do married men die before their wives..........
Because they want too.
As he said left the country and some people much richer but left a trail of destruction in her wake, got lucky with north sea oil and was the most unpopular PM in histroy before the Falklands War.
Some of the things she did had to be done (controlling union power and getting the EU money back) but others were unnecessary and we are still feeling the effects of them such as the lost of a manufacturing base, not allowing councils to replace the sold off council homes and no credit controls.
As Marr said at the end of the show like it or not we are all Thatchers Children.
Left the Falklands unguaded, used Britain as a lunching pad for cruise missiles and wasted billions of pounds of North Sea oil revenues on the failed economic experiment called monetarism, privatised a whole raft of national industries to pay for tax cuts and sold them off far too cheaply.
I digress however. Henry has touched on my viewpoint in that much of what she did was a double edged sword.
Anybody who lived and worked in the seventies will recall how the Unions regularly held the country to ransom through indiscriminate strike action. They cynically abused and orchestrated the basic right of the worker to withdraw his or her labour to such an extent that public opinion, as well as the employers whom you would expect to be in favour, was overwhelmingly in favour of smashing the power of the Unions as innocent, ordinary people were the ones who always suffered through the strike action.
In my opinion though, whilst something had to be done at the time, ordinary working people are still paying the price. Employers can now undercut British workers with cheap immigrant labour as many involved in industries like construction for example will be aware. There is no way that would happen to the extent it has with strong Trade Unions.
So yes smashing the Unions was good at the time but British workers are a whole lot more vulnerable because of it.
The idea that somebody, after years of paying rent to a local authority, should have the right to buy the house they lived in for a third of the market value was truly wonderful and enabled many people who otherwise would have had no chance to buy and own their own homes.
The downside though was that the real motivation was to shift the responsibility for repairs to the former tenants enabling the councils to pocket LOADSAMONEY!! from the sales and save even more by sacking the council workers who used to repair the houses.(The Unions were smashed by this time so no real opposition!).
Again we are still paying the price of this in that there is no longer affordable housing especially as having smashed the steel, shipbuilding and mining industries more and more people were forced to migrate South to London and the South East, forcing up house prices on a supply and demand basis.
Hence the calls to turn Kent into the patio of England rather than the Garden of England.
Final point: people describe her as Eurosceptic yet she was the one to sign the Single European Act in 1986 which created the single market. It is single market legislation which is responsible for much of the undesirable "interference from Europe" which people get so frustrated with.
She has subsequently claimed that her officials misled her and tried to make amends by "handbagging" the rebate which our Tone has just given back to our European Partners.
Had you or I made such a fundamental mistake though we would have been sacked. I guess you could draw up a Charlton analogy and describe Thatcher as Marcus Bent not performing yet the non- playing staff get the sack.
In conclusion she was not afraid to grasp the nettle and do what had to be done but she did not put in enough safeguards for her actions. She was Prime Minister for 11 years so had plenty of time to do so in my opinion.
For that reason I have to say Slayer.
Statistics suggest that the gap between rich and poor is at its greatest now after 10 years of Labour.
or maybe thats just me being cynical
government's would never go to war to make themselves popular would they?
The Falklands was HER saviour. As Prime Minister she was dead in the water before that - her masterstroke was fanning the flames of jingoism throughout the Country and playing down the losses as inconsequential in war.
As has already been said, she destroyed the backbone of mining and manufacturing industries causing widespread devastation through many major cities and communities.
The poverty caused and the suffering for many, particularly outside of the South East, was immense.
Sure, the Unions needed to be checked back - but she swung the pendulum so far that it was 20 years before the effects neutralised.
But she did ultimately enable a booming economy - built largely on the back of unsustainable credit before that collapsed leaving the Country in the grip of recession.
She used to boast: "the lady is not for turning"
In an earlier era she would have been the lady fit for burning.
Monetarism was a huge failure despite the new massive annual bonus of 8 billion pounds of North Sea oil tax revenue and nothing was exempt from the slashes of Thatcher's razor blades, not even the Royal Navy where she decided to impose swingeing cuts, included in the decomissioning was the Endurance which patrolled the Antarctic and offered protection to the Falklands ..... if that wasn't raising a white flag to the Argies I don't know what would've? Imagine the roles reversed - and the Argies ran the Scilly Isles from 8000 miles away but then decided to leave them unprotected and indeed decimate their navy?!? If the Argies had had any sense they would have waited a year, then we'd have been buggered.
A good indictaion of the cuts everywhere at the time is that the Argies invaded the day after (I think) most of the Portsmouth dockers received ther P45s in the post - which did not stop them from working day & night to get the ships ready for war, including the already decomissioned Intrepid.
The selling of council houses was a very clever way to prevent people from taking industrial action, the same reason they encourage people to have kids. Kids + Mortgage = personal responsibilities which outweigh principals . People are lumbered with their job, whether they like it or not, Thatcher has created a nation of Drones, which Major and Blair have been happy to continue, because they are at the top of the food chain, and love every minute of it.
Agreed, but Maggie started the ball rolling and that's my point.