dennisr
the acceptable face
yep, i'd agree with that as well. how long he stays is another matter
Thatcher - I'm too young to remember...
- Thread starter rikwakefield
- Start date
yep, i'd agree with that as well. how long he stays is another matter
I don't think you can deny there were things which did need to be addressed ... but HOW she did it has been excessively damaging and she went way, way further than was needed to actually address the real issues.
Unfortunately Labour pretty much made itself unelectable by it's own internal, political wranglings and that gave her a far clearer run than she should have been allowed ... and like all zealots, given a free run, she just went daft ...
I fear so ... though I pray not.
Gordon Brown is so not Prime Minister material, no matter what his other strengths might be ...
dennisr
the acceptable face
while the zealots that ended up in control of the labour party continued the process directly
rikwakefield do you live in Wakefield? Some of the effects of Thatcherism can still be seen today just a few miles from you.
She destroyed our society. As has been noted, she overtly used the police for political purposes, something that they have never recovered from. She also facilitated the "greed is good", "loadasmoney", absolutely materialistic world which I believe lies at the root of the fuckup which the banks, etc. have become. Whilst I can understand her emphasis on expecting people to stand on their own two feet if they can, she went way, way, way too far.
Although she apparently never actually said the words, "There's no such thing as society" sums up the impact of her reign.
Blair and Brown may be bad ... but she was infinitely worse ... as, I fear, Cameron will be ...
Are you sure about that?
God, that is soooooo how China works, there's no government support for anyone, it's fucking hilarious how all these people go on abou China being communist, either Thatcher was a communist, or China is arch Thatcherite...
I think his name is Mr Wakefield ... and he lives in Rickmansworth ...
I wasn't sure at all ... I thought I had seen it somewhere ... but I could never remember where and every time I mentioned it I kept getting shot down with "She never actually said that ..." (including on here) so I reverted to the "Apparently she didn't but it sums her approach up" format.
Thanks for finding it. Where is the quote from? You got a link to the speech somewhere?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Although, if we're honest, some of us occasionally had our revenge.
The politicisation of the police under Thatcher, though, that was and is still a gaping wound in society.
Pickman's model
sunset spires and twilight woods
bobby sands mp
francis hughes
patsy o'hara
ray mccreesh
joe mcdonnell
martin hurson
kevin lynch
kieran doherty
tom mcelwee
michael devine
rip
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
AKA "The Ridley Plan", after the cancerous hard-right racist shit-bag who broached the idea.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Although, if we're honest, some of us occasionally had our revenge.
The politicisation of the police under Thatcher, though, that was and is still a gaping wound in society.
Controversial, but I'd rate that the worst.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I think his name is Mr Wakefield ... and he lives in Rickmansworth ...
Poor bastard.
(for the latter, like)
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
Not having lived through it in Britain, I'm not privy to the hardships that resulted. But I think that any time a major societal shift occurs, this sort of dislocation and hardship ensues. Doesn't make it any easier to live through, though.
Someone above mentioned trade unionism. Once again, the perception to an outsider was that trade unions had a stranglehold on the country, and were in fact strangling it with their short sighted policies of constantly demanding more, at a time when the system couldn't deliver it. I was in UK for a time in 1979 - 80, and it was astonishing, how many unions were on strike at the same time, and how much it was fettering daily life. I recall laughing at what was to me, the final insult, the parting gift: at the airport, waiting for my flight home, the signs that told of arrivals and departures weren't working. They were those old flip kind of sign. The union that worked the signs, was on strike.
Unionism had gotten out of control over here as well. At the time, I liked it: my union would ask for 30% raises at negotiation time, and we'd strike over the pay issue. 25% raises over a three year contract weren't uncommon. And they wonder why we had runaway inflation?
Governments here acted to curb unionism just as Thatcher did: I think the effect in UK was more pronounced, because unionism was even more pervasive there than it was here.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
No, she took on some unions, she bought off quite a few more.
And her Foreign Secretary was responsible for the Falklands being invaded in the first place, due to some appallingly bad diplomatic fuck-ups and "crossed wires".
Sorry, but that's balls. She ran from more fights than she stood still for. She was a past-master (or should that be mistress?) of dropping a pithy one-liner then legging it, rather than standing her ground. That way, when the shit hit the fan, she could blame a member of her staff, rather than taking it on the chin like an honest person would.
True, the woman is a cunt with a capital CUNT.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Well, it's certainly still having a forceful effect today. What we got slapped with in the late 80s and early 90s in terms of public assembly legislation paved the way for the ridiculous shit every protester is hit with now. 07/07 just gave the govt an excuse to give the police powers that, in some cases, they'd been requesting for years.
I suppose that the "up-side", if we can glean one at all, is that more people, even folks of the age of my parents (late 60s) now see the police as defenders of privilege rather than guardians of liberty and bringers of justice.
ericjarvis
give a feck for the feckless
Right. First thing is that Thatcher gets unfairly demonised to an extent. She was foul, arrogant, greedy, unscrupulous, dishonest, and bigoted. However a lot of what happened whilst she was PM is as much everyone else's fault as hers. This is important, because failing to understand what actually happened is looking likely to lead to some of the same things being repeated.
Thatcher was elected not because of Labour being too far to the left, but because of an ineffective right wing Labour government led by a PM seen to be a bit of a ditherer, and unwilling to risk doing anything that might be unpopular. That's absolutely vital to understand, because the right of the Labour Party eventually won the subsequent battle for control and thus have written the history that keeps being trotted out. Much of which is complete bollocks.
The basic Thatcherite plan was to use the revenues from North Sea oil and gas to fund a restructuring of the British economy from one based on manufacturing to one based on service industries, and from one based on long term jobs to one based on short term contracts. That meant an initial spell of very heavy unemployment, with benefits paid out of the oil revenues. It also led to a long term problem because you simply can't run an economy solely based on service industries in exactly the same way as a medieval village economy can't be based on everyone taking in each other's laundry. Eventually somebody has to actually do something.
So the first disaster was that what had been supposed to be a short term increase in unemployment became pretty much part of the basic structure of the economy in many places.
The second strand was to create a feel good factor by deregulating the financial services sector, increasing the level of home ownership whilst restricting the availability of housing, and hoping that people would borrow money against the resulting rise in house prices.
This worked pretty much precisely as the Thatcherites hoped. The vast majority of people were unable or unwilling to distinguish between an increased standard of living through earning more and an increased standard of living through debt. Almost nobody was prepared to see the connection between rising house prices and increasing levels of homelessness. Otherwise they would have been forced to accept the possibility that part of their new dishwasher or second car had been paid for by having a part share in causing somebody to sleep rough.
She sold the plan to the voters on the basis that they would get tax cuts and no cut in services. This free lunch was to be provided entirely by cutting waste and increasing efficiency. What that actually meant in practise was that anything that resembled public investment was declared to be inefficient. Anything that made a short term cut in the public spending budget was declared to be efficient, no matter what the longer term consequences, since they could all be blamed on somebody or something else. Also staffing began to be done on the entirely unreasonable basis that maximum efficiency could be created by minimum levels of staffing. This lunacy has become so prevalent that I often find it completely impossible to explain that it isn't sensible to cut staff levels in a way that will require the hiring of temporary staff to cover anyone sick or on holiday to the extent that it costs more than having enough staff in the first place. Apparently it is management's fault if anyone is sitting aroung doing very little, but it is entirely down to lazy employees if it becomes necessary to hire in temps and contractors to cover contracted holidays and the simple unavoidable fact that sometimes human beings get sick.
She sold the plan to her backers with the promise of massive privatisation. That also helped fund the tax cuts. Quite a large number of Tory grandees made a massive killing out of the privatisation of public services, often including ministers responsible for the privatisations.
Finally she feathered her own nest by travelling around the world greasing the wheels for arms deals brokered by her son's company, covered by the export credit guarantee scheme. That led to her son taking multi million pound commission payments from arms deals that were eventually paid for by the British tax payer when the buyer decided not to actually get around to paying. Whilst I can't accurately trace those commission payments all the way through to the vast fees she now gets for "speaking engagements", I don't think it's out of order to claim that she has fairly directly and personally ripped off the exchequer on a fairly large scale.
That's what she and her supporters did. That's also what other people let them do, rather than look too carefully at what seemed like the offer of a free lunch.
Thatcher was elected not because of Labour being too far to the left, but because of an ineffective right wing Labour government led by a PM seen to be a bit of a ditherer, and unwilling to risk doing anything that might be unpopular. That's absolutely vital to understand, because the right of the Labour Party eventually won the subsequent battle for control and thus have written the history that keeps being trotted out. Much of which is complete bollocks.
The basic Thatcherite plan was to use the revenues from North Sea oil and gas to fund a restructuring of the British economy from one based on manufacturing to one based on service industries, and from one based on long term jobs to one based on short term contracts. That meant an initial spell of very heavy unemployment, with benefits paid out of the oil revenues. It also led to a long term problem because you simply can't run an economy solely based on service industries in exactly the same way as a medieval village economy can't be based on everyone taking in each other's laundry. Eventually somebody has to actually do something.
So the first disaster was that what had been supposed to be a short term increase in unemployment became pretty much part of the basic structure of the economy in many places.
The second strand was to create a feel good factor by deregulating the financial services sector, increasing the level of home ownership whilst restricting the availability of housing, and hoping that people would borrow money against the resulting rise in house prices.
This worked pretty much precisely as the Thatcherites hoped. The vast majority of people were unable or unwilling to distinguish between an increased standard of living through earning more and an increased standard of living through debt. Almost nobody was prepared to see the connection between rising house prices and increasing levels of homelessness. Otherwise they would have been forced to accept the possibility that part of their new dishwasher or second car had been paid for by having a part share in causing somebody to sleep rough.
She sold the plan to the voters on the basis that they would get tax cuts and no cut in services. This free lunch was to be provided entirely by cutting waste and increasing efficiency. What that actually meant in practise was that anything that resembled public investment was declared to be inefficient. Anything that made a short term cut in the public spending budget was declared to be efficient, no matter what the longer term consequences, since they could all be blamed on somebody or something else. Also staffing began to be done on the entirely unreasonable basis that maximum efficiency could be created by minimum levels of staffing. This lunacy has become so prevalent that I often find it completely impossible to explain that it isn't sensible to cut staff levels in a way that will require the hiring of temporary staff to cover anyone sick or on holiday to the extent that it costs more than having enough staff in the first place. Apparently it is management's fault if anyone is sitting aroung doing very little, but it is entirely down to lazy employees if it becomes necessary to hire in temps and contractors to cover contracted holidays and the simple unavoidable fact that sometimes human beings get sick.
She sold the plan to her backers with the promise of massive privatisation. That also helped fund the tax cuts. Quite a large number of Tory grandees made a massive killing out of the privatisation of public services, often including ministers responsible for the privatisations.
Finally she feathered her own nest by travelling around the world greasing the wheels for arms deals brokered by her son's company, covered by the export credit guarantee scheme. That led to her son taking multi million pound commission payments from arms deals that were eventually paid for by the British tax payer when the buyer decided not to actually get around to paying. Whilst I can't accurately trace those commission payments all the way through to the vast fees she now gets for "speaking engagements", I don't think it's out of order to claim that she has fairly directly and personally ripped off the exchequer on a fairly large scale.
That's what she and her supporters did. That's also what other people let them do, rather than look too carefully at what seemed like the offer of a free lunch.
Aye and ten men dead
danny la rouge
Ninja swords for all disabled people
Brown (and New Labour) can only be seen in the context of Thatcher having come first. New Labour is the child of Thatcherism, Brown now is merely the manifestation of a faction trying to stay at the helm of the neoliberal project.
I'd argue that this is of course nothing new; the police always were and always will be used by the state and the ruling elite for political ends. It is quite impossible for it to be otherwise. However, what is particularly interesting of the Thatcher era is that your perception is widely shared by cops who were there at the time. Interesting because in other times you and your colleagues - and often society at large - would not perceive it.
Why was different then? Because it was one of those times when a shift in societal consensus was taking place. A battle was being fought over the concessions hard won by the working class at the previous crisis moment, when the settlement we call the Welfare State had been arrived at. The post war consensus had been a compromise between labour and capital (not given freely, but fought for and conceded at a time of weakness for capital). The New Right came along in the 70s wanting to call time on that, and the economic circumstances meant that they now had more leverage to push their agenda. Indeed, Callaghan was the first British PM to implement monetarist policies; those forces were there with or without Thatcher. Thatcher's distinguishing features were that she and her lieutenants - notably Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit - were unapologetically open and explicit about the war they intended to wage on the working class. Unemployment was to be used as a tool to bring down inflation, and too bad if your life was to be destroyed because of that (not to mention the lives of successive generations); if you were "strong", you'd rise to the top. You'd "get on your bike". There was a callous openness about it all.
So cops with open eyes could see that they were being used as a tool against the working class at a time of heightened and overt class conflict.
Now, of course, the new equilibrium has been settled, and the full propaganda model is in operation pushing the idea that to attack that equilibrium is "chippy", "old fashioned", "being a discredited 70s-style class warrior" and so on. The class war being waged by the ruling elite on the working class is invisible to those lenses, and cops can go back to being largely oblivious to their role as political tool if they so wish, until the next crisis point comes along.
It's certainly up there ... but I think the rapaciousness of the "greed is good" City boys is damaging on a far, far wider front.
There were certainly aspects of the way the trade unions were acting which were damaging for the country ... like any large / powerful organisation they had started to get too big for their boots and needed to be reined in to some extent ... but Thatcher went way, way too far and, as a result, she knocked back the rights of employees far too far.
She could, after humiliating Scargill, have said "Right, now we've established that the government run the country, not the unions, let's sit down and work out how we can deal with your genuine concerns over the rights of your members in a sensible way ....". But she didn't.
Seeing as that is not what they are supposed to be, how can that be an "up-side"?
There is clearly always going to be a political aspect to the police and to policing - they are an arm of the State and so it is inevitable.
But what she did was overtly use the police in a political way, far, far in excess of anything else that had been done in recent times. As a result, she also took her senior police officers far deeper into her government circles than had previously been the case (Paul Condon was the first - he was an out-and-out political appointee).
The police had been (and should be) significantly independent of government (in the same was as the judiciary are) with the concept of the seperation of powers. Thatcher massively undermined that. It has not recovered.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Seeing as that is not what they are supposed to be, how can that be an "up-side"?
Historically, it's what the police do though.
Kaka Tim
Half Arsed and Slapdash till I Die
AS has been noted -she used britains north sea oil windfall to further enrich her very wealthy mates , smash the organsied working class and fuel an unsustainable economic boom based on house prices. Meanwhile all long term investment in public services was stopped.
In Scandanivia the oil windfall was used for the common good of its population by building the best social welfare programs on the planet.
That alone makes her traitor to the people of britain and deserving of imprisonment or public lynching.
In Scandanivia the oil windfall was used for the common good of its population by building the best social welfare programs on the planet.
That alone makes her traitor to the people of britain and deserving of imprisonment or public lynching.
Thick arseholes basically, she waved the flag and all the Sun reading cunts were mesmerised
whoever said that she didn't run from a fight, there were hundreds if not thousands of us in Newcastle in early/mid 80's ready to give her some abuse when she planned one of her humbling visits. They lied about the time of visit and she'd already been and fucked off 2 hours earlier - probably because she knows what reception she woulda got...
Similar threads
