Margaret Thatcher Dies At 87 539
syngularyx writes "Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister who became one of the most influential global leaders of the postwar period, died on Monday, three decades after her championing of free-market economics and individual choice transformed Britain's economy and her vigorous foreign policy played a key role in the end of the Cold War."
Re: A sad day (Score:1, Interesting)
In other words she ushered in the era of zero accountability for the rich and corporations.
Sounds like she is partial author of the current turmoil.
Mother of BSE (Score:5, Interesting)
Because her government started a relentless drive for less regulation the Brits decided to limit the rules on the reduction of offal to cattle feed.
Although Scrapie and it's transmission is still not fully understood, in the day there was sufficient evidence it was related to a human syndrome called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
The rules for offal use were mainly about the time and minimum temperature it had to be processed to become acceptable as cattle feed, Maggie's government lowered both the time exposure and the minimum temperature resulting in Scrapie jumping the barrier to first cows and next humans.
When Mrs. Thatcher came to office the country was in a deplorable state and changes were long over due.
But the way she's gone on about them is not fit for a repeat, the all but destruction of the unions has left the country as an outsider in Europe re. workers rights. Even now it's become quite obvious the well regulated German system is superior her party is still strictly adhering to the path she set.
The issues with her government are not with the subjects she tackled but with the rigorous and often cold-blooded way she did.
This is geek news (Score:5, Interesting)
I am aware that the deregulation of the financial market went too far. However, I maintain that if Mrs. Thatcher wouldn't have exercised her influence, the UK would not have thrived as it did.
Re:Good and greedy. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll agree that you're right re: shortsighted - but given that direct share ownership at the time wasn't widespread, and the buzz going round was that you could spend £400 one day and get £500-£600 a week later without any obvious risk, most people would take the money and run...
Re:Tragic loss (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you have a rose tinted view of what the unions were offering (or in fact, still achieve today in public sector). Public sector unions are still fairly strong, and as someone who has worked in public sector (for 6 years) and took the time to get involved with Unison, including striking with it, I can assure you that it's not as rosy as you think.
Unions have this horrible habit of protecting their members no matter what, you may argue they have a duty to do so, but it ultimately means that no matter how in the wrong a member is they will waste an organisations time and money fighting them tooth and nail over something their member is guilty of that is completely indefensible (such as simply not turning up to work for 6 months but also refusing to get a doctor's note as evidence of some sickness - a real example witnessed first hand). Worse than this, these sorts of lazy people often then go and apply to be union stewards and so forth because they can't be bothered to do their own job and it's a good excuse to get out of it now and again. This means they get time out of their job to spend with the unions at the tax payer's expense, due to them having contact with union staff they often have a greater influence on policy and sometimes even get given jobs there meaning the unions are built up of the worst, the laziest, most inept members of society which results in a repeat of the cycle of them then going on to defend more lazy inept people. They don't care about the average Joe, they don't care about genuine injustice, it's a scam - it's all about minimising their personal responsibility in life.
On another note I think you're misguided regarding inequality. One of the times I went on strike, related to pay the government pay offer was something like 3% for the lowest paid workers and 2% for the highest paid workers (i.e. public sector executives and service directors) at a time of around 5% inflation. The lowest paid would normally be the ones that went on strike, the execs would never go on strike, so anyway the low paid workers went on strike for 2 days, giving up 2 days wages for their belief that the pay offer was too low, the government came back with a new offer which the unions accepted immediately - 3% across the board.
So there you have it, the low paid workers, the union lackeys give up their wages to go on strike so that the union negotiators can get an extra 1% pay rise for the high paid execs that gave up not a single day of wages for the effort.
It took me some years to grow up and realise in hindsight what the unions were about, how they really worked, but eventually I did. The people at the top of unions are no different from people like Rupert Murdoch - they don't care about you or I, they don't care about the workers, about increase their wages, they want one thing and one thing only - they want power to influence policy their way. Dave Prentis, the current boss of Unison, do you know what he earns? almost as much as the prime minister, he earns £127,000 and he holds so much sway in the Labour party that he can potentially determine a prime minister - it was him as much as anyone who managed to get Ed rather than his infinitely more fair and competent brother Dave as leader of the opposition right now. You really think with his salary, with the power he wields, that it's really about you, the worker?
Unions in the UK have long lost their way, they have little relevance to the mythical ideal people hold about them and one of my biggest regrets in life was ever believing the lies and funding such a corrupt organisation. They're as much an affront to classical union ideals such as those you mention as bankers are to corporate responsibility.
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Interesting)
She thought that Britons were cleverer than the rest of the world so Britain could make its living from purely cerebrial work, like finance, without getting its hands dirty. And of course, selling the "family silver" (the UK industries) and North Sea oil would keep the UK going, for some time anyway. This was before the internet allowed many service industries (apart from the most crappy things like washing up) to be outsourced, even more easily than manufacturing which has significant shipping costs.
The French, Germans and Italians, the most comparable nations, did not follow suit. My own industry - railway engineering - was decimated by Mrs T (she particularly hated railways) and the world-leading railway technology we had was largely picked up by those nations to supplement their own, and they now manufacture and sell the hardware to us.
It is a mystery to me what we live on now in the UK. Everyone I know is basically shifting paperwork around and is, metaphorically speaking, taking in each others' washing. The shit is starting to hit the fan now though.
Here is what I think of her free market theories The Grantham Grocer Fallacy [demon.co.uk]. "The Grantham Grocer fallacy" because she thought it would work as it did among the Grocers of Grantham ( as her father was) during the 30's and 40's. I loathed the bitch, yet I am most definitely not a socialist. Views on her were binary - some loathed her while the others thought the light of the World shone out of her backside.
Mother of BSE? Unlikely (Score:4, Interesting)
That decision would have been ministry for agriculture, she wouldn't have even been in the meeting. But yes, her government was not perfect, every choice she made was not perfect. You're kinda clutching at straws I think though.
Also I see people complaining about Mr Whippy. Mr Whippy's 99 was the most popular icecream before Cornetto came along, it far outsold the icecream slice and more people wanted the soft 99's with the choc flake even than scooped chocolate icecreams. DON'T DISS THE 99!
Overall though, damn good on you Mrs Thatcher, I remember the bin-men strikes, I remember the miners and their 20% pay rises. I remember my dad complaining that he had to go on strike because he's been told to and would lose his job is he didn't (closed shop agreements suck). I remember factories closing everywhere.
I also remember how we'd get our food order in on Fridays, and eat banana sandwiches, and eat all the crisps. I remember how by the next week there would be no food. I even ate lard at one point. Britain was poor before her, a banana sandwich on a Friday was luxury.
I sound like an old man, but I remember what the 70s were like, we were poor! We had power cuts, we would sit in the dark with an oil lamp because the power workers wanted a 20% rise this year since the miners got so much, and the bin men went on strike wanting the same. F*** you. I'm really angry when I remember how bad things were and hear you diss Mrs T.. You don't have a clue, you really don't know how much better she made things.
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
She knew how to play the politics game. Her opinion polls were absurdly bad, but she rattled the Jingoist sabre with the Falklands conflict and let the middle classes buy their council homes. That was all it took, two master-stroke policies. Whatever your opinion on the long-term effects of what she did, no-one can argue she wasn't good at doing it.
British Unions (Score:5, Interesting)
Economics 101: if the economy does badly, it's the fault of unions
It is arguable whether the unions were to blame for the state of the UK economy in the 1980s but they certainly were not helping it recover. The reforms she introduced included things like requiring a vote of members before a strike could be called, limiting the terms of union leaders (before her some unions elected leaders like popes - they were elected for life), requiring one vote per member - no massive block votes. Effectively she required the unions to actually pay attention to their members - I don't see anyway that these reforms can be seen as anything but a good thing. It stopped union bosses making decisions in their own best interests rather than the interests of the workers they were supposed to be representing.
Had she stopped there she would have been remembered as a truly great prime minister. Unfortunately having fixed the economy by making the unions function properly again she then went a lot, lot further and did a lot of damage. Her legacy would have been far greater had she been a one term prime minister.
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Interesting)
"There are still whole cities that have never recovered from the death of manufacturing. Service sector jobs simply don't pay as well, and there aren't as many to go around."
You know the services sector includes things like Finance, IT, engineering, health, education, media right? I don't think factory workers and miners do get paid better than IT workers, financiers, doctors, engineers, teachers, and journalists somehow. Service sector jobs pay the most of any.
I know the towns that were the centre of anti-Thatcher protests very well having previously lived in such areas and still having many friends there and I can assure you ability to recover has little to do with anything Thatcher did and is entirely about the social attitudes of people who live in these places. Many of the old mining towns in West and South Yorkshire, such as Hemsworth, Fitzwilliam, Grimethorpe, Goldthorpe and Shafton have had millions poured into them, by way of investment including shiny new doctors surgeries, dentists, learning centres offering free training, local railway stations that link them to the UK's 3rd and 4th largest cities (Leeds and Sheffield) such that all those cities in South/West Yorkshire have a train station, or are at worst, a 10minute bus/car journey from one, and then only take 30mins at most to the above mentioned major cities.
But the state of each couldn't be more different, take two neighbouring villages, Shafton and Grimethorpe, only a few minute drive from each other, but the other side of Grimethorpe to Shafton you have a number of large employers with warehouses - companies such as ASOS, the major online clothes retailer for example. Grimethorpe has the advantage of being slightly closer to the employers than Shafton and Grimethorpe also has had more money poured into it (it has a medium sized ASDA, it has a massive brand new doctors clinic, it had a brand new learning centre that for the last decade has offered IT training- CCNAs and so forth), it has more new affordable housing developments, and yet despite these two neighbouring villages having come from the same background Grimethorpe is an absolute shit hole, full of criminal chavs with arsonist children, whilst Shafton has really picked itself up and whilst it has some way to go the place is much better looked after, people have gone to the far side of Grimethorpe and taken all the job opportunities that have come up.
So here's the thing, I know it's easy for them to keep blaming Thatcher and so forth and yes there's no doubt she was the nail in the coffin that triggered these villages problems from the start, but that was over 30 years ago now, and to say their problems are still all her fault is ridiculous when you compare different cases. Grimethorpe has had more money and more opportunities thrown at it than Shafton as it became obvious it wasn't improving like Shafton and other towns were but it's still not going anywhere.
The problem hasn't been Thatcher for a long time, when you have so many of these villages that have been all treated equally but where some have become quite nice, and quite modern, whilst others are still complete shit holes the only thing you can sensibly blame is the people that live in them. It's pretty clear that people in towns like Hemsworth and Shafton were keen to work, keen to pick themselves up and get on after the pits were closed, it's also clear that people in places like Grimethorpe and Goldthorpe had an entitlement attitude - they felt they were entitled to a job in the mines for life even when that became unprofitable, and they still to this day feel they're entitled to do what they want and have everyone else pay for it. The problem isn't Thatcher now, the problem hasn't been Thatcher for about 20 years, the problem is lazy people, who want a free ride in life. It really is night and day between the villages that have taken the effort to pick themselves up, and the ones that haven't.
FWIW I'm with you on the current muppets in government :)