shes a gonner

[petercj]

You have too much time on your hands

Says a man with 10,149 posts against my 1,413! lol

 

[SimonG]

Like her or loathe her, she's dead and her family are grieving, hard enough without all the crap going on at the moment.

 

[petercj]

I think it's going to be a long goodbye - probably the longest since C&A closed down.

 

[nickelarsed]

there were more pit closures under Harold Wilson (labour) than under Thatcher. For comparison: 406 pits closed in the 1960s, with 315,000 job losses; only 146 closed in the 1980s, with 173,000 jobs lost. The damage was already done.

British manufacturing fell as a % of gdp mostly under Blair. Just because one group of journalists say something is true, don't make it true. Anyway for my money as far as our politicians go, she was by far the best of a bad bunch.

 

[petercj]

Well that misses the point by a wide mile. The issue was about the loss of jobs, and the closing down of an industry with little regard to the consequences for the people who worked in the industry.

It needed to be managed in stages, with some effort being made to retrain people for other industries.

Throwing people on to the dole, and then creating a new benefit (Incapacity Benefit) to cover up the huge increase in unemployment put a huge strain on the economy. Being a Thatcher legacy that has carried on over three decades. Thatcher wasn't interested in any part of the State playing a role in the industrial transition - she closed down the Manpower / Skills Centres, which was the training side of the Manpower Services Commission.

Blair was more of the same in diluted form. He could see that Thatcher had managed to instill her ideology into any people's minds as a form of: "common-sense", so rather than try to return to anything that might seem like socialism (i.e. collectivism) he ran with Thatcherism lite, i.e. New Labour's own version of individualism, but based on a core of Thatcherism.

The irony now is that while Cameron & Co rattle on and blame everything on New Labour, many of the policy decisions they took were a continuation of what Thatcher started. The lack of control over the Bankers and their casino dealings was classic Thatcherite thinking. PFI in the NHS, and the introduction of an internal system of competition, was classic Thatcherism. NL sat on the sidelines as house prices escalated (another legacy of Thatcher) because it created the illusion of wealth, and gave homeowners access to credit.

The current Government constantly blame NL for the huge increase in Benefits during their time in power, but much of it was about the Thatcher legacy they inherited, i.e. Incapacity Benefit and Housing Benefit being two prime examples.

The radical free market favoured by Thatcher has seen job after job exported to China, while cheap labour has been imported from Europe to maximise the profits of service industry.

Anyway I can't spend any more time trying to educate people who just google for Daily Mail propaganda - you'll learn the hard way as your standard of living gradually slips lower and lower. Gas and plumbing experienced a hike due to the skills shortage Thatcher created by closing down MPS and throwing training over to the private sector. However, due to time, and the recession, supply and demand have turned around, and the private sector will just carry on training anyone who has the money to pay their fees, so the basic laws of the labour market will prevail as there are more and more people chasing less and less work.

Seeing the bigger picture, and coordinating the economy worked before Thatcher came along, and I don't doubt that eventually Britain will return to that kind of economic management.

At the moment, I don't see a political party with the gumption or the guts to take such a task on.

 

[nickelarsed]

Doesn't miss the point at all. Coal mines were getting closed down because our country no longer ran on coal (no steam trains, new gas central heating etc). and our mines were so inefficient Australian coal was actually cheaper. Weirdly closing them is not a problem at all if it's a labour PM but if it's your own personal pantomime villain then it's suddenly the root of all evil. If I'm honest I didn't read the rest of your overly long monologue, I think you need to go and take a valium or something.

 

[Guest123]

Whether the mining and steel industry was profitable or not, 350,000 miners lost their only source of income with no help or alternative from the government except unemployment benefit. It was done with a ruthlessness that was unparamount in a so called modern democratic society. The bill from unemployment benefit from that period was horrific with over 3 million unemployed. Imagine being told that the job you've been trained for and worked all your life is being taken away and there was nothing else put in place for you. Wouldn't you want to protect that job and the means to support your family?

Thatcher was an evil ruthless tyrant and loathed by everyone in my country. Even her own party kicked her out in the end as a liability.

 

[nickelarsed]

Whether the mining and steel industry was profitable or not, 350,000 miners lost their only source of income with no help or alternative from the government except unemployment benefit. It was done with a ruthlessness that was unparamount in a so called modern democratic society. The bill from unemployment benefit from that period was horrific with over 3 million unemployed. Never mind North Sea Oil paid for it.......

That's fair comment. But lets be honest, what else was she going to do? Politicians from all parties had tried reform, had tried all sorts to modernise our country and get manufacturing working again and they had all failed. Thatcher didn't close those industries down, what she did was remove state subsidies from them. They were already totally inefficient and making a loss. You can't blame her for that. Britain was called the "sick man of Europe", our economy had "the British disease". Remember when she came into power our country was in such a crisis that it was illegal to take more than £30 out of the country. And even to do that you needed to ask permission. Why does no one blame the people that got us into that mess? Why is no one angry with those people? They get angry with the Woman who actually fixed it.

 

[nickelarsed]

For some reason I can't edit my post. Before you edited yours I said it was fair comment. I'll take that back since you've gone down the "evil tyrant" route. We are all lucky in this country never to have really lived under one. The idea that she was one for not supporting industries that had refused to modernise for forty years by printing money endlessly, which trashed the rest of the economy is pretty lame imo. I'll leave it at that. Best of luck with your referendum, we all want the same result on that one at least.

 

[PlumbersMate]

Whether the mining and steel industry was profitable or not, 350,000 miners lost their only source of income with no help or alternative from the government except unemployment benefit. It was done with a ruthlessness that was unparamount in a so called modern democratic society. The bill from unemployment benefit from that period was horrific with over 3 million unemployed. Imagine being told that the job you've been trained for and worked all your life is being taken away and there was nothing else put in place for you. Wouldn't you want to protect that job and the means to support your family?

Thatcher was an evil ruthless tyrant and loathed by everyone in my country. Even her own party kicked her out in the end as a liability.

I read that the miners were offered re training packages the lot but Scargill rejected it