mrs thatcher and conservative government
im interested to know what people think this country would be like now, if conservatives had never won an election and if mrs thatcher had never been prime minister for three terms. would the miners still be digging? would the unions still be in charge?
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Just so happens she went too far in the end, but then our country because very competitive because of her.
Popcorn anyone ?
That pretty much summed up what things were like in the lead up to the Thatcher era. Was it the sick or the poor man of Europe we were known as at the time?
I was into motorbikes back then. I bought my very first bike when I was 17 (1977). It wasn't a Triumph or a Norton.... it was a Kawasaki. I used to buy the odd bike magazine back then. You'd see reports showing some drop dead gorgeous designs for British bikes but we simply couldn't turn those designs into reality at that time. Why?
All I could assume was that this country must have sat on its laurels basking in the post war glory for thirty years (or something) and totally took it's eye off the competition. We'd gotten too unionised, too jobsworthy, too.... up ourselves basically and we were getting left behind.
Thatcher kicked our asses. If she hadn't somebody would have had to or we'd probably look exactly like Greece does at the moment, ie stuffed.
There's no point harping on about the way she did it and the rights and wrongs of her methods. What's done is done. But at the time in the little bit of the country I lived in (Gloucestershire)and through the eyes of a teenager about to turn twenty it struck me that nearly everything I was into, gadget and vehicle wise was foreign made. What did the now Lord Alan Sugar give us as an alternative? ****ing Amstrad!! The biggest pile of Delboy Trotter's, market stall, cheap, poorly made, imported and rebadged/branded sh!te going.
It was embarrassing - I didn't see much of a future here - I very nearly emigrated. It was only emotional ties to family and friends that stopped me tbh.
People still blame Thatcher for all the greed and selfishness thats out there. She may have opened the road, but nobody forced anyone to drive it. People seem to forget that. She had her failings but she's now just a convenient scapegoat to blame for those less appealing aspects of human nature,
IMO manufacturing needed reforming but not in the way Mrs Thatcher went about it.
During her Premiership millions of people lost their jobs because of factories and mines closing down and her Government did nothing to replace the jobs that were lost.
That they sat back and did nothing to get people back into work is IMO the root cause of the long term unemployment we are still seeing today.
Had Maggie never been Prime minister UK would be even worse of than it is now at least she broke the unions who were destroying country. :cool:
You are so right, the whole benifts culture can be traced back to Thatcher. They took away the jobs and the incentive to work.
Thatcher used a sledghammer to crack a nut and the damage the sledghammer did still has not been repaired.
Funny how the unions didn't destroy Germany or France who still have strong unions AND heavy industry.
So everyone's to blame for today's mess EXCEPT the person who created the casino banks without which, if they'd not been created, we wouldn't be in this mess today.
And, unlike the speculation in your post, I can point to Canada as an example of somewhere where the banks weren't deregulated in the manner of Thatcher's "big bang" and so weren't able to throw away the billions our banks did.
Totally agree.
The damage done by her scorched earth policies is still being felt today.
You could easily argue that localised benefit dependancy can be traced back to Thatcher, but what caused it to spread its wings out of those mining villages and into the wider community?
The mass long term unemployment and welfare dependency that grew up under Thatcher; she didn't limit the damage to mining villages.
Well because other manufacturing industries and mills were closing down at the same time the pits were closing I imagine it was the lack of alternative employment for the millions of people who were made redundant.
Good rant - unfortunately it doesn't fit with the facts. No UK bank failed due to Casino practices, Northern Rock, Alliance and Leicester, Bradford and Bignley and HBOS all got into difficulties in traditional mortgage lending and High Street banking. RBS simply took over too many bad businesses.
But dont let the facts get in the way of a good rant..
Why would you invest in a business with the Unions running amok and weak management? - recipe for losing your shirt no?
And why were they closing down? It wasn't for the sake of it. It was because they were uncompetitive. We weren't buying their goods, we were buying someone elses.
As per usual the truth will lie somewhere in the middle. Arguably by the time Thatcher came along we were already beyond rescuing the situation. Those markets were pretty much lost.
Do leave off - the closed shop and all the spanish practices were firmly embedded by the 70's but they started decades earlier.
I have no objection to that - but especially in the cae of the nationalised industries (but also many private ones), there were no profits.
Isn't it fair to say we'd basically lost those traditional manufacturing markets so had no choice but to persue other avenues?