Author Topic: O/T Maggie Thatcher  (Read 16696 times)

Maxross

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #30 on: April 09, 2013, 09:32:54 PM »
Well we wouldnt be paying through the nose for gas for a start. Paying all this money to overseas companys who don't care a jot about us or GB. Unless when things like Corby steel works got closed 11000 people lost a job all at once. Suppose if you think thats a good thing 11000 familys ruined. Hey good for you I say.


Indeed no we wouldn't just be paying through the nose for Gas it'd be for everything and banckrupt as a country.

I think if you think the developing nations of the world are going to stop trying to take the jobs of un competative industries your deluded.  Why should they as a popultion live in real squalor and accept their lot? This while the people backing unions here wanted to lie back and take it easy with a short working week and work to rule and demarkation?  Big business will migrate to exploit where is best for their interests and profits and there is no control of any rules that one nation could put in place to prevent it.  In the 80's our industry generally and productivity mostly was down the pan and the unions liked it like that.

Equally I don't think loosing jobs is a good thing but refusing to change, buying your head in the past and waving a socilaist workers flag isn't going to enable the country to remain competative either.  Just take a look at the end of the USSR and that's the state our economy would have been in without the hard calls made. 

Trabant anyone ?

This is the line pedalled time and again by the Tory party but the old industries didn't have to necessarily go to the wall. I think it's clear that reform was needed, but I believe that could have been done so that we could shape our industrial sector for the 21st century.

If you look at what the Germans did when faced with similar challenges to us I think we got it wrong. They accepted they couldn't ever compete on price and therefore decided to focus on marketing their products based on quality. In addition they kept a representative of the workers on the board of directors to aid communication between the two and I believe managing directors were promoted from within the company. Ie you could work your way all the way up.

The fact is time has told us one thing, thatchers big plan hasn't worked. We are now in the longest reccesion in living memory (it is now longer than the great depression) and all the talk is of "re-balancing" the economy, to guess what... Manufacturing! We live in a society of individuals, every man for himself where we tread on others to get to the top.

Just a final note to what could have been done. Rolls-Royce, the firm I work for went bankrupt in 1976 I believe. Too important to the country's defences etc the state stepped in and ran them. The company wasn't re-privatised until 1991 and has gone on to become a shining beacon of engineering and without doubt our best manufacturing company. Ok it was always a good brand, but their is no reason similar success couldn't have been achieved with other companies rather than letting them go to the wall, lost forever and thousands unemployed.

Food for thought....

The Big M

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #31 on: April 09, 2013, 10:14:33 PM »
My brother lives near a little rolls Royce factory near hucknall. Other than that it's a dead area around there and it's just that thats sad the thousands of unemployed

BostonGoals

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #32 on: April 09, 2013, 10:24:18 PM »
I think PM's should do their upmost to care for all their citizens not just a select few. She paid too high a price for the changes she made, and left us overly reliant on the financial services.

Was society a happier place before or after her?

Dave H

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #33 on: April 09, 2013, 11:39:46 PM »
Well she took power in 1979 when there was a three day week and the period was known as  "The Winter of Discontent"  , Bins unemptied, limited times for electricity , society certainly wasn't happy then.

Dipdodah

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #34 on: April 10, 2013, 08:47:58 AM »
Well she took power in 1979 when there was a three day week and the period was known as  "The Winter of Discontent"  , Bins unemptied, limited times for electricity , society certainly wasn't happy then.

True, things were bleak.  The unions DID have too much power and something had to be done.  The problem was that she showed no middle ground and crushed the unions.  Generations of fight and denial wiped out by a dictator type Police state.  You only have to look at Hillsborough to see how corrupt South Yorkshire police were.
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ianh

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #35 on: April 10, 2013, 11:45:53 AM »
The fact is time has told us one thing, thatchers big plan hasn't worked. We are now in the longest reccesion in living memory (it is now longer than the great depression) and all the talk is of "re-balancing" the economy, to guess what... Manufacturing! We live in a society of individuals, every man for himself where we tread on others to get to the top.

Thatchers plan would have worked, only its been changed over the last 20 years by too many lily-livered politicians (who are still with us), do you really think we would have had this recession if we had kept to her policies and not spent more than we earned, if Gordon Brown hadnt sold off our gold to the lowest bidder.
its alright tring to be socialist and look after everyone here and worldwide...........until other people (the taxpayers) money runs out

Scots Pilgrim

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #36 on: April 10, 2013, 08:27:06 PM »
Certainly no tears being spilled over her up here north of the border

The Big M

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #37 on: April 10, 2013, 08:33:20 PM »
Why not. Closing all the steel works and ship yards with no plan for getting people back to work ruining thousands of Scottish peoples lifes for generations. Places never recovering. Sounds like a great leader to me

les

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #38 on: April 10, 2013, 09:15:43 PM »
Well most of you claim to believe in the British democracy and she was elected every time she ran as party leader. She put the Great back into Great Briton.
She started the movement to allow companies and individuals to save towards their own pensions, to take some of the burden off the state. When Blair and Brown came to power, in the very early stages they robbed the pension funds of 5 billion in the first year, wasted the money and set the decline in the economy on the downward slope we are still trying to get out of. Pensioners are still trying to recover from that great pension fund robbery after the previous Government decimated the pension system, and are not looking back to the state to cover what was taken from them.
The only thing she seems to have done wrong is she was a Lincolnshire girl.

truffleshuffle

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #39 on: April 10, 2013, 09:56:59 PM »
The only thing she seems to have done wrong is she was a Lincolnshire girl.

You should know by now, if they are local their no good  :dan

Fairfax

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #40 on: April 10, 2013, 10:19:32 PM »
If we're going to talk about pensions, I was a software designer for a payroll company and had to make the payroll program changes. I can assure you that Thatcher was the prime minister when I had to alter the programs allowing employers to take "a holiday" from paying into pension funds. I have my diaries to prove it.

Myleftfoot

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #41 on: April 11, 2013, 09:20:02 PM »
I cannot believe the supposedly poor British people on here espousing the virtues of Thatcher. Whilst  she and her cronies set about the destruction of the manufacturing infrastructure of the UK! The fancy Tories of Lincolnshire have conned the locals for decades, and this continues! Vote Tory or your jobs at risk is the old tack.  8)
« Last Edit: April 11, 2013, 09:21:51 PM by Myleftfoot »
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Dipdodah

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #42 on: April 12, 2013, 09:17:34 AM »
I cannot believe the supposedly poor British people on here espousing the virtues of Thatcher. Whilst  she and her cronies set about the destruction of the manufacturing infrastructure of the UK! The fancy Tories of Lincolnshire have conned the locals for decades, and this continues! Vote Tory or your jobs at risk is the old tack.  8)
I remember in the 60's a local farmer of the time used to give time off to vote.  Not only did he give time off, his wife gave all his workers a lift to the polling station.  Only condition was that they voted Tory.  I remember my neighbour telling me and I asked him if he did vote Tory, or did he vote for who he wanted.  He said he voted Tory because his boss told him to.  He was afraid for his job.
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dubai camel

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #43 on: April 12, 2013, 10:36:09 AM »
Taken form the Independent newspaper:

Baroness Thatcher was a leader of exceptional determination and willpower, driven by an absolute conviction that she knew what was best for Britain. But if David Cameron's tribute to her is correct, that was not all she could be admired for. "Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country – she saved our country," the Prime Minister claimed. The second half of that statement is worth examining. If Lady Thatcher saved Britain, what did she save us from, and where are we now?

Inflation and strikes

It is not really disputed that the UK was in bad shape in 1979. Trade unions are often blamed, because of the prevalence of strikes during the 1970s, but what people forget is that there was a reason for their militancy.

Inflation, which affected everybody, ate into the value of people's pay. It took huge pay rises just to keep up with prices. Inflation was rapidly coming down before Lady Thatcher came to power but was still in double figures, at 10.3 per cent per year, in 1979. At first, the Thatcher government unintentionally pushed it right back up over 20 per cent, but then ruthlessly brought it down to 5 per cent in time to secure victory in the 1983 election.

Today, it is 3.2 per cent. So it can reasonably said that Lady Thatcher saved the UK from runaway inflation.

Trade unions

Thatcher's government introduced a series of laws to curb union militancy, but when inflation was out of the system, employees had less reason to strike for higher wages, regardless of the state of industrial legislation. Instead, they faced the worse threat of being out of work. The major strikes of the 1980s, such as the year-long miners' strike, were over jobs, not pay. Every redundnancy of a union member weakened the union.

There were 1.4 million jobless in 1979, or 5.3 per cent of the workforce. That figure peaked at more than 3 million in 1986. Currently it is 2.52 million, or 7.8 per cent – so Lady Thatcher certainly did not save the UK from unemployment, though she did permanently weaken the unions. There were 12 million members of TUC affiliated unions in 1979. Now there are six million.

State ownership

"We were the first country in the world to roll back the frontiers of socialism," Lady Thatcher claimed after she left office. If 'socialism' means state ownership of industry, the claim is undeniably true. In 1979, the electricity, gas, water, coal and steel industries, and British Telecom and BP, were all state owned. Now all are in private hands.

Those privatisations were popular and in practice irreversible, because they replaced state monopolies with private firms competing in the market, improving efficiency. The exception, the botched privatisation of British Rail, was not her doing.

Home ownership

In 1979, 55 per cent of the population lived in owner-occupied homes, and 42 per cent in council houses or other 'socially rented' accommodation. Today owner occupation is around 70 per cent, while 18 per cent are in council or housing association homes. So she helped to bring millions of working class families the benefits of home ownership – but at a cost of rising homelessness, because the council homes that were sold have not been replaced. In 1979, there were just over a million households on housing waiting lists, now there are 1.8 million – though most of that rise came after Lady Thatcher's time.

Public debt and spending

Lady Thatcher's government did a good job of driving down government debt, which was 43.6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1979, and 26.7 per cent in 1990. In 2009, after the banking crisis, it was back where Lady Thatcher found it as a proportion of national output, and rising. In gross figures, the debt was £88.6bn in 1978-79, and £1,103.6bn in 2011-12. But she had those one-off asset sales and tax receipts from North Sea oil to help pay off debt, which no other government has had.

Public spending actually went up in the early Thatcher years, from 45 per cent of GDP to 48.5 per cent, before she started to bring it down. It was back at the 1979 level in 1987, and carried on falling until 1999, after which Labour let it rise slowly until 2008, when the cost of bailing out the banks made it shoot up from 41 to 48 per cent. It should be back to its 1979 level next year.

The pound

Lady Thatcher believed in keeping the value of sterling high. The pound was worth $2.06 in 1979. It shot up to $2.42 by October 1980, then fell to $1.81 within a year. It was $1.96 when she left office and is now worth $1.51, so she did not 'save' sterling from depreciating internationally.

Freedom to borrow

In 1979 there were strict rules about mortgage lending, about how shares were bought and sold, and how much money could be taken abroad. Her government scrapped them all, allowing building societies to become banks and banks to lend for mortgages, though any other government might have had to do the same because computer technology was globalising the money markets. The changes made it much easier for a young couple to raise a mortgage, but much harder to stop banks behaving recklessly. Her policies also pushed up house prices. A house that cost £83,000 in 1979 would cost £163,000 now.

Sexual freedom

Lady Thatcher personally had a reputation for being authoritarian, yet during her time sexual freedom generally increased, along with divorce rate and the rate of abortions. This is not something she encouraged, but she generally did not try to interfere. And this is possibly not what David Cameron meant when he said she 'saved' Britain. On a more negative note, she presided over a frightening rise in the crime rate, from just over 2.5 million recorded crimes in 1979 to 4.5 million in 1990. Lately, the figures have been falling, so that by 2010 it was below the 1990 figure. Lady Thatcher did not 'save' Britain from crime.

Britain's place in the world

A large part of the pre-1979 British malaise was assumed to be the loss of the empire and the sensation that having been the world's third most powerful state in 1945, the UK was sinking down the league table. There had been colonial wars lost, and the debacle of the Suez conflict. Lady Thatcher raised the nation's morale through the victory in the Falklands. She is also often credited with ending military rule in Argentina, though actually all South America's military dictators gave way to civilian rule in the 1980s.

But that aside, not much has changed. In 1979, Lady Thatcher agreed to buy Trident from the US. Now, the government is preparing to update it. Then, western opinion was outraged when the USSR sent the Red Army into Afghanistan. Now the west is embroiled in a war in Afghanistan which has dragged on for over 10 years.

Then, Lady Thatcher was in a minority of one at an EU summit, when she battled for a reduction in the UK's contribution to the EU budget. Two months ago, David Cameron was rather less isolated as he battled to keep the overall EU budget down, something he could not have achieved alone

Overall, Lady Thatcher did not save the UK from losing its position as a premier league world power, but she made patriotic Britons feel less miserable about their lost status. Myth of Thatcher is in full swing.....


green hats mate

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Re: O/T Maggie Thatcher
« Reply #44 on: April 12, 2013, 12:36:30 PM »
Don,t forget Gordon Brown saved the WORLD . :-[