BritDopers: In hindsight, what do you think of Thatcher's legacy?

Great Debates
21

I was at Uni from 1976 - 1979 studying Politics and Economics.

The UK was an utter mess.

In my view the Conservatives had three strands, Industry, the City and ‘the County’
The County is a bit hard to pin down, so I’ll leave it to other UK Dopers to attempt to describe it.

The City is finance. Probably influenced by her husband, she had this strange idea that wealth was created by shuffling bits of paper.

In my view she totally shafted Industry (manufacturing) and created a climate where people were proud of closing plants - while before then they were ashamed.

We had massive unemployment which did eventually choke off wage inflation and did break the power of the Trades Unions, although it is likely that technology would have done that anyway.

Interestingly she took on the legal profession, who had a nice little monopoly.

The Falklands was probably an Intelligence screw up, while I would have willingly handed the islands over to Argentina if they had asked politely, not to have reacted to armed aggression would have made the UK look pretty feeble. Personally I reckon the USA was watching with interest to see whether the senile old lion still had any teeth.

Pinochet provided quite a lot of quiet assistance, it is difficult to pin down how much, but it is easy to see that we owed him a debt regardless of what he and his supporters had got up to.

The Poll Tax was a major mistake, and it is one that is being repeated right now. Thatch correctly realized that local Councils were (and still are) virtually unanswerable to their electorate, and thought that making the bulk of the electorate bear the burden of local taxation would make the electorate force the Councils to toe the line.

Of course this was and still is, misguided, the vast majority of Council revenue comes from central government, and their knee jerk reaction is to increase local taxes and blame it on central government.

While I disliked many of Thatch’s policies, I do not like to think about what would have happened to the UK if she had not been elected. She could have done a lot better, but the alternative was not pleasant.

22

Huh?

23

Pinochet led a coup d’état deposing the democratically-elected Socialist President Salvador Allende…
Pinochet implemented a series of security operations, with support from the United States and other South American military governments, in which around 3,000 suspected or known dissidents and leftists were killed, and (according to the Valech Report) around 30,000 more were tortured…
At the time of his death in 2006, around 300 criminal charges in Chile were still pending against Pinochet for human rights abuses and embezzlement during his rule…

See, we ‘on the left’ like a Democratic Government.
We don’t like military dictators who are mass murderers and torturers.
You support such people, do you? :rolleyes:

Perhaps you’d like to congratulate Hitler on sorting out the German economy ‘regardless of what he and his supporters had got up to’? :smack:

24

I sometimes think that British Dopers lose control of their faculties when it comes to discussing Margaret Thatcher. For example, from the otherwise sane glee

Thatcher was merely the figurehead of a general rejection of statism/collectivism/socialism, which were seen to have led to Britain’s post-1945 economic decline. If she hadn’t happened, somebody else would have. It would just have taken five or ten more years than it did, and we would probably still be catching up to Germany and France, rather than being better off than both of them, as we are now.

25

I reckon the Conservatives did not know exactly what they had selected when they chose her - my understanding is that she was a bit of an accident.

I would also be wary of stating that we are better off than France and Germany, our GDP is grossly inflated by an overvalued pound and a quick trip to France or Germany would leave most UK residents thinking that they are doing very nicely.

26

The pound wouldn’t be valued higher than the Euro if our economy wasn’t considered a better bet than that of France or Germany. Market values of currencies don’t lie.

27

Don’t bet on it.

There is an underlying ‘commodity’ exchange rate, but that can be swamped by capital flows and by speculation.

I would be surprized if we do not see a dramatic fall in the £ in the next 12 months.

28

Eh? For all of history to date, a pound has been worth more than a U.S. dollar. That does not mean the pound has always been a stronger currency. After all, the yen is pretty strong.

29

“Were seen to” – but, in hindsight, did they?

30

Presumably these are a different set of people than those that voted her in three times, then?

31

Tecnically yes. You’ve got to remember that less than half of votes cast in almost every general election since 1885, were for the overall winning party.

Also those who did vote for a certain party, may still not support their respective candidate for PM. For those of you outside the UK, in a general election you are actually voting for your local Member of Parliament (MP). The Prime Minister is the leader of whichever party has MPs’ bums on more than half of the total seats in the House of Commons (646 total seats as of 2005).

So really in a gerneral election you have to weigh up 3 main factors before you vote.

  1. Which one of the three party leaders will do the best job as PM
  2. Which party will do the best job of running the country
  3. Which of the local candidates will do the best job representing his constituents in Parliament.
  4. Why bother voting, they’re all a bunch of deceitfull bastiches.

83 results
87 results
92 results

32

Bear in mind that some people live in a Dystopian Parallel Britain and due to sunspot activity lines sometimes get crossed.

And as for the econony

National deficit remains under the 3% European agreement and national debt, which the Daily Mail (a great paper for incontinent dog owners and border-line hysterics over a range of issues from Evil Immigrants to Pyramid-building aliens ) claims is 3 times higher, seems perfectly manageable.

For civil service numbers - well it depends on what you count. All those extra doctors and nurses, police and security people? The country needs public administration and employees and unless you are an idealogue or a Daily Mail reader they are not intrinsically bad and the govt is slashing traditional big C big S civil service numbers following an efficiency review.

I dislike this government for a host of reasons but they’ve done a pretty good job on the economy while trying to mend the social fabric Margeret ‘there’s no such thing as society’ Thatcher ripped apart. The UK today is living with the consequences of the barbaric and callous way she went about ‘reforming’ the economy through mass unemployment and the effective abandonment of entire regions.

People might like to remeber what the country was like in the eighties, how Labour’s 1997 election victory was greeted along the lines of VE Day and why it has taken so long for the tories to regain their credibility before making out the UK is some sort of economic hell.

33

I didn’t say that second thing you quoted.

I’m not trying to say Pinochet was a great guy, I’m just saying I don’t understand why he’s brought up so much more than the many other tin pot dictators of the time. My understanding is also that most of the death and torture (which are inexcusable and I supported his prosecution for crimes against humanity) were in the first stages of his revolution.

(As an aside, Allende wasn’t democratically elected in a meaningful sense)

34

He won the 1970 election in the democratic sense on a plurality of 36.2% and was chosen to be President by congress following normal precedent, despite US Track 1 trickery. And by ‘revolution’ you meant to say military coup d’etat.

35

Well yeah, and 43% voted in 1988 to keep Pinochet on…

I’m not saying that his win was against the rules, I’m just saying that it wasn’t meaningfully democratic.

36

I misread that as Satanism.

37

Was Thatcher for that or against it?

38

Well, if hatred of Thatcher = “general rejection of Satanism” …

work it out

39

What a fine mixture of compliment and insult! :slight_smile:

Thatcher was not just a figurehead of change. Tony Blair changed the Labour party dramatically and won lots of elections. But he will be remembered for Iraq.

Take a look at Szlater’s excellent post early on in the thread.
Thatcher was involved in corruption, economic stupidity, dividing society (unions, gays), unecessary war and shielding mass murderers. Her legacy caused her party to lose power for decades.

40

Firstly, as BunnyTVS showed, Thatcher was elected not only by a minority of those who voted, but was not at all popular considering how many of the electorate didn’t even vote.

Next she was dropped by her own party, who considered her a future disaster.

Her economic policies were rapidly discarded and she is never mentioned by the current Conservative leadership.

I got the line about people dancing on her grave from a TV comedian. The remark stopped the show because people were laughing so much.