Reds controlling a number of the unions. Or have you forgotten Arthur Scargill? Or the rigged ballots? Or the rent-a-mobs?
I’m going to treat that contempt with the remark it deserves.
Ah, your poor little country defeated the Socialist Might of the Argentine Empire. Were the Generals who ran Argentina really Leftists? And wasn’t Argentina having a financial crisis?
Maggie had them too. They wore uniforms.
All I can suggest you do is some research for yourself Usram
Differant Britons had very differant experiences of Thatcher, so personal experience is not necassarily a great guide to the actual effect of her misrule.
It is very easy to dredge up the numbers though, take a look at the economic indicators and tie them up with the policy decisions Thatcher made, but make sure that you also tie in a certain amount of lag, interest rate rchanges usually take about 12-18 months to work through, however tax cuts take much less.
You’ll see that that 20% tax cut in the higher band coincides very well with an increase in inflation and the consequent increase in interest rates, which then ties in well to the boom and bust cycle.
Thatcher was hopelessly irresponsible with finance, she used a huge opportunity that no other British leader ever had, and she squandered it all, because the oil revenue supported sterling when it would have declined severely, and this would have meant a completely unaceptable rise in interest rate and a depression, not a recession.
Those oil revenues replaced the lost taxation of millions of recently unemployed, it paid for borrowing on the international markets, our need for manufacturing was reduced in national terms.
As for manufacturing being less relevant as low cost economies begin to use cheap labout, why do Japan, and Germany see manufacturing as being crucial to their prospects then ?
British investment performance is very short term, it is very dynamic very profitable, but commodity trading will never employ the masses.
British industry has been seriously let down across generations by its ‘Captains of Industry’, you can look at just about every major industry the UK had, and trace its decline to poor short term investment decisions, from ships, motorbikes, cars, to almost anything you can think of.
The problem in the UK is that as far as developed nations were concerned, we were a low wage economy, its cheaper to get a quick return using more workers and outmoded equipment. I personally worked in the 1990’s in a company that had machines dating back well over 100 years, some of those very same machines actually made the suspension springs for the Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, they still had all the dies to manufacture suspension springs for horse drawn mail coaches!
Germany and Japan went the other way, they used fewer workers, preferring to develop industrial technologies that enable them to employ fewer workers, but much better paid.
One of the reasons for the rise of the unions is simply the appalling way British workers were treated, look at the casualisation of the dockworkers for example.
Had British capitalists looked after thier workforce the unions would not have developed the power they did.
There is a good old capitalist saying,
“There are no bad workers, only bad managers”
Its as true today as it ever was.
If you look at the Nissan plant up at Washington, you find British workers with modern plant can produce and compete with any other similar workforce producing cars, the reason that other British car manufacturers had such low production rates was largely down to investment.
Risking a hijack - are you saying that these machines did the job as well (and is that defined in terms of speed, quality or cost) as modern equivalents, or not?
She seemed a principled and skilled politician at the start. Taking no nonsence from the unions but also lacking in policies to help those who became unemployed due to her harsh industrial shake-ups. I think the stronger econimy of UK over France is mostly due to her policies. She became increasingly beligerant and this lead me to consider her porrly from arround the middle of her second term in office. She remained in power far longer than was realy good for the country.
Her legacy that new Labour is carying out many of her policies indicates the value of at least some of what she was doing.
So a good politician who became a monstrous politician over time.
Those machines were way inferior to more modern stuff, both in terms of quantity of output and als in terms of quality.
Maybe the UK economy appears to be doing better than France, but the latter still has a larger manufacturing sector, and you don’t see French pensioners investing their life savings to buy up English ruins to refurbish and retire in.
I wonder who has the better quality of life ?
That might of played well in the home court, but out in the real world, it was considered something of a joke that the then-crippled British Navy, lacking true aircraft carriers, had such a difficult time establishing air superiority (although it certainly vetted the Harrier as a superior fighter in direct air-to-air confrontation) and stretched Naval capability to the limit to effect amphibious landings on what Reagan derisively referred to as “that little ice-cold bunch of land down there.” And that the Falklands Conflict improved Thatcher’s standing at home is a non-sequitor to the fall of the Soviet Union. Gorbechev didn’t announce the “Sinatra Doctrine” (as the snowball that started disintegration of the Soviet Union became known) in fearful response to Margaret Thatcher; he did so because the political and economic situation of maintaining central control became untenable. This had nothing to do with a small collection of islands in the South Atlantic.
Well, I’m a staunch supporter of the theories of Sir Issac Newton (as long as we’re not moving a significant fraction of c.) Can I therefore claim responsibility for gravity continuing to function?
It is well established that the Soviets were running well beyond their means long before Reagan came into the picture. In fact, while the NATO and particularly US defense conventional defense forces were languishing during the Seventies, the Soviets maintained their arms production infrastructure, and while it was the one area of production that brought in hard foreign cash during the economically barren period of Brezhnev and his immediate successors, the Soviets spent that and more building up conventional forces and purchasing grain from abroad. Soviet support and occasional intervention in Asia and Africa (not to mention stalwart support of Castro’s Cuba and certain Latin American juantas), while not a significant portion of their military spending, continued apace while the US largely divested itself of foreign interests and expendatures.
When Reagan came to town and started the largest military spending spree since the early Kennedy Administration, the Soviets only had to marginally ramp up production to keep up, as they already enjoyed a substantial numerical advantage in land forces. (Their naval situation is somewhat more contentious, but Soviet naval stratetic doctrine was dramatically different from that of the NATO powers, with the Soviets primarily interested in controlling the North Atlantic and the area around the Kamchatka Peninsula, whereas American thinking on the matter dictated a global naval presence, particularly in the Med and the South Pacific/Indian Ocean.) By the end of the Brezhnev Era, even the Soviets had to publically acknowledge their manifest economic difficulties. See this paper (warning: PDF) for more detail.
Containment of Soviet expansion was critical in limiting the control and subsequent exploitation of industrialized Europe, of course, but by the mid-Sixties the lines had stabilized and no significant effort was made by the Soviets to increase their satellite holdings; the major effort of the Politburo turned to maintaining control of their existing client states and fomenting dissent in pockets of the world that would be most irritating to the Western powers rather than gaining actual control and integration. By the Eighties the Soviets had become so insular that their international involvement (not counting the members of the Warsaw Pact and Cuba) basically amounted to arms sales and the ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan (nucleated by then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s policy of encouraging Islamic fundamentalism and military aid to the mujaheddin, starting from early 1979).
I don’t even have time to get into the details of the Dubček government in Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity Movement in Poland, the political and economic reformed of Gorbechev (which, intentional or not, were a direct cause to the dissolution of Soviet control over its Warsaw Pact client states); suffice it to say that there were many active players who had direct involvement in the events that precipitated the fall of the USSR who were on the ground and in harm’s way. In short, while the rhetoric of resisting the Soviet Union proved to be a political coup for both Reagan and Thatcher, the events that led to the fall of the Soviet Union were set in motion long before either of those people were in power. To dismiss their efforts by suggesting that it was all due to Thatcher and Reagan is historical revisionism at its worst.
Stranger
I thought the late-80s inflation was generally attributed to interest rates being too low, and also largesse by Tory standards in the budgets of the time? This thread is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest it was cause by reducing top-rate income tax. You say that the money was all spent on Porsches and mobile phones rather than bricks and roads and nurses’ salaries, but I don’t see how that would affect overall inflation. Porsche prices would rise, brick prices would drop.
Are you talking about the series of military dictators following the National Reorganization Process junta? 'Cause I don’t think these guys could even be considered nominally socialist. (Heck, the CIA cooperated with them during Operation Condor.)
And not only was Argentina in a serious recession, their Navy was neither well-prepared nor had technological parity with the British Navy (even at its then sad state.) Despite that, loses on the Argentine side were far less than expected. It’s slightly more of an accomplishment than, say, invading Grenada, but hardly the bellweather event that sent the members of the Politburo quaking at the knees.
Stranger
That sentiment crops up now and then, as if the size and climate of the place were significant. How about “An island, inhabited by people who universally wished to remain under British protection, that had been invaded by the forces of a vicious military dictatorship with absolutely no claim to the territory”?
The point about Porsches seems to be lost on you, this point was made to show that far from reinvesting the tax cut money, it was used to import expensive foreign goods, wether it was Porches, or Champagne.
Such a massive import boom is unstustainable, it must be financed, you can do this exporting more, or getting more moeny for your exports, or by borrowing from the international money markets, but to do the latter means that you will habe to raise the government bond rates, which in turn puts up the cost of borrowing for British consumers and small to medium sized companies, which is precisley the industrial group Thatcher claimed she was trying to encourage - the entrepreneurials.
The money was not invested, had it been put into infrastructure, it would have created more employment without increasing imports to the same massive degree.
This is the basic differance between funding much needed public projects, which are acknowledged as being far less inflationary than spedning it upon expensive consumer imports.
One of perhaps the most noteworthy things about the current Labour administration’s record is the extremely steady and predictable growth over the last 10 years, and this has been hugely based upon the the lack of political interferance in the Bank of England, which had been previously used very cynically by
You see, the top 10% of the wage earners got a 30% tax cut, the remained got around 5%.
Now 30% of the tax take on a top wage earner is quite a significant amount to the individual, and this windfall went to buy the luxury goods to which many such folk aspire.
On the other hand 5% take on the lower 90% is nothing like as big a windfall, its not going to buy as much, it’ll probably ger you a couple of pints in the pub, or maybe an extra take away meal, its money that will highly likely be spent within the existing economy and will draw in far fewer imports.
In fact, as far as those lower wage earners, this tax cut was almost entirely eaten up by increases in interest rates on their mortages, give in one hand, take away in the other.
It also increased the mortgage costs of the higher earners, but it didn’t eat it all away not by any means, it dented this windfall only slightly.
I don’t know where whichever poster thought that the Falklands war was significant in the Cold War is coming from, but I’d like to disagree with your other point.
There can’t have been many amphibious landings attempted with supply lines as long as the distance from the Falklands to Ascension (although the supply line really was all the way back to the UK = 8000 miles). Given the equipment on hand, and particularly after the airlift was gone with the sinking of the Atlantic Conveyor, the troops on the ground fought a really nasty battle across hostile terrain, on foot, with little or no air support.
No disrespect to Grenada veterans, but the Falklands is in a different category, and for it to be described as only “slightly more of an accomplishment” is IMO an insult to both sides.
I cited it as an example of how little Reagan thought of the conflict in global terms. (The same holds true for the invasion of Grenada, which had the rest of the world wondering what the US was so up in arms about.) I have no argument with the right of Great Britian to reclaim its protectorate with the volition of the inhabitants.
No question that the Falklands conflict was the essential maritime post-WWII conflict, and that the individual soldiers, sailors, and aviators acquitted themselves well in the conflict. But the fact that Britian was ill-equipped to support such operations didn’t speak too highly in terms of its ability to rally against a conventional land war in Europe or marine-based air superioritity conflict in the North Atlantic (the two likely scenerios in a East-West conflict).
A single proper aircraft carrier that could launch bombing missions, provide air cover for ground troops and landing forces, and attack Argentine naval forces with near-impunity would have made short work of the invading forces. Instead, the groundpounders received very limited air support and the Argentine Navy could move with land-based air cover while the Navy had Harriers (of great mobility but very limited range) and helicopters.
The lack of effective defense against the French Exocet missile also demonstrated the weakness of even modern surface vessels against a concerted attack; even a cheap, second-rate (at best) navy could pose a serious threat to a modern, well-equipped frigate-sized or larger vessel. The Soviet Navy, while having neither technical nor numerical parity with NATO forces could, in its venue, pose a substantial, perhaps show-stopping threat. Britian’s naval philosophy of the time (to shy away from full sized carriers and focus on highly advanced guided missile ships) ended up being a serious weakness in their ability to cope with a wide array of situations.
Stranger
Surely this yuppy splurge, the scale of which I still think you overstate, was already paid for by the foreigners to whom they exported financial and other services? No need for any government to balance the books afterwards.
“Invest”. Weasel word meaning government spending. Governments can’t create jobs, overall and in the long run. We covered all this back in the seventies/eighties.
Was just trying to point out that politically and militarily that the two are not comparable.
You are wrong here I think, at least in the latter part of your post. At the time our whole military stance was concerned with the West German border and the North Atlantic gap. The Army and the RAF were entirely focused on how to counter a Soviet land attack, and in the case of the RAF, counter strike. The Navy function was, as usual, protection of shipping lanes. Force projection outside the European theatre really wasn’t (and is only now coming to be again) a priority. Which leads onto:
I don’t really understand what the purpose of the mini-carriers was. The amphibious landing ships did not have sufficient protection. Lack of money, probably. The Argentine navy was not a factor.
Major wake-up call for all navies! (The Argentine air force delivered all but one Exocet, the other was launched from land). The RN has a couple of proper carriers in the pipeline, and a new destroyer class is at sea trial. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of budget will be allocated soon to replace Trident.
British naval doctrine with regard to a North Sea/North Atlantic campaign seemed to be predicated on the use of guided missile frigates and ASW hunters, which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn’t provide for air power projection. Admittedly, Britain can reach much of Western and Central Europe as well as the critical bits of Iceland and Greenland from home bases even without refueling, so that’s not such a dramatic issue for the UK as it was for the US (plus, the US has carriers out the wazoo, making British carriers redundant in a combined naval action) but it did come up short with the Falklands under that doctrine.
Also, while British naval forces in the North Atlantic could count on ground-based air cover, the coverage wouldn’t be as complete or as immediate as that from a carrier-based flight group. Whether that would actually be critical in a major engagement or not is questionable; flight operations on a carrier are always risky and usually logistically limited in comparison to those run from a ground-based force, all things being equal, and of course, a carrier is a large, juicy target for an enemy, the damage of which could create a major dent in the fleet’s ability to operate.
The purpose of through-deck cruisers (the Brits don’t refer to them as “carriers” for political reasons) was to retain naval air capability in the wake of cancellation of the CVA-01 project. The Invincible-class was supposed to be a compromise between a large capital carrier ship and a cheaper, more flexible cruiser-sized vessel. Instead, it ended up being the worst of both worlds; very limited air support capability combined with high liability.
The Argentine Navy wasn’t a serious threat in any conventional sense, i.e. comperable ship-to-ship combat, but the inability of the Royal Navy to use air power to keep them at bay and under observation made them a constant harassment and a risk for extended detached maneuvers. And the sinking of the Sheffield–a modern, well-protected ship with no major design flaws or problems–by a single Exocet highlighted just how delicate surface vessels were, even to an inferior force.
One area where the British Navy equalled and arguably exceeded the capability of the American counterparts was in submarine combat and ASW capability, which would be critical in a NATO-Soviet naval conflict. However, that capability wasn’t really in play in the Falklands. At any rate, the Falklands Conflict didn’t demonstrate to the world, and particularly to the Soviet Union, that the British were a naval force to be reckoned with; if anything, quite the opposite, or at least failing to demonstrate the Royal Navy’s strengths. Good on Britian for taking back what was hers, but the impact on the downfall of the Soviet Union was negligible.
Stranger
I disagree: it had a major psychological impact on the West. Rather than continuing a gentle decline, we’d stood up for ourselves and stopped the rot. This helped us stand up to the Soviet Union.
Yeah, we stood up for ourselves in a conflict that was predictable, preventable but that would not have done the good old trick of gaining support for a wartime government.
Unpopular governements have done this regularly, let’s face it, it’s why Galtieri invaded the Falklands in the first place, to prop up his ailing regime. You can go right back to the last Czar and see this.
We knew they were going to invade, we knew when they were going to invade, we could have taken modest measures well beforehand, as we had done on three previous occasions.
On one of those missions to deter Argentine aggression, I happened to be part of the it, albeit just as crew on a warship sent down there, sent there by David Owen - the defence minister during the previous Labour administration.
Face it, Conservatives were down to 20% in the polls, and with an election the following year, they were set to be wiped out, the Thatcher administration had all the intelligence reports and knew all about the Argentine build up, and they did nothing, yet on three previous occasions we had, and we had prevented war.
Thatcher took a huge gamble with the lives of servicemen, and it paid off, before the war they had nothing to lose, after the war you could not read a newspaper, turn on a tv or radio, without being regaled with how we well we had done, how we had defended freedom and how Thatcher was just like Churchill.
We were force fed this diet of nationalism for month upon month, with endless discussion about the ‘Falklands factor’ in terms of governemtn popularity.
In the meantime, the mass factory shutdowns continued, but fell from the top of the news agenda.
Agreed on Liverpool’s relative economic decline, but I’d argue that the replacement of transatlantic passenger shipping by air travel and the rise of container shipping played an important role. The port of Liverpool handled container traffic of a record 616,000 teu (20-foot equivalent units, a standard industry measure of capacity) in 2004, the most recent figures I could find, but that’s much less than the biggest U.K. container terminals, which are at Felixstowe on the southeast coast (annual capacity of more than 3.7 million teu) and Southampton on the south coast (annual capacity of close to 2 million teu).