You’ll note that oil prices rose from around $2 a barrel to just under $15 a barrel, during a time when we had to import all our oil, and into 1982 Thatcher also had a huge problem, but by then the very real prospect of North Sea Oil revenues had instilled a measure of confidence into the UK economy, its that change from being dependant upon imports to being a net exporter of oil that made all the differance, and it was a benefit that Heath never had, which caused a recession and led to a Labour poll victory, and in turn, killed off the Labour government and ushered in Thatcher, and it very nearly lost her the election, but for the Falklands victory.
It’s those increases in the oil price that made North Sea oil exploration a viable prospect.
I took a look around for figures relating to the popularity of Thatchers 1982 popularity, just prior to the Falklands war.
I was actually surprised to find out just how low the Tory rating was,
Even though Michael Foot was utterly hopeless as a party leader, and even though the Labour party was riven with ideological differances, the Tories were still on a low prior to the Falklands war.
You’ll also remember that Thatcher called that 1983 election a year early and that was partly because she could ride that wave of nationalistic fervour following the successful outcome of that war, and also because there were plenty of economic forecasters who were predicting a rise in inflation and interest in the following 12 months, which actually in the event were not as severe as feared.
It took the Labour party a great deal of effort to lose their lead to a distinctly average to poor performance of that first term of the Thatcher govenrment, but they managed it.
As for our economy picking up, not so, were were at 11% unemployment in 1982, inflation was in double figure and so were interest rates, and this was no improvement over the previous Labour administration the future gains in Britains economic performance took place later, well into the following government term.
I think you’re just proving my point: we got a spring in our step. And you have yet to show that she orchestrated the affair.
She was successful, people saw she meant business, etc etc. And the opposition split. No wonder she got re-elected. No conspiracy at all.
Casdave, as far as I can tell from this thread, your hatred of Margaret Thatcher is blind and unreasoning. Your points have been disproven at every turn. Open your eyes, take a look at what she achieved.
How was this any differant in the slightest to the previous two decades ?
How was this any differant in 1977/78 when we were sent down there by David Owen ? Or the other two occasions ?
As for the improvised operation, we had our newspapers bleating on about it for around two months when they landed on the South Sandwich Islands, yet still Thatcher did nothing.
Do you actually imagine the Royal Navy was so stretched it did not have a couple of frigates and a sub available, becuase that is certainly not the case, there is always at least one full squadron available in home water all the time, and there is always at least one hunter killer sub in the north Atlantic all the time, these assets were available at minutes, not hours or days notice.
So you agree with me then, much of our Royal Navy assets were readily available to be sent off on a mission.
The belief that the economy was picking up in the period 198-82 is completely fallacious, inflation was in double figures, unemployment was 11% interest rates were in double figures, although I’ll concede that this was going to fall and had been predicted.
On top of this we had the 1981 oil shock, so there was virtually no possiblioty of any improvement in industrial performance, even if Thatcher had been suer competante, which she was not.
It was not until well after that 1983 election that things turned up, and the oil revenues were instrumental in that.
Does anyone here actually deny that Thatchers poll rating was 20% and lower in 1982 ?
Whe you look at that poll rating, you hve to wonder how it rose so much, the Falklands war played a big part, and the media made damn sure we didn’t forget it either.
Are you doubting the veracity of my cites on the historical oil prices, are you doubting my accuracy on the oil shicks of the 1970’s that led to the recession, which then led on to inflation, waves of strikes and the downfall of both the Heath and Callaghan governments ?
If you are going to make some claim about the ability of Thatcher, then you need to disporve or explain away the low poll ratings, the state of the UK economy and high unemployment of the first term of the Thatcher government.
Then can you explain how, despite such mediocre economic performance and unpopularity, Thatchers poll rating recovered ? The clue is, that rating did not improve because of the healthy economy, that didn’t come until later, the Falklands war was instrumental in improving her poll rating.
I also see a lot of explaining away of intelligence etc, but this doesn’t match the behaviour of previous Labour and Conservative administrations.
I would like to see some cite about Thatcher ‘hoping diplomacy was the way to go forward’ prior to the actual landing on the Falklands by the Argentine.
I would like to see something about the so-caled diplomacy, the right wing newspapers were screaming about the inaction, she didn’t even send her Foreign Minister off to deal with it, until it was well too late.
…and exactly the same applies to Thatcher, she needed that war as much as Galtieri.
Read further down that page and you’ll see that although her achievements are mentioned, this is qualified by the costs of widening the gap between the rich and poor, and of creating an underclass.
I can certainly see what Thatcher achieved, we live with it every day, the non-counting of unemployed for spurious reasons, the social exclusion of millions, the immense increase in payment of disability benefits, especially in South Wales as a way to massage those unemplyoment figure (disabled folk do not count as unemployed), I see the me me me culture, I see entire regions that are still struggling to cope with the depradations of her attetions.
This site, paints a more balanced picture of her, crediting her with certain things, such as the necassary breaking of union power, and tempers that with the fact that other achievments were actually less within her control than is commonly hyped. By this I mean you should read the legacy of her years in office.
As for blind hatred, well all I can say is that when you read that summary, you’ll see why she is still reviled, noone has yet answered my charge that she divided the country so thoroughly, that the Conservatives were wiped out in Scotland and Wales and now both these places have their own assemblies, she is more responsible for the nationalism in those areas than any other person in the last 200 years.
You have yet to provide one shred of evidence of conspiracy. Was the Falklands War fortuitous for her? Absolutely, given that won. But she didn’t seek it, nor cause it.
You cannot provide any evidence because there was no conspiracy. So stop trying to pretend that there was.
Actually I remember working during the 3 day week, behind blackout curtains, re-pricing goods - during a price freeze.
Inflation was a nightmare and there were perpetual strikes.
Taxation was very high, and although I remember it being easy to get jobs, they were pretty low paid - which was made up for by doing unnecessary overtime.
In my view, at the time and now, Thatcher had three sources of support:
The ‘county’ - farmers etc - but more
The City
Industry
Sadly, she sold out to the City and drove industry to the wall.
Prior to 1980 people were embarrassed to close factories, by 1981 they were doing it with relish. I know, just listening to my father was enough to guage the mood shift.
Incidentally in 1976 I was sent to Germany to work for a successful subsidiary of a UK company (pure nepotism :-} but interesting) I was alarmed to learn that a Product Manager there earnt more than my father, a director of the UK company.
My take is that Thatcher - if not her, someone - had to handle the Unions, who were completely out of control - and had resisted the 1960’s ‘In Place of Strife’, Heath’s pathetic attempts to cow them with judges in robes and wigs, and had turned on Callaghan - the Winter of Discontent.
It is a shame that she sided with spivs, but understandable as Dennis had made a pile through inheriting a chunk of Burmah Oil.
I despised the Poll Tax, but understood the theory (it was flawed, the electorate has little control over local councils - and we can see the same problem with Council Tax now).
While I have been following Cazdave’s line on the Falklands with interest, I do not believe that Thatcher allowed it to happen deliberately. Very possibly people in the Foreign Office knew what was going on, but Thatch and her team were pretty new to the job.
At the time I was not in favour of invasion, I would (and said at the time) have torpedoed their ports and shipping, dropped ICBMs without warheads on pre-warned areas and quietly have said ‘you are welcome to the place - but don’t grab’.
I’ve little faith in opinion polls, anyone who has studied statistics, econometrics or commissioned market research tends to be jaundiced. The Labour party was un-electable in 1983.
Also, while unemployment was horrific, a good chunk of the population was doing very nicely. In the early 1980’s I was working in marketing for a mass market package holiday company, and was forever being asked, as an economist, why the heck we were doing so well when there was a depression on.
Reminds me of asking an old boy what it was like during the 1930’s depression, he answered ‘well to be honest I did not really notice it’. 10% of the work force might be unemployed, but the other 90% can be living the life of Riley.
The housing bust was set off by Lawson’s (?) idiotic delay of banning double mortgage relief in 1988, it brought forward transactions and enticed people into the market who should not have been there. Things were not helped by rising interest rates, but they would have mattered far less if people had not over borrowed.
My epitaph for Thatch would be that she did the right thing wrong, and was honest but misguided.
I do not regret my vote in 1979, but could never bring myself to vote for her again.
Margaret Thatcher remains a highly divisive figure in Britain, even fifteen years after her fall. Many on the Left still hate her with a visceral hatred for the changes she made to British society, changes which the modern Labour Party has largely accepted and made little effort to reverse. When she eventually dies they will give a great big cheer and hold a huge party.
It still irks me somewhat that Thatcher apologists even after all this time will never acknowlegde the real causes of all those strikes, the rampant inflation and the high interest rates.
Why do they never accept that the truth is that Heath and Callaghan were victims of circumstances far beyond their control, and that Thatcher was almost brought down by the very same things, but ultimately benefitted hugely from them.
The simple fact is, oil prices mutiplied massively during the 1970’s, its why the workforce were asking for more pay, it’s why we were so dependant upon coal for power.
Thatcher was hit by rising oil prices in her first term too, but by the time the second term arrived, the UK was already a net exporter of the stuff, and its this that supported the currency and allowed her to ignore manufacturing industry to the exclusion of the money markets and the city.
The failure to realise this will have a serious knock on effect, because that oil from the North Sea will decline, and without a reasonably sized manufacturing base to produce the wealth, we are going to find ourselves in deep trouble.
We must have a strategy to encourage investment, not in call centres, not in large insurance brokerage, nor in hedge funds and the like, we will need those anyway, we need to look to the future and work out just how we are to employ the masses, and to stem the flow on imported goods by making stuff ourselves.
You’ll note, we no longer have shipbuilding, coal mining, steall has seriously declined, we hardly make any white goods, virtually no electricals, our car industry is virtually all foreign owned which would not be a problem were it not for the fact that when one of the companies decided to close a site - the UK ones are the first to be considered.
Anyone can point out that these industries work better when labour costs are lower, but high labour costs ought to promote investment in high production machinery, but as yet, the UK industry bosses are always after a quick return, 10 year or more break even investment is just not in their imagination.
This was the situation in the UK all the way from WWII and its one that still prevails.
All Thatcher did was show how short term money was good, strange how other countries seem prepared to work with longer terms industial investment, but that takes lots of work, something British bosses do not seem to be able to handle.
It was largely the unions that drove heavy industry out of the U.K… For example, Arthur Scargill brought the miners out on strike and destroyed the mining industry. My father was in shipbuilding and saw the decline first-hand. He noted that to have a good chance of becoming Secretary of the TUC, you had to have a ‘good strike’ under your belt. So there were lots of strikes. At all levels, incompetent and supine management didn’t help either. Nor did over-restrictive labour laws. I’m All Right Jack lampooned this rather well. Heath let the NUM destroy him.
Remember our propensity to strike being called ‘the British disease’, and Britain being ‘the sick man of Europe’? Mrs Thatcher put a stop to all that.
…and you still will not acknowledge what drove those strikes in the first place will you ?
Look, if you went to fill up your car and found the price of petrol had gone up from 92p a litre to £5 a litre, and it wasn’t going to come down again, you might consider that you need more pay to deal with it.
Add to that, every single item in the shops will also rise in price due to the increase in transportation costs, that you have to close your cheaper running power stations and electricity will cost more, and all the knock effects of that, then you might have some idea of what happened to inflation in the 1970’s.
This is what drove those pay demands.
I distinctly rememeber at decimalisation, petrol was 28 pence a gallon, it went up in short order to 70pence, and I remeber al the fuss when it went to over £1 a gallon, this in less than 2 years.
This situation was completely out of the control of national governments, but the differance is that in Germany and Japan, they had invested heavily in new plant, they could keep production high, whereas the stuff we were working with was clapped out, because labour was relatively cheap it had been easier to get a high return on production by employing lots of bodies instead of expensive machinery.
As soon as the labour wanted more money, costs went up dramatically, in more advanced nations, although costs went up, increased production offset this.
The woeful short term investment policy of UK bosses made a serious problem worse.
I’ll agree that the oil price hike contributed to inflation, but I don’t see it as the sole or even main reason.
Inflation is a curious thing, largely it is psychological, and once it gets going the original reason is lost in the tumult.
In the late 1960’s the Labour Government realized that industrial relations were getting out of control - hence In Place Of Strife, fronted by Barbara Castle, which got scuppered by the unions.
Ted Heath unleashed the banks and building societies with Competition and Credit Control, which led to an outbreak of commercial property speculation, and probably is at the root of later housing price booms.
Decimalization also contributed to inflation.
I tend to put responsibility for a lot of later problems firmly in the hands of Ted Heath.
I also agree that British industry was badly managed - and the private bits were run purely for short term gains. Personally I reckon that for historical reasons good people tended to avoid going into industry, also that the accountants had too much control.
Interestingly the miners have always been a problem, recently I learned that they went on strike in WWI - also IIRC in 1911
From what Cazdave has said, it sounds as if quite a few people had an idea of what the Argentinians were up to, but I seriously doubt that Thatch, Carrington etc had the faintest clue.
For what it is worth, my take is that the USA was watching with great interest, to see how the UK would handle things. And that interest was not particularly benign.
It would appear that what Quartz is after, is a publication, authorised by Tatcher, or maybe one of her close advisors, that details the events leading up to the Falklands war, and the rationale for taking the course that resulted, including the reasons for inaction.
Is this naiive or what ?
I would be incredibly interested in the reasons why Thatcher was not allegedly aware of the Argentine build up, since we pay large sums of money to people whose task it is specifically to analyse and report on such issues, which, to be fair, they had done on at least three previous occasions.
I just do not believe senior civil servants, especially in the intelligence community were unaware, or they were aware but chose not to cover their arses by failing to inform Thatcher of impending events.
There will be no smoking gun, far too many high level individuals would be seriously embarassed, and these are the very same folk who would set the terms of referance for subsequent inquiries as referred to previously, and whose reports were rubbished by the previous Prime Minister.
Thatcher, one of the most authoritarian and powerful Prime Ministers this country has had in the last couple of hundred years, and yet her underlings did not feel it was necessary to report to her a situation that could result in the loss of British Sovereign territory ?
It’s a pretty strange war strategy that calculates that your prospective enemy can be allowed to walk in, take what he wants, settle down and make himself comfortable on it, and then rely on his being too incompetent to hold on to it.
Given the Conservative poll rating of less than 20%, what else could have lifted them from electoral wipeout ?
They had nothing to lose, everything to gain.
They didn’t have to let them land on the Falklands at all, they could have done what previous governments had done, and sent down a deterrant force, as on three previous occasions.
They had the time to do it, they had the precedents, and do you believe that our intelligence simply dried up when it had been perfectly good on those three previous occasions ?