Well, Thatcher was one step down from Hitler. In large swathes of the country she is univerally hated and she certainly did more damage to the nation than anyone since the Luftwaffe. She weakened the military enough the Argentines thought they could take the Falklands. She expropriated the TSB. She got elected to reduce unemployment and tripled it, and more than doubled VAT, the most regressive of taxes.
Major was largely a non-entity. Watched his power slowly wither away and all he could think to do with it was privatise the railways, which gutted the service, cost the taxpayer billions of pounds in increased subsidies and fares, and killed several dozen people.
Blair was obviously a war criminal and he presided over a vast increase in private and state debt, a vast increase in wealth inequality and the gutting of the public sector and infrastructure through the private finance initiative. He did some good things, most of which he has since said he regrets.
Brown didn’t last long and didn’t do much. Easy winner.
The failed PR flack Cameron cut my benefits by £35 a week before doing his populist Icarus impression.
Expensively, actually. The PFI means the borrowing is officially private, meaning higher interest rates. It also has to be paid back with enough premium for the private companies involved to cream off a nice fat percentage.
I completely disagree with your first point, though you’re quite right with the latter. It probably helped being just twenty when I helped vote him in - Blair was idealistic, charismatic and inspirational. Of course in the latter half of his reign it turned out these virtues perfectly suited his new-found vocation as hawkish Catholic crusader. A great pity.
I’m too young to remember much of Thatcher or Major, but despite the Iraq War I think Blair and Brown were probably the least worst PMs I have lived under. May has become my least favourite by far.
Heath, Callaghan, and Wilson were disasters. Major was a non-entity. Brown was a bully and a coward and his policies and lack of oversight caused the 2007/8 crash. Cameron inherited a very difficult position, stabilised things, and his legacy is Brexit. May is a walking disaster area.
That leaves Thatcher and Blair. Thatcher turned the country around. Ironically, it’s because the unions so opposed her that she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Had the unions seen the wisdom of her reforms and compromised then they’d still be a serious force today. Instead they drove themselves into irrelevance. But the confrontations divided the country. Blair saw that things were more or less working and used that to make positive reforms. OTOH he set up the regional assemblies which led to the rise of the SNP, and he let the bankers run amok. Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney applied far more to his era than Thatcher’s.
Thatcher did short-term harm but long-term good; Blair did short-term good but long-term harm.
You pays your money and you takes your choice; they’ve all got feet of clay.
I count the second as short-term harm. And the unions had got too powerful and too corrupt and needed reining in. But the unions really broke themselves. They forced Thatcher to act. Had they seen the wisdom of her plans and not been Luddites then they’d be a much stronger force today.
I know many of you are as old as me – Why only one brief mention of Winston Churchill? He and Alan Turing head the short list of “Indispensable Brits who saved Western Civilization.”
But he did that in 1940-45. Are there that many aged 72 and above? Any successes of his second government probably stem from the fact that he wasn’t actually running it much of the time.
Churchill died before I was born and hadn’t been Prime Minister for more than a decade. As a civilian Prime Minister, he was faced with the aftermath of WW2. His achievements were considerable. He put down the Mau Mau and the Malayan Emergency. He ended rationing completely in 1954. He had a stroke in 1953 which put a crimp on his abilities
I fully agree that the unions were too powerful and too corrupt. The problem was: so was Margaret Thatcher. Her “plans” involved transferring vast amounts of public resources to her cronies at well under market rates while actively and deliberately harming the working classes.
But she was certainly a bold and decisive leader in a time of great uncertainty and chaos, I’ll give her that.
That’s a statement too far. There’s never, ever, been so much of a whiff of corruption attached to her personally. Her son is another matter, of course. Thatcher was an idealist - much like Corbyn, really - and her objective was to privatise. So she did it, and if the government didn’t get the most money you can blame the inept civil servants.
Actually it’s worse. Thatcher was only looking at the macro-economics and long-term good; she simply didn’t care about the short-term harm. Neither did the union leaders who drove their industries into oblivion and catastrophic reconstruction instead of a managed gradual reform.
If right-wing idealism is indistinguishable in its effects from crony capitalism, and it arises from the same base of support, does it matter if it is based in pure theory rather than in pure corruption?
There was never any effort to get a decent deal for the tax payer, and sometimes worse. With the TSB, for example, it was expropriated by Thatcher without the owners being given any compensation, then it was privatised and all the proceeds were given back to the new shareholders. She was nothing more than a thief, a liar and a fraud.
The “short-term” harm was the whole point. Cause deflation, cause unemployment, weaken the position of labour, lower wages, weaken the political opposition. And of course for the simple sadistic joy of harming others.
Are you kidding me? No wonder the empire was lost if people think that.
How is it that for-profit corporations are assumed to be able to create jobs, but the government, which has a lot more pure research capacity, is not? That’s nonsensical a priori.
