So what should the British government have done with North Sea oil money to create jobs? Please give specific examples that would actually have been reasonably foreseeable at the time. Nobody knew in 1985 the Web would be a thing, so don’t pretend that’s an option.
If the money was in fact thrown into benefits… I mean, aren’t social benefits, you know, of BENEFIT? They help people.
Again you are mistaken. The working classes voted for her in droves.
I am not mistaken. The working class also vote for the Republicans in droves, despite repeated characterisations by Republicans of the working class as lazy scroungers and “animals”.
The web was only a twinkle, however some folk thought computing was going to be quite important in the next 50 to 100 years, wild visionaries that they were. Britain could have hosted a Silicon Valley and thrown a lot into manufacturing to get a keen edge.
Off reading, they did have the Sinclair things, the BBC Micro, Acorn, Commodore, Atari etc. — which British computers may have been fine or rubbish for all I know, but there was certainly a ready-made basis for government investment.
You don’t get massive dams without a government being involved.
I’m old enough to have been alive when Churchill was PM so I have no difficulty at all in making my choice.
“Investing in new jobs” is probably a bit reductive. What I should have said was investing in R&D, infrastructure and adult education, so that the material conditions to attract private investment were there.
A brief history of the collapse of UK industry, using mining as an examplar: Mining villages had one industry only. People worked in the mine, or in ancillary jobs supporting mine work. The government and industry colluded to keep other industries from investing in the area, because mining sucks and if people had a better job they’d go to it, even for a lower wage. When the mining industry collapsed, this meant that people living in mining areas had no alternative employment or alternative skills, and there was no other industry looking for a large influx of ex-miners. Thatcher’s solution was to pay benefits to the people left high and dry, but this was very much “give a man a fish” territory. No-one was taught how to fish, nor - expanding the metaphor beyond all sense - were new fish species introduced. Benefits are of limited benefits.
This benign neglect was quite deliberate policy (the rapid growth in those claiming disability benefits during this period was no accident -see Fig 1 and Fig 2 in the appendix here): the government believed that the UK economy needed to be restructured away from manufacturing/heavy industry and towards services, and was happy to pay ex manual workers to sit at home rather than retrain them. The problem is that this has led to “Crap Towns” where well-paying jobs are rare, the labour force is unskilled, education isn’t valued, and companies are reluctant to invest. This insightful blogillustrates the problem:
Coketown is, in large part, Thatcher’s legacy.
Of course, the other option available was to do what Norway did with their oil money and create a publicly owned investment fund(theirs is now worth £700bn). Norway turned its oil revenue - always due to run out at some point - into a permanent financial asset. The UK spent it all, and has nothing to show for it.
Not a Brit, but born in 1964 and long interested in British politics. Thatcher and then Blair take top honors in that period, I think, although from different ends of the ideological spectrum and with quite a few caveats, as noted above.
I’m not British, but I have watched Fawlty Towers.
All I can say is, “IT’S BLOODY WILSON!!!”
:D:D:D:D:D:D
I distinctly remember a conversation with an economist at about the time North Sea oil was coming on to the agenda, and he pointed out that that was exactly what was going to happen if the government went on as it was planning to do.
Norway also retains a 67% holding in Statoil, whereas Thatcher allowed BNOC (later Britoil) to go into private hands.
Interesting; but the first lines had me wondering about dementia:
*Victoria Wood’s comments on Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning will provoke a few angry letters. She has noticed, she says, that the audiences in the big provincial cities are quicker and more sophisticated than those in small towns and country areas. *
This has been the accepted belief for a few millennia.