Surprised no-one has voted for Brown as worst PM yet, Seldom has anyone been so ill-suited to a job.
I disagree. His handling of the Financial Crises of 2008 was excellent. Better then Cheshire Tony and pretty boy David could have done.
Attlee?
He believed every bogus statistic issued by the former USSR regarding the brilliant success of “planning” and “output”.
He nationalised the British coal industry, worked towards nationalising the steel industry (more efficient, don’t you know, look at the Soviets!!!), continued to maintain wartime rationing run by petty bureaucrats for no rational reason (It became fairly pointless after 1944 but, perhaps, not as pointless as the continuation of wartime blackouts in the UK).
He was a gullible accountant, as much out of his depth in the real world of economics as Chamberlain was in foreign affairs.
Why do people like you cut well meaning fools so much slack?
It has to be said that at the time of nationlisation, all these industries were backward and seriously underinvested. They were innefficient and would have gone to the wall much much sooner.
It may come as a surprise, but nationalisation at that time saved those industries.You have to remember that during this time, the same industries in Germany and Japan were being rebuilt pretty much from the ground up and would have outcompeted them in the early 1960’s.
The thing that did for those industries was the rise of trade unon power and inneffective management.
One of the great nationalisations was that of the electricity generators and the distribution network, without nationalisation, much of the re-building of British industry could not have taken place - the power grd was without doubt a national strategic industrial asset and would not have come about had it been left to private organisations.
One of the great scandals of Maggie Thatchers misrule is that she sold off these national assets for a fraction of their true worth - which is why so many of her colleagues bought in, and how, with some of the greedy little porkers making illegal multiple applications to buy hugely underpriced shares in an attempt to make a quick easy profit. A measure of how underpriced the de-nationalisations were is the fact that the share issues were oversubscribed by 3 times or more - it really was raiding of national assets, privatisation is fair enough, but giving taxpayers assets away for political dogma is not.
This is one reason why Thatchers legacy has to be viewed with some caution, she financed it on the basis of North Sea Oil revenues, it is not hard to look good whilst presiding over a quick asset strip and giving largesse to all your own folk, all the while destroying manufacturing industry and putting millions of workers out oe employment.
Your response consists of a series of totally confused, muddled, incoherent and unsubstantiated assertions.
You’re simply describing the foggy beliefs squirrelling around in your mind.
There’s really nothing to respond to.
To be fair he didn’t post statistics either, but there is quite a lot to respond to. FOr example you could post numbers showing the capability of German or Japanese energy networks.
Or in Paragraph 4 you could point out a country that developed a national energy grid without government ownership.
Paragraph 5 - there must be plenty of evidence regarding whether the shares were underpriced or not.
Paragraph 6 - Can check if North Sea oil revenues were more crucial to her Government then the previous governments.
You can hardly claim there’s nothing to respond to.
The funniest thing about your post is that you probably think it’s intelligent.
I’m usually reluctant to respond to posters who don’t bother to do any research at all.
Paragraph four:
This is an unsubstantiated assertion for fuck’s sake, and you think the obligation is on me to do an hour’s worth of research that even the assertor hasn’t wasted even one second of his time doing?
Get knotted.
As for assertions five and six, that’s the poster’s obligations to justify with his own facts, factoids, made up shit or links.
Hey I never claimed that it was a good post. I just said that there was actually quite a lot to respond to if you wanted to. It seems you don’t thinks its worthwhile, fair enough.
And as to Paragraph 4, it doesn’t sound so ridiculous to me. If I post evidence showing that no European national electric grid came into existence without government ownership would that be enough to require you to come up with counter evidence?
I would think that it was fairly self-evident.
Well as chancellor for the previous 11 years he managed to manoeuvre the UK into a massive financial hole. The worldwide crash allowed him to wash his hands of any responsibility…very handy.
As a man-manager he was a disaster, as a chancellor he was a disaster, as a PM he was a disaster, as a leader he was a disaster.
He did speak well in 2008 certainly and galvanised some into action. Hard to say whether his actions were good, bad or neutral as we have no control.
But that isn’t what be remembered for. His legacy is financial ruin, reduced social mobility and larger gaps between rich and poor.
We’ve ended up in an argument about contemporary politics. It’s too soon to pronounce on Brown - or Thatcher. Enough time has passed to form a perspective on Eden. Not them.
And this has to be reinforced. It’s a variation on ‘some have greatness thrust upon them’.
Churchill was great because he had the opportunity to be great and that opportunity directly matched his skills and abilities. Almost any other circumstance wouldn’t have allowed him to shine as brightly.
Not unlike Lincoln on this side of the Atlantic. If South Carolina had said ‘he makes us nervous but we’ll hold off and see how it goes’ it’s likely the Civil War might not have happened and Lincoln might be remembered with the likes of Buchanan, Fillmore and such.
I don’t disagree. Churchill’s failings are well known. I simply believe that what he accomplished by being the right person in the right place at the right time outshines those failings by an order of magnitude.
To those who have disagreed with me re Chamberlain, and those who have suggested other candidates, thanks. You’ve given me some thinking to do.
This smacks of homework so I’ll just make a few comments.
The post-WW2 Labour government had the great successes of the NHS and council housing, but it increased rationing to an extent never known in WW2. And long-term, nationalisation was a complete disaster, allowing the unions too much power, which eventually resulted in a huge correction - the election of Mrs Thatcher.
There is a strain of thought that Chamberlain is unfairly maligned because he brought us precious time to prepare for WW2. I think that we did gain time, but it was not deliberate.
I think that Churchill’s failures early on were crucial to his later success. He’d been there, done, that, and knew to not do it again. There is no doubt, though, that he was the right man at the right time.
Brown was a complete and utter disaster as PM and we’ve now found how much of a disaster as Chancellor he was. It’s no good blaming Thatcher for the current recession: Blair and Brown were in power for a decade prior to the bubble bursting; they had plenty of time and opportunity to fix things but did not.
This is a one-sided view. In fact, nobody knew at the time what the nationlised utilities were worth, and there was much talk that the offer prices were too high. It was feared that the privatisations would flop, and some of them did. The idea that they were prized assets being sold at a discount to privileged insiders is inaccurate. They were sold to all comers, and the owner (i.e. the British taxpayer) got a reasonable deal.
Greatest : Churchill.
As stated above: the right man for the right hour.
Were you around at the time? With the possible exception of BT, everyone knew getting shares in the initial allocation was a guaranteed winner. And BT turned out to be a massive first trading day gainer and massively oversubscribed, which strikes me as pretty much the text book definition of underpricing something.
Yes - Attlee. The man who with Bevin did more to win the war than the drunk racist clown he replaced. The man who with Bevan did more to improve the lot of the working class than anyone before or since.
There was never any doubt that coal would be nationalized. Many of the pit owners were crying out for it, as their decades of incompetent management had led to situations where they did not have the money to invest to meet basic safety standards. Safety standards won by the unions and their representatives in Parliament, by the way.
What people like you fail to realize is that the clock wasn’t going to be turned back in 1945. The interwar years were brutal for the working classes and there was no willingness to tolerate a betrayal of their sacrifice such as happened in 1918. BeVin and Attlee barely kept a cap on labour unrest during the war itself, with profiteers raking it in while prewar conditions down the pits worsened.
What you say about steel as well shows you have drunk the right wing Koolade totally. Ravenscraig was among the most (if not the most) efficient steel mills in the world. The witch closed it not because it was inefficient, but because it was strongly unionized. Similarly, if you read the memos from before the assault on the mining industry, the target wasn’t the least efficient pits, but instead the ones with strongest union support. Thatcher wed open class warfare, and the scars still show.
Yet those shares were so oversubscribed, why do you think that was? and why did the share value rise so suddenly after the sell offs? It certainly allowed millions of folk to make a quick profit.
IIRC the one privatisation that did not go well was that of BP, and even that was not a full sell off at the time, there was another, just can’t remember it - but various parties had guarunteed the share price and got quite a beating when the markets did not agree with the share valuation - but it was an exception.
from here
http://www.engineering-timelines.com/how/electricity/electricity_07.asp
The power grid was created through government money, and it was Atlees government that fully nationalised it, and at the time this was seen as an exemplar of how nationalisations should be carried out. The subesquent ‘dash for gas’ in the 1980’s served several purposes, some political and some environmental - the ending of the coal contracts and the replacement of coal generated power with gas turbines certainly worked against the miners who had been a source of serious industrial problems.
You’ll also note in that article there is a hint of one of the main problems to all governments around the world at that time - the oil price shocks, these had a huge impact on world inflation, and Britain was especially ill-equipped to cope with it. The subsequent inflation was significantly responsible large pay demands, which made our very labour intensive industries much more vunlelrable than those in nations that had already invested in greater automation.
Those oil shocks led to widespread ‘stagflation’ around the world, and the industrial unrest led to the downfall of the Heath government, and less directly, but just as certainly, the fall of the Callaghan government. The miners were leaders in those disputes, but certainly not the only ones who flexed unionised workers industrial power.Yo will recall that it was the strictures imposed by the IMF that led to Callaghan’s tightening of public finances, and his policy of attempted consensus with the unions to try limit wage demands - not that it worked, it did lead to the ‘winter of discontent’ and the end of his tenure as PM.
Here is a reasonably neutral view of what went on from the end of WW2 to more recent times, it discusses monetry policies mainly, and the mindset of policymakers, but does mention the events I have stated here, and how those mindsets worked aginst national interests in many ways
http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text131_p.html
I do remeber a quote by Callaghan who stated in conversstion with Tony Benn just prior to the 1979 election that whoever won was likely to have the benefit of North Sea oil revenues and that this would probably allow the winnders to retain power for a significant periond of time, unfortunately I can’t find this quote online. Make of that what you will.
I have found a mention of this, although I agree it isn’t really the quote I had been seeking.
http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201003/1983761971.html
From the Labour party manifesto of 1979 we get this,
Which nowadays means little except for the history buffs, except to indicate that there was an expectation of oil revenue surplus which could be used to support national government policies - but Thatchers legacy was to use this to keep folk out of work, rather than to invest.
Read more: http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201003/1983761971.html#ixzz19LlKQvIG
Its not easy to find any links that do not have some sort of axe to grind regarding Thatcher, either for or against - I suppose that show just how controversial her legacy still is, this following link is certainly not neutral so you have to read it with that in mind, but it does show up that there is more than one point of view.
There is no consensus on Thatcher being one of our greatest leaders, not within the UK, she tends to polarise people, maybe its too early to decide if she was a great leader, influential of that there is no doubt.
Personal attacks are not permitted in this forum, so knock it off.
Aquila Be, you are so far over the top that your posts appear to be BBQ Pit rants rather than arguments in a debate. Stick to the discussion and leave the commentary on other posters out of your posts.
[ /Moderating ]
I disagree that my post was a personal insult. The OP himself stated that he was unknowledgeable on British history, yet he has previously, in this very forum, posted which British Prime Minister he would have voted for since 1832.