On the contrary, it is not a fundamental right at all- please provide a cite for assembly or demonstration being protected in the manner in which it is so protected in the US constitution.
The police (together with the courts and the Home Secretary)have an absolute right to re-route or ban marches and to control the number of people at a public gathering.
There is no guaranteed right to demonstrate or assemble. What we have is permission from the state to do so.
Even the rights given under the European Convention on Human rights to such rights are not entrenched. It only took a year or so before the government back-tracked on its accepting the convention into British Law- not a good precedent.
Just why was the UK economy on the brink of collapse ?
Clue - the anwer lies in a post I made earlier.
If MT’s methods were so great then why was it that other nations used the same system of government intervention toward their industries which actually worked, resulting in companies that are extremely profitable today ?
If MT’s policy of not subsidising ‘lame duck’ industries(Norman Tebbits description and not mine) was such a good thing by letting only the strong and innovative survive then why was it that the industry that soaked up the vast majority of government subsidy never had those subsidies withdrawn -
I’ll give you more than a clue here -
MT’s main support comes from rural areas, always has done, and guess what the main industry is ? Farming.
So it was ok to close down a steelworks and shed 20k jobs and kill a town like Corby for lack of subsidy, but it was fine to keep handing out subsidies to her supporters in the farming industry, subsidies that cost hundreds of thousand of millions of £
You see, the one thing that those who lived towns and cities that depended upon manufacturing dislike the most, was that the pain was distributed almost exclusively among those who would never support Thatcher, so by carrying out her policies in this way she did not stand to lose much of her natural electoral support.
Please defend her policy of subsiding her wealthy supporters and not subsidising those who were not her supporters.
It is not hard to work out where those who benefitted most from her policies live, all you need do if look at a poltical map of the UK, and you will see that Scotland, Wales, and virtually the whole of industrial England are Labour dominated.
MT was a great one for nationalism, she was dead set against the idea of regional parliaments and yet it was her policies that did more to threaten break-up of the Union than any Labour politician, and that includes the most hopeless leader Labour ever had - Micheal Foot
MT - a true patriot, yea right, the UK has never been more divided and it is solely down to her.
Lets see what wonders she did for human rights in the UK.
Well if you were gay you didn’t do all that well, the repressive section 17 was put into legislation by her, and that forbids any educational establishment ‘promoting homosexuality’ and because of the vague and extremely subjective meaning of the wording in the law this means that in practice the only way to be sure of not being prosecuted is for schools not to make any mention of it, and in some tragic cases have found they have been unable to assist some teenagers as they come to terms with their sexuality, this has led to one or two suicides and untold misery for those who suffered in silence.
How about the little discussed exclusion powers that our police were given ?
Normally if a person were to be specifically excluded from a location, there would have to be a court issued warrant and the judge would have to be given reasons why the exclusion order should be issued, this would be on the grounds that the presence of an individual, or group of indiuviduals were likely to commit criminal offences and/or endanger public safety.
You may not know this but during the miners strike, the police were given the power to exclude any person from any location without any suspicion or reason, and firthermore they were given the power to stop persons travelling lawfully and exclude them from any place they chose, this power has not been repealed.
It was used to stop suspected groups of miners travelling to areas where they might excercise their democratic right to protest.
It was MT who passed legislation designed to prevent wtriking workers from picketing other workers at places not involved in a dispute, so far so good, but she also made sure that law was used in such a way as to make potential strikers liable for damages due to lost trade if an arcane and exacting method of balloting for strike action, and carried out on a date specified with three months advance notice of the strike event.
In effect she denied millions the right to strike, and to add to that, her polices which were designed to create unemployment meant that workers were tied down into jobs where conditions did not satisfy them because they were too frightened to speak out for fear of losing the meagre income they had(as per the recommendations of the Adam Smith Institute)
She removed the right by a whole swathe of workers to remove their labour, which is a basic human right.
It was not until she had gone that this was compensated for by the right of both strkers and employers to binding independant arbitration.
As for the poll tax riot, I know what happened there.
I work in a prison and from time to time I meet both inmates and staff who were involved in the riot at Strangeways prison in Manchester and the picture they paint is bleak and damning.
You will remember that riot broke out on 1st April, and if that date seems significant it is because it is.
Fo rmonths before this date a large number of violent and disruptive prisoners were moved to Strangeways prison, the normal practice as any person who knows anything at all about prisons is to try and keep such people as far apart as possible.
The staff questioned the wisdom of this, and the inmates all understood that something was brewing.Intelligence reports had confirmed something was afoot, prisons routinely collect such from informants and a good thing it is too for the safety of staff, inmates and the public.
The protest about the poll tax had been planned for months ahead and a route was submitted to the Met, LOndons police force.
The protest started off peacefully enough but the policing was extremely provocative and very heavy-handed, some police had already drawn issue of riot equipment long before any trouble broke out, which for a British protest is very unusual unless there is specific reason such as a racist group march.
When the march arrived at Trafalgar SDquare it all took off, the event exploded in violence, and there is still much contention about how it began, but the imnages broadcast around the world certainly showed what appeared to be a Britain on the verge of serious disorder or even revolution.
Meantime, in Strangeways, the prison riot took off the following day during a church service, officers I speak to say they were fairly sure it was either this or a mealtime that it had been planned, the informant said so.
Given the quality of intelligence it is surprising that there was any large gathering of prisoners permitted within the jail at all and also surprising was the very low staffing level that day.
Meanwhile back at the jail large reserves of priosn riot control officers had been gathered and were ready to retake the affected areas all within 12 hours, the inmates had not had the time to make the barricades as sevure as they later became and there was confidence that the operation would be a success.
At less than 20 minutes notice the Home Secretary - Micheal Howard - himself ordered that this operation be held back until further notice.
It is true to say that senior governemtn ministers employ people who are expert in their fields, people who may have spent thirty or more years dealing in such matters, and yet, aginst their advice the minister concerned, with no experience of prison operations overrruled his experts.
The following day the poll tax riots were forgotten in the publicity about Strangeways.
The accusations, recriminations and examination of the police behaviour in Trafalgar Square and the unfairness and manifest unpopularity of MT’s poll-tax dissappeared from the front pages for a month.
The timining and exploitation of both events was incredibly convenient in rescuing a government from a close examination of its policies.
In the end it was one of the things that made the Conservatives unelectable, possibly for another ten year on top of the eight they have been out of office and it cost MT her job, she was removed fairly soon after.
It was MT who decided to ban all visitors from Stonehenge, simply because those who wished to celebrate the Summer Solstice had a differant set of values and lifestyle to hers.
It was her who set the police on assaulting those people who were pushed and evicted and provkoed and bullied. Eventually the police had to pay huge summs out in compensation to several of them for the polices own criminal actions, yet not one copper was prosecuted.
I’ll tell you how MT got us into the Falklands war in order to preserve her unworthy hide, and trust me I really do know what happened and there is plenty of incontrovertible proof.
That war cost 2000 lives, but I shall give it a break before I launch into that one, this post is plenty long enough.
Regardless of what Thatcher’s responsibility was in the Falklands, the bottom line is that are esprix as a bird now because of her intervention, and I consider that a good thing.
Whilst I would agree that the Falkland Islanders wishes in the determination of their future are paramount and that those rights are worth defending, the fact is that the role of MT was such that the war could have been prevented by using an established pattern of deterrance which had been employed by the previous Labour administration, on three previous occasions.
I was on that mission, aboard HMS Pheobe, we were sent there by the Labour Defence Minister Dr David Owen.
Those rights would not have required the intervention of British armed services had she behaved properly in the first place, she and her senior ministers did absolutely nothing when they were faced with intelligence reports that preparations for invasion were being made by Argentina some five years later.
They had plenty of time to act too, those preparations began in Soutern Hemisphere spring and the invasion was timed so that the Argentinians would have the territory secure before the onset of winter, which then made the possibility of a British attack less likely.
The fact that we managed to get our men and materials together and down to the Falklands before the bad weather arrived is a little surprising, its almost as if we had certain plans well in hand. long before the islands were taken from us.
This was not a defence of freedom, it was a defence of MT’s electoral hopes for the following year and it worked too.
Slight nitpick on Casdave’s post; I remember watching the Commons debate on the Monday after those riots. The Home Secretary answering questions about them was David Waddington, not Michael Howard.
I was looking forward to this post of yours. I’d never heard the “MT manufactured the FW” theory before, but that may be because I’ve had my head up my arse. However, you’d be doing yourself a great favour (assuming you want people to believe what you’re saying) if you made it sound less like a conspiracy theory and just presented the facts.
For example, you cite the 1977 deployment & your involvement. This is an excellent point in your favour, at least as far as setting the scene (i.e. the threat existed and was recognised). You then go on to describe the meat - that there were intel reports which were ignored. You provide no independent link and then concluded that this must have been evil design rather than stupidity/an error.
You then go on to say that the response time was surpisingly fast. This may or may not be true, but I’ll not believe you without any support.
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be an attack. I was just looking forward to finding out something new.
Casdave Bromley is right. The way you’re putting it out, it sounds like just another conspiracy theory. (Ditto with the Strangeways theory) There’s a similar story that FDR let Pearl Harbor happen on purpose.
As for the rest of your complaints. First, as I’ve noted, her biggest accomplishment was facing down the Unions. Is it any wonder that she wasn’t too popular in Wales after crushing the coal miners?
You claim Thatcher and her policies were completely unpopular. Let’s look at the facts.
In the 1987 election, well after the Falklands, the Conservatives took about 42% of the votes cast while labour took about 31%. As per normal, the Conservatives did very badly in Scotland and Wales and very well in England. These results gave the Conservatives a 102 seat majority. Note, however, that they held 147 more seats than did Labour.
So at this point, even you’ll have to admit that, despite all the “unpopular” things she had done, she was still, well, very popular.
In the 1992 election, two years after she left, the Conservatives did slightly less well. They still managed to earn 42% of the popular vote to Labour’s 34%. The Conservative’s share of the vote dropped only a few tenths of a percent. Labour’s gains came mostly at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. Nonetheless, this slight swing was enough to reduce the Conservative majority to 21 seats. The Conservatives still held 65 more seats than did Labour.
This election was, more-or-less, a referendum on Thatcher’s policies sans Thatcher. Once again, these election results provide no evidence that Thatcher’s policies were widely unpopular. Indeed, there is no evidence at all of people abandoning the Conservatives. There is some evidence of people becoming somewhat less afraid of Labour’s Loony Left. Hence the movement from Liberal Democrats to Labour.
Now, in 1997 the bottom does drop out of the Conservative majority. Indeed, they are left with only 165 seats and Labour has a 179 seat majority. In terms of the popular vote, the Conservatives take only 31%. This is the worst electoral showing since, well, since Labour got only 31% of the vote in 1987.
Can this result be blamed on universal Thatcher-loathing? Of course not. She hadn’t led the party for seven years. The unpopularity of the Conservatives in 1987 has to be laid at the feet of her successors.
The bottom line here is that the British electorate knew quite well that many of Thatcher’s policies, especially in the early 80’s were strong – and nasty – medicine. Nonetheless, they recognized that the medicine was necessary and that the alternative offered by Labour was no alternative at all. Lots of people lost out because of her reforms. Nonetheless, on balance, those reforms were necessary and Britain is a better place for them.
I would never have said anything at all about the deterrance missions to the Falkland islands, not feeling at liberty to do so, until I later watched and interview with Dr David Owen on a Sunday political programme, can’t remember the name but I believe it was something like Waldon on Sunday where this matter was put firmly into the public domain.
On that interview(which was more about the Liberal Democrat alliance than anything else) Dr David Owen stated the three occasions that such missions had been deployed and the reasons why.The one I was on was the third of these.
What you may not know is that we, the British, trained Argentinian pilots and Naval officers and we sold them aircraft, ships and subs.
In Argentina there is a very strong Anglophile contingent, indeed at the higher echelons of Argentine society there is a view that being seen to be ‘English’ is of itself a mark of class and sophistication.
The result is that it is easy to recruit sources of information from within Argentine society and the military, and in any case it is rather difficult to conceal your militaristic intent from the nation who is selling you your ammunition and weapons platforms.
Based upon these reports and independently gathered material ,missions were sent to the Falkland Islands as deterrance three times.
It beggars belief that those sources of intelligence simply dried up and that we knew absolutely nothing about Argentine military preparations in 1982.
This then can only mean that the British government had some awareness of Argentine intentions, and yet chose to do nothing.
If you choose to ignore that last then one can look at the Argentine invasion of the South Georgia which ocurred nearly a month before their taking of the Falklands themselves.
In that time we could have easily flown a strong force of infantry to the Falklands and we did not, we could have made landing on the Falklands very much less likely, and we did not, we could have made the crucial airstrip at Port Stanley secure and prevented Argentine reinforcement by air pracitcally impossible and we did not.
Our hunter killer nuclear subs had made a seaborne invasion too dangerous and air-reinforcements were the only genuine option that the Argentine had, and yet we did not use the time we had available to make this impossible.
So lets sum up, we had the intelligence reports, as we had on three previous occasions, we had time to make invasion at least extremely costly and likely too dangerous and we had a government that was about to be wiped out at the polls and needed something to boost its popularity.
The counterargument being that the British government had been fully aware that an invasion could conceivably take place. Their mistake was that they assumed that, if there was going to be one, the invasion would come later in the year, precisely because they calculated that the Argentinians would do so when it was most inconvenient for the British to mount a military response. Moreover, an invasion later that year may well have been the original Argentinian plan, which was possibily revised only because the British did respond to the occupation of South Georgia, sending the Endurance on just the sort of token show of force which, as you say, had worked before. One man’s show of force can be another’s act of provocation. Diplomatic bluffing and counterbluffing is never an exact science.
Lord Owen, whose views on the subject have been widely aired, is hardly an independent source, as it is obviously in his interests to stress the success of his previous approach, while ignoring the fact that there was a new government in Argentina which, as it turned out, was not prepared to play the same old game. (The same, of course, can be argued in reverse, with an argument that the Argentinians miscalculated the likely response of the new government in London.) Owen’s analysis is simply a variation on an ex-politician saying, ‘I told you so’.
I note your counter argument but in none of the previous warnings was there any token resistance, in fact for several years before this event HMS Endurance was due to be retired.
The Falkland Islanders themselves has expressed anxiety about this since no replacement for her was planned.
Their view was that the increasing reliance of the Falkland Islands upon Argentina, coupled with the withdrawal of one of the few remaining symbols of military presence was sending the wrong message to Argentina and might embolden them to action.
The point here of course is that following real shooting and taking of prisoners at South Georgia there was still time to beef up the contingent of marines at Port Stanley and there could hardly have been a more stark warning about what was going to happen.
Just a couple of hundred more around Port Stanley airfield and this facility would have been denied to the Argentines.
Since the Argentine could not invade by sea because of our subs, why was this easily carried out reinforcement not done ?
Look at it like this, the enemy has taken one of your outposts and engaged in you in battle, you have the opportunity to make it very difficult to invade their next target, and you have the time, you also have every reason to believe they will attack this next outpost, and still you do nothing ?
(I will add here that I personally think that the sinking of the Belgrano was necessary and that those who think that this action was a conspiracy to scupper the potential peace talks are not really all that aware of the strategic situation, and it did make a very large contribution to the final result bottling up the Argentine Navy in port)
Of course Owen is not independant, he was an opposition politician andyet made no mention of this for several years after the events, yet if he had wanted to make mischief he would surely have done so during one of MT’s election campaigns, he did not call for a public enquiry and his comments were very low key, but then the interview where he made this known was not about the Falklands conflict, nor really about MT at all, it was pretty much a a side issue.
I think that this should have been made known more widely and far sooner, and in that Owen has been overly discreet.
Unpopular govenrments have gone to war to bolster their position within their own country for generations, and fact is that MT was at her least popular at any stage in her Prime Ministerial career.
Going back to MT’s unpopularity, one might note that during her term in office, voter turnout fell dramatically, it isalso true that Labour was unelectable.
I like the idea of painful medicine being necessary, but it is always necessary when it hits all those who are not your supporters, the pain was not in any way shared evenly, why should farmers continue to enjoy huge subsidy when the philosophy was supposed to be to cut them out for industry ?
As for the medicine being actually needed, no-one has yet replied to my point that other nations continued with their subsidisation of unprofitable state industries and these are now viable.
MT was using GB as a test bed for the economic theory of moneterism, and all it did was result short term industrial strategy.
We sold off our valuable industries that actually did make very healthy profits, and now some of those are doing very badly indeed, BT has overstretched itself and yet the services they provide have only gone down in cost to the consumer at the insistance of industry regulation(competition was supposed to force prices to the consumer down, didn’t happen).
The Railways are a complete shambles, the steel industry is a shadow of what it was, the mining industry is virtually dead, hospitals are a mess largely due to years of deliberate underinvestment in staff and infrastructure which will take years to rectify,shipbuilding is now merely a collection of sepia tinted photgraphs of what use to be, our car industry is either foreign owned or struggling to survive.
When you look at what was sold off, and when you remember that all these were supposed to perform so much better freed from the dead hands of the state and then see how badly they have actually done, it is clear to me that MT’s belief that bad management would somehow magically transform itself into good management was laughably fanciful.
There is an old adage, there are no bad employees, just bad managers, and the fact is that people unfairly blame unions for poor industry performance in the UK.
Serious underinvestment and rubbish leadership were at least equally to blame, and since management was supposeed to run things one can make a case that it was up to them to manage, which they signally failed to do.
Sir Micheal Edwardes was appointed head of the state run car industry and was amazed to find the production lines stopped when he arrived on a Friday afternoon, it transpired that weeks targets required by management had been achieved, which demonstrates just how overmanned the company was.
What MT was very good at was opening up the financial markets, no question about that, but the effect was that economic policy was then geared to the needs of the markets and these policies had an adverse effect upon manufacturing industry, and as time wore on it seemed that manufacturing was dispensible, which meant that millions employed therein were dispensible too.
This is why MT is disliked so much around the country.
I note your counter argument but in none of the previous warnings was there any token resistance, in fact for several years before this event HMS Endurance was due to be retired.
The Falkland Islanders themselves has expressed anxiety about this since no replacement for her was planned.
Their view was that the increasing reliance of the Falkland Islands upon Argentina, coupled with the withdrawal of one of the few remaining symbols of military presence was sending the wrong message to Argentina and might embolden them to action.
The point here of course is that following real shooting and taking of prisoners at South Georgia there was still time to beef up the contingent of marines at Port Stanley and there could hardly have been a more stark warning about what was going to happen.
Just a couple of hundred more around Port Stanley airfield and this facility would have been denied to the Argentines.
Since the Argentine could not invade by sea because of our subs, why was this easily carried out reinforcement not done ?
Look at it like this, the enemy has taken one of your outposts and engaged in you in battle, you have the opportunity to make it very difficult to invade their next target, and you have the time, you also have every reason to believe they will attack this next outpost, and still you do nothing ?
(I will add here that I personally think that the sinking of the Belgrano was necessary and that those who think that this action was a conspiracy to scupper the potential peace talks are not really all that aware of the strategic situation, and it did make a very large contribution to the final result bottling up the Argentine Navy in port)
Of course Owen is not independant, he was an opposition politician andyet made no mention of this for several years after the events, yet if he had wanted to make mischief he would surely have done so during one of MT’s election campaigns, he did not call for a public enquiry and his comments were very low key, but then the interview where he made this known was not about the Falklands conflict, nor really about MT at all, it was pretty much a a side issue.
I think that this should have been made known more widely and far sooner, and in that Owen has been overly discreet.
Unpopular govenrments have gone to war to bolster their position within their own country for generations, and fact is that MT was at her least popular at any stage in her Prime Ministerial career.
Going back to MT’s unpopularity, one might note that during her term in office, voter turnout fell dramatically, it isalso true that Labour was unelectable.
I like the idea of painful medicine being necessary, but it is always necessary when it hits all those who are not your supporters, the pain was not in any way shared evenly, why should farmers continue to enjoy huge subsidy when the philosophy was supposed to be to cut them out for industry ?
As for the medicine being actually needed, no-one has yet replied to my point that other nations continued with their subsidisation of unprofitable state industries and these are now viable.
MT was using GB as a test bed for the economic theory of moneterism, and all it did was result short term industrial strategy.
We sold off our valuable industries that actually did make very healthy profits, and now some of those are doing very badly indeed, BT has overstretched itself and yet the services they provide have only gone down in cost to the consumer at the insistance of industry regulation(competition was supposed to force prices to the consumer down, didn’t happen).
The Railways are a complete shambles, the steel industry is a shadow of what it was, the mining industry is virtually dead, hospitals are a mess largely due to years of deliberate underinvestment in staff and infrastructure which will take years to rectify,shipbuilding is now merely a collection of sepia tinted photgraphs of what use to be, our car industry is either foreign owned or struggling to survive.
When you look at what was sold off, and when you remember that all these were supposed to perform so much better freed from the dead hands of the state and then see how badly they have actually done, it is clear to me that MT’s belief that bad management would somehow magically transform itself into good management was laughably fanciful.
There is an old adage, there are no bad employees, just bad managers, and the fact is that people unfairly blame unions for poor industry performance in the UK.
Serious underinvestment and rubbish leadership were at least equally to blame, and since management was supposeed to run things one can make a case that it was up to them to manage, which they signally failed to do.
Sir Micheal Edwardes was appointed head of the state run car industry and was amazed to find the production lines stopped when he arrived on a Friday afternoon, it transpired that weeks targets required by management had been achieved, which demonstrates just how overmanned the company was.
What MT was very good at was opening up the financial markets, no question about that, but the effect was that economic policy was then geared to the needs of the markets and these policies had an adverse effect upon manufacturing industry, and as time wore on it seemed that manufacturing was dispensible, which meant that millions employed therein were dispensible too.
This is why MT is disliked so much around the country.
I note your counter argument but in none of the previous warnings was there any token resistance, in fact for several years before this event HMS Endurance was due to be retired.
The Falkland Islanders themselves has expressed anxiety about this since no replacement for her was planned.
Their view was that the increasing reliance of the Falkland Islands upon Argentina, coupled with the withdrawal of one of the few remaining symbols of military presence was sending the wrong message to Argentina and might embolden them to action.
The point here of course is that following real shooting and taking of prisoners at South Georgia there was still time to beef up the contingent of marines at Port Stanley and there could hardly have been a more stark warning about what was going to happen.
Just a couple of hundred more around Port Stanley airfield and this facility would have been denied to the Argentines.
Since the Argentine could not invade by sea because of our subs, why was this easily carried out reinforcement not done ?
Look at it like this, the enemy has taken one of your outposts and engaged in you in battle, you have the opportunity to make it very difficult to invade their next target, and you have the time, you also have every reason to believe they will attack this next outpost, and still you do nothing ?
(I will add here that I personally think that the sinking of the Belgrano was necessary and that those who think that this action was a conspiracy to scupper the potential peace talks are not really all that aware of the strategic situation, and it did make a very large contribution to the final result bottling up the Argentine Navy in port)
Of course Owen is not independant, he was an opposition politician andyet made no mention of this for several years after the events, yet if he had wanted to make mischief he would surely have done so during one of MT’s election campaigns, he did not call for a public enquiry and his comments were very low key, but then the interview where he made this known was not about the Falklands conflict, nor really about MT at all, it was pretty much a a side issue.
I think that this should have been made known more widely and far sooner, and in that Owen has been overly discreet.
Unpopular govenrments have gone to war to bolster their position within their own country for generations, and fact is that MT was at her least popular at any stage in her Prime Ministerial career.
Going back to MT’s unpopularity, one might note that during her term in office, voter turnout fell dramatically, it isalso true that Labour was unelectable.
I like the idea of painful medicine being necessary, but it is always necessary when it hits all those who are not your supporters, the pain was not in any way shared evenly, why should farmers continue to enjoy huge subsidy when the philosophy was supposed to be to cut them out for industry ?
As for the medicine being actually needed, no-one has yet replied to my point that other nations continued with their subsidisation of unprofitable state industries and these are now viable.
MT was using GB as a test bed for the economic theory of moneterism, and all it did was result short term industrial strategy.
We sold off our valuable industries that actually did make very healthy profits, and now some of those are doing very badly indeed, BT has overstretched itself and yet the services they provide have only gone down in cost to the consumer at the insistance of industry regulation(competition was supposed to force prices to the consumer down, didn’t happen).
The Railways are a complete shambles, the steel industry is a shadow of what it was, the mining industry is virtually dead, hospitals are a mess largely due to years of deliberate underinvestment in staff and infrastructure which will take years to rectify,shipbuilding is now merely a collection of sepia tinted photgraphs of what use to be, our car industry is either foreign owned or struggling to survive.
When you look at what was sold off, and when you remember that all these were supposed to perform so much better freed from the dead hands of the state and then see how badly they have actually done, it is clear to me that MT’s belief that bad management would somehow magically transform itself into good management was laughably fanciful.
There is an old adage, there are no bad employees, just bad managers, and the fact is that people unfairly blame unions for poor industry performance in the UK.
Serious underinvestment and rubbish leadership were at least equally to blame, and since management was supposeed to run things one can make a case that it was up to them to manage, which they signally failed to do.
Sir Micheal Edwardes was appointed head of the state run car industry and was amazed to find the production lines stopped when he arrived on a Friday afternoon, it transpired that weeks targets required by management had been achieved, which demonstrates just how overmanned the company was.
What MT was very good at was opening up the financial markets, no question about that, but the effect was that economic policy was then geared to the needs of the markets and these policies had an adverse effect upon manufacturing industry, and as time wore on it seemed that manufacturing was dispensible, which meant that millions employed therein were dispensible too.
This is why MT is disliked so much around the country.
**
One might say that. One might also be dead wrong. Voter turn-out actually increased in every election between 1983 and 1992.
[ul]
[li]1983 73% turnout[/li][li]1987 75% turnout[/li][li]1992 78% turnout[/li][/ul]
The big decline occured in 1997 when there was only a 71% turnout.
**
which is simply another way of saying that the Conservatives were vastly more popular than Labour.
**
I’m not sure I get your point here, is it that Thatcher wasn’t bloody Solomon? Which UK politicians are? Do you believe Labour was? Do you realize that the maximum marginal tax rate in the UK in the late 70’s was 98%? Hint – confiscatory tax rates on interest and investment income didn’t greatly inconvenience Labour’s core supporters.
In any case, this is, once again, a false premise. Most people in the UK live in urban areas. The Conservatives outpolled Labour by a wide margin, even in 1992. Though it is true that the Conservatives are more popular in rural areas than in urban ones, the Conservatives were still more popular than Labour in urban areas.
**
Like Swiss Air? Alitalia? Given the utter disaster that the UK economy was in 1979, I can’t believe you’re complaining about how things turned out. As I’ve said numerous times, her most important contribution was breaking the unions. has she not done so, it is quite possible that the UK today would look like Argentina. Instead, the UK has one of the healthiest economies in the world. In any event, why do you believe state-owned industry is better than private industry? It certainly hasn’t got the world’s best track record.
**
Indeed. What’s your point? Why do you believe that a domestic steel of mining industry is such a great thing? Mining in particular is an excellent industry to be out of, especially if you can import what you need for less than the cost of domestic production. Consider, first, you stop the environmental damage which inevitably accompanies mining. Second, you actually get cheaper coal. Third, you’re not exhausting your domestic reserves. Now, it’s true that the unemployed miners don’t like it (though why someone would want to work in a mine escapes me, it’s hard, dirty, dangerous work) but that’s the way it goes.
I’ll grant you, however, that the railway privatization was a shambles. I thought at the time that it was far to byzantine to work.
**
Huh? You manage to disprove your own point, see below.
**
One of the key points of privatization is to bring market forces to bear on management.
**
Uhhm, ahh, casdave, why do you think the company was overmanned? What do you think the unions would have done if management had decided to lay off 20% of the workers?
** casdave, Time for you to do a bit of research yourself. In your next post please tell us the current unemployment rates in the UK, France, Germany and Italy. This will help us understand the effect Thatcher’s economic policies have had on employment levels.
Spouses of those claiming unemployment benefit were excluded from the register.
Only those actually claiming unemployment benefit were registered as unemployed, and yet there are those who operate in the black economy or choose not to claim for various reasons.
Those over 55 and had been made redundant and thus had a financial stettlement are not classed as unemployed, but when the job cuts came this age group was the first to be affected and the most heavily.
If you are under 18 you cannot be classed as unemployed, as governments promised that training palces would be available for all who fell in this group and despite the fact that there are not enough such places and that the training draws a benefit of the same amount as unemployment money this has not been modified.These peole when they are without work are unemployed in everything but name and cost the taxpayer the same amount of money to support.
If you have been out of work less than 17 weeks you cannot recieve unemployment money, instead you recieve social security if you are lucky, and you also do not qualify for being counted as unemployed.
If you are classed as being on long term sick you are not unemployed, which might seem reasonable, but in certain areas, South Wales especially, this was abused and many thousands of unemployed were registered as being sick in order to gain the extra £5 differance in money between that and unemployment benefit. It is also noteworhty that the rates of long term sick rose in parallel with unemployment, but as employment has risen those on long term sick are usually the last in line for employment as for as employers are concerned, for obvious reasons.
Here is a better analysis than I can relate to you
Every change in the way the figures are collated has ended up in a revision downwards.
Some of those revisions were necessary it is true but many are just massaging the numbers, and though Conservatives have been responsible for it, I am dissappointed(but not surprised) that the current Labour government has not chosen to reform them and derive a more acurrate figure, which is held by all accounts to be some 50% higher, using the more widely recognised international labour standards.
To show you how much effect these changes made to official unemployment then take a look here
Or you can accept my cribbing from that site as it takes time to download, it states
“On the basis of published data the unemployment rate peaked at 22.1% in 1932 however this figure would certainly have been lower on current definitions, perhaps in the range 10% to 16%”
So what is actually being said here is that unemployment in 1986 was as high as during the great depression of 1932.
It is not surprising that MT is widely hated so much in areas that were affected.
Even when all these are taken into account the official figures for unemployment in the UK peaked in 1986 at three millions, and was over two millions in 1982 just prior to the Falklands war.
One can speculate about what the true figure actually was, current accepted figures are some 50% higher than the official ones, so its very likely that in reality there were 4 million and perhaps more who were unemployed in 1986. This figure is well in excess of 10% of the entire workforce and this in a nation that had previously enjoyed unemployments rates of much less than 5% for the previous 40 years.
You will recall the Saatchi and Saatchi poster that the Conservatives used extensively as part of their election campaign in 1978(actually I might well be out on year here as I’m going on memeory).
It was a very effective campaign tool, it showed a queue of people against a white background and was supposed to be an unemployment line.
(it is immaterial that the reality was that those people were not unemployed at all but were Saatchi’s own staff, just call it artistic licence)
The slogan which went with that poster, was ‘LABOUR ISN’T WORKING’ and this slogan stuck in peoples minds.
Fact is that unemployment then had just risen to around 700k and that was considered poor performance, and yet MT took those levels to over four times that according to official figures, and five perhaps six times that if you remove the effects of her massaging of those numbers.
I also note that as I look at differant sites that unemployment, has fallen, and employments has risen markedly in a trend that started with John Majors aministration and apart form the occasional bad quarter has continued right throughout the Labour administration.
This is not the whole picture though becuase many of those jobs are either part-time, or low wages service sector jobs.
In terms of the mining industry, in 1970 there were 400k persons employed and by the time this industry was privatised there were only 20k, a loss of 380k jobs for the most part well paid.
Further to this, when those jobs were lost it affected the local area dramatically, it is often said that for every job in the pits there are three others outside the industry required to either support it in engineering terms of just providing services for mine employees. Now I know that is purely ancecdotal but the loss of so many jobs concentrated in certain regions was bound to be disastrous for those populations.
I guess the counter to this is that had it not been for MT things could have been even worse, but yet other nations managed to cope with the harsh realities of the oil price hikes, other nations were plenty strike riven and unions had excessive power(this I do not deny), and yet they found solutions that did not lead to such horrific levels of unemployment.
The examples I have concentrated upon centre mainly around the coal industry, but when you factor in the other industries that were destroyed at the same time, and then look at where they were located, it really is no surprise MT is so despised in Wales, South Yorkshire, Scotland, Midlands.
I will go through point by point your last post Truthseeker where I must concede points where you are right but also to reply to points where I still think you are wrong.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the UK’s rate is “actually” 50% higher. That makes it aproximately 7.6%, still substantially lower than that of France, Italy or Germany.
In any event, all you have shown is that the measure of the UK unemployment has changed over time and that adjustments may have to be made when comparing the current rate with past rates. Virtually all countries adjust their measure of unemployment from time to time You’ve said nothing that indicates how it compares with the measure used in France, German or Italy. However you cut it, slice it or dice it, Thatcher’s economic policies have hardly resulted in massive unemployment.
What you’re refusing to recognize here is that, in 1979, the UK faced the threat of a total implosion of its economy just as Argentina does today. That didn’t happen. The main reason it didn’t happen is that Thatcher was a dictatorial, take-no-prisoners prime minister on a mission. Not only did she step on some toes, she intentionally set out to kick a few bums. Had she been a warm & cuddly consensus-seeker, she would have failed.
‘During my lifetime, most of the problems the UK has faced have come, in one form or another, from Baroness Thatcher and the solution from someone else.’
Unfortunately none of this shows the UK media forming public opinion!
It’s simple - Thatcher was widely detested at the time she was Prime Minister. These stories simply reflect that.
This would make sense if the majority of the media had a liberal tilt during the Thatcher era. However, it did not. I don’t have distribution figures, but the most popular newspaper in Britain at the time was the very pro-Thatcher Sun. The breakdown (off the top of my head) is thus:
Sun (pro)
Mirror (anti)
Mail (pro)
Express (pro)
Telegraph (pro)
Times (pro)
Guardian (anti)
Morning Star (very anti!)
That someone wrote a hate-filled piece in an anti-Thatcher tabloid is, I think, a reflection of the opinions of the readership, rather than a factor that influenced the electorate in any way.
I have to admit that I was wrong about the turnout of registered voters Truthseeker
One factor that aided MT greatly ws the split in the opposition vote when some of the most respected Labour Party members set up their own breakaway party(the Social Democrats) and Allied themselves to the Liberals.
In 1983 nothing could have stopped the Conservatives, Labour was still unpopular and even if you add some of the votes lost to the SDP it would have changed the outcome only by reducing the majority, but not by all that much.
In 1987 however things would have been far closer, probably too close to call had that SDP split not existed. It is not easy to strip out the vote from the overall Liberal Alliance vote because the Liberals and the SDP had completely merged, but going on previous and later elections it seems likely that around half of the Lib-Dem Alliance vote would have been Labour votes had those defections not ocurred.
It would have made the election too close to call.
By 1992 things were clearer still, Labour had salvaged much of its natural support back from the Lib-Dem Alliance but it is a feature of our electoral system that even if you get just five percent less of the vote, you end up with a much smaller representation in parliament than your results justify.
What can be seen throughout all this time is that the Conservative vote stayed pretty steady, but that the Labour vote was hit much harder by splits.
One can say that the reason that those splits ocurred was that the Labour party itself had been the driving force behind them, the internal wranglings of Labour cost them dearly.
Voters do not like to see such things, they want to see a government that is united and thus knows what it is about, as much as people voted for Conservative candidates its as much true that they were also voting against the mess that was the Labour party, in other words Labour itself helped MT into office as much as anything she ever did.
One thing that aided the Conservatives greatly was the make up of it natural support.
The age range of the Conservatives tends to be 50 and above, less than 5% of their party memebership are 35 or under.
Read it here
This is not at all surprising since many of MT’s policies directly affected younger voters, many of whom did not even register believing falsely that by not doing so they might avoid liability for poll tax.
The notorious Youth Opportunity Schemes(YOPPERS) plus the restrictions upon benefit that they could claim, along with the fact that they along with the over 50’s were disproportionally affected by both unemployment and poor employment opportunities(in other words many of the jobs that were available to young people were rubbish).
Demographics have ensured that as this tranche of young people have made their way through life, they remember all too well the MT years and very few of them choose to actively support the Conservatives, either by joining the party itself or even just by voting for them.
This is a problem that worries not only the Conservative central office but also anyone concerned that this might lead to a long term trend of inneffective opposition to the Labour party, not exactly great thing for democracy.
All this flows from the massive unemployment deliberately caused by MT as part of the recommendations by the Adam Smith Institute.
The idea was that if employment levels were too high then this gave the workforce too much power in wage negotiations, and would lead to wage inflation.
Or put another way, if you make your workforce frightened for their jobs then they are more willing to accept lower settlements, and it is true.
I wish you would aknowledge that the prime cause of the UK’s economic woes was not the unions at all, it was the sudden price hikes in oil that did the real damage.
The first was in 1973 and oil prices rose by 130%, which led to inflation, higher interest rates, and in turn higher wage claims.
The next was just 6 years later, in 1979 and again we had all the same problems, the increased costs had to be passed on and so British exports reduced as their price went up.
The resultant inflation is what caused unions to become more belligerant.
The UK was especially vulnerable, it had fewer restrictions upon imports than many of its competitors such as Japan and France thus cheap and often subsidised goods flooded the country, our interest rates were higher than all our competitors, our industry was badly under-invested in high technology production methods and we had to import all our oil, or else we had to use coal, and this vulnerablility by being dependant upon home produced coal was crucial.
The miners brought down two democratically elected governments, and they had to be broken, no question and it is the one thing that MT should be credited with, and it is a worthy achievement too.
MT is not hated for that, its her decade of greed, asset stripping by her acolytes and her abandonment of manufacturing industry that causes most dislike of her.
If she had stated in 1979 in her election manifesto that she was going to create unemployment levels as high as those during the great deprssion of the '30’s, that manufacturing was going to be left to die, that the railways were going to be shattered and that these would lead to such hatred of her and the English parliament that it could lead to Wales and Scotland demanding their own parliaments(ie the breakup of the Union) do you seriously think she would have even remained leader,let alone be elected as prime minister ?
No, absolutely not but that is what she did.
Yes she is part of our history, but I also think that she could have achieved so much without destroying so many communities.
MT fans always use the argument that things would have been so much worse, but when one looks at our competitors did you see their economies implode ?
Nope, thought not, there is none and there can never be definative proof of what would have occurred without MT.
If we wish to speculate that’s fine, lets speculate that we did not get those oil price hikes, lets speculate that as a result inflation did not jump dramatically, lets speculate that the unions did not make large pay demands because there was no longer any need to do so, and lets speculate that the ‘winter of discontent’ never happened.
It’s a fun game this, we might have still have had coal, steel, shipbuilding, car-making, industries, the nation might enjoy the profits of the electricity, telecoms, gas industries which used to make a healthy return to government finance, now it all goes to investors all over the world.
Instead we have terrible public services, we have privatised companies raising their prices beyond the rate of inflation, we have call centres, we have leisure parks on the sites of former industries, we have the highest fuel, gas and electricity prices around, we have higher interest rates than all our major competitors.