Take a trip to North Lanarkshire and you can still see the impact that the closing of Ravenscraig has had on the area. No-one says the name Thatcher in Scotland, it has to be whispered. After having a successful independence referendum scrapped by a labour government she went back on the promise she made to the Scottish people about increased devolution for Scotland, instead turning her into a testing ground for some of the most unpopular Tory policies of all time.
This is in no way a personal attack on a woman who is now no longer with us. She was someone's mother and sister and my heart goes out to her family at what most people would agree is a terrible time for a family. However the words "respect" and "inspiration" when describing Margaret Thatcher is not a position that will be shared by many people in Scotland.
For many who simply wanted to continue their work as usual found themselves involved with the consequences of a dispute of miners. Ultimately people like to choose a side to blame for catastrophes such as the 3 day working week (due to power shortages because of the coal strike, electricity had to be rationed). How much hard did that do to other industries. My grandfather at the time an electrical engineer lost his job due rather directly to the 3 day week.
For people like them Thatcher was a good thing, ultimately it was not her fault that the unions did not want to compromise on closing mines. The reaction of unions towards a shift from being a publicly subsidised industry I don't think can be described in anyway as sustainable or even 'long term OK'.
I find it someone disingenuous of certain areas to blame the government for the result, when the unions often negotiated with such a simple all or nothing mentality. Ultimately blaming her after going all-in isn't right.
[NB Of course, I want neither!]
So yes - we were being held hostage.
For a start of your talking retail banking rather than trading banking?
All deposits were guaranteed up to £25k which is now £100k. Why the hell would a high street bank profit from cutting of ATM or chip and pin? Do you know how much merchant fees are!
Quite the opposite they do everything they can to make people spend more. Granted they aren't lending money as easily as they used too, but that was what created the mess we were in before.
They wouldn't have profited - if they hadn't been bailed out they wouldn't be operating at all (RBS was within 2 hours of closing up shop entirely).
Read Alistair Darling's autobiography for his account of the near disaster - it's really rather alarming to read.
I think you're a little bit confused between retail and commercial banking. It was the latter which was bailed out, not the former. A collapse in it wouldn't have stopped ATMs working, but would have quite likely had dire consequences for the global economy and businesses, simple things like an airline hedging their fuel price would have suddenly turned into an airline losing their money (depending on the product bought it might just be a premium or a the whole lot). In that one simple example imagine the main airlines going bust, owing all the money for previously sold tickets etc. That is the kind of doomsday disaster a collapse of commercial banking could have lead too.
The ATMs would still be there, there just might be no cash in them due to hyperinflation and lack of consumer confidence. However the retail banks would do all they could to keep operating.
As for reading Alistair Darling's autobiography, I don't really get why I would, the guy didn't really get round to doing anything, but had been a cheerleader for the team that deregulated much of the commercial banking industry. People forget that all Thatcher did was to open it up to people outside of Eton, Brown's light touch and continued deregulation helped encourage it to grow and grow.
If he says that the Government was worried that a collapse of RBS, HBOS and others might have led to the banking system ceasing to function in the UK then I'm inclined to believe him.
Wait, so you're saying that at any time the bankers could have flipped a switch and magically the economy turns back on in a matter of seconds?
So no, we were not being held hostage.
They were greedy and incompetent and we let them do it. No holding hostage. No extortion. No protection rackets. Greed and incompetence and lack of oversight and deregulation.
I know they weren't literally gangsters - and as you say, we let them do it.
I grew up in Massachusetts. Cities like Lowell and Worcester are very depressed now because they lost what made them big - manufacturing. Should we have subsidized that industry despite it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors? What about the horse and buggy industry when automobiles came around? The whaling industry once petroleum refineries started being built?
Those coal mines were outdated and inefficient. Unfortunately, the government subsidized them for far too long, which created dependence on them as well as the assurance that the jobs would always be there.
Sadly, there is displacement whenever there is a change. But it's far worse to cling to the status quo when it's blatantly impractical. We should be learning the opposite lesson from the hardship created by these mine closings - it's far better to bite the bullet and take the immediate effects than prop up an outdated system and finally get rid of it once it becomes too much to bear.
Easy. The coal mining industry could have continued existing for another thirty years, bringing huge losses each year, subsidized by the taxpayer. Like, say, in Poland, which is where you get your cheap labor from, and not the other way around, and the two facts are not entirely unrelated.
It was just the way of the future - the Southeast had lower labor costs, lower cost of land, and advantageous shipping arrangements. The cities just couldn't keep up, and they fell by the wayside.
And yes, it's pretty crappy to go to these cities and tell the people who are struggling there that their businesses deserved to go bankrupt or leave, but there's no other way to do it. The alternative is to subsidize them, and that ends up discouraging progress and also creating a culture of dependence on the government. After all, why invent new stuff if the government will increase the subsidy to keep up with your new manufacturing process?
Letting the free market purge badly competing industry is good for the country and also good for everyone in the long term.
The West was crippled by socialist excesses in the 1970s. There's a reason why Reagan and her won election in the same year.
So, bearing in mind the above, I'd say that overall Maggie was a pretty awful leader but she inspired a lot of good (but depressing) 80's music.
Churchill was pretty sexist, homophobic, and all the rest: but he is revered as an excellent wartime leader. Everyone can have significant character flaws and still be, at their core, a good person.
Whether Thatcher was an awful leader or not is certainly a point of debate. There are good arguments either way. She supported Section 28, didn't support sanctions on South Africa, Poll Tax - all of which were bad (I don't necessarily include the miners strike because, as I mentioned in another comment, those industries were fairly doomed anyway - the clashes with the unions heightened its notability. And, anyway, as many people love her for breaking the unions as hate her for it.). But then she did some good things for the economy, and pushed Britain to the front of the financial industry (I'd argue later leaders failed to execute on this strategy, but lets not get too bogged down in arguing merits). Lots of people love her, lots hate her; what they seem to share is how strongly they feel either way!!
So, six and two threes.
In retrospect, it seems like that did more benefit to the country than any of her policies did harm.
On that scale Thatcher is far from evil. Her economic reforms where necessary even if they left many worse off.
Might be worth mentioning that Ravenscraig had a very up to date seamless stainless steel tube rolling mill and brand new blast furnaces just completed when it was closed.
Seamless stainless steel tubes with mapped stress patterns 30cm in diameter and a few metres long used to cost my project about £300 to £400 a pop then. When the facility closed, we had to source from specialist mills in the then West Germany. £2000+.
(I spent some time in Shotts and Paisley around that time)
Ravenscraig steel works was, er, rather large so buying it up would require very significant capital. The rest of the supply chain was being disrupted at the same time.
Specifically with regards to the miners - that industry had been in substantial decline since the early 1900s and I'd suggest that whatever happened we'd still be looking at devastated areas today.
What happened, though, was as it all came to a head in the 80s, it also coincided with Thatcher's politics of forcing the trade unions to heel. Hence, clusterfuck.
(My interest/view here is academic; I've no real strong opinion on who was "good" or "bad", as I've no connection with what happened and so have no right to hold one)
Interesting buried metaphor there: treating them like disobedient dogs...
She fucked over a lot of people, she is hated still by a large portion of the British people to do this as a woman within the male dominated power structures of the time is nothing to be proud of.
The UK was as Greece is today in 1979. Hell there were three months of strikes by miners employed by the government in an unsustainable, unprofitable industry BEFORE she even took office.
And people still bitch that their kids didn't get free milk at school for lunch.
Just to take one example: Where do you think that Federal money comes from?
I'm afraid HN is slowly progressing into Reddit.
> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
Sorry, but there is no way for me or anyone else but you to know that. Anonymity comes with a price (in this case, credibility).
I'd argue that that one move alone has done more to benefit the UK than any other decision since WWII, period.
And that's a call she lost her job on.
How so? She was out before Maastricht was signed. Germany wasn't even unified when she was around.
She lost her job because frankly she presided over 3 terms in which she completely lost her mind part-way through the second and into the third and had to be removed by her own party who saw the writing on the wall. We don't have a term limit in the UK (and perhaps we should), but I still remember the "We have become a grandmother" moment which may sound trivial but was a shining example of how mental she became towards the end.
I would say if anything the thing leading to her being stabbed in the back was the way the poll tax was handled. The conservatives knew that if pushed through it gave Labour a credible chance of re-election, and that her reactions to it rendered her completely uncontrollable. They needed someone that senior tories could manage, which is why we had John Major (who for my money was one of the best PM's we had in a long time).
Granted, nobody has written her a personal apology for the other reasons yet. :-)
(And my opinion, from a Canadian, is that two term limits was one of the smartest things the founders of the US created)
I completely agree with a two term limit, would be a great thing to have here although somehow someone would find a way around it.
That being said she lost her job for a lot more than that. Poll tax was a much bigger social issue at the time. Her rough style had left her isolated in her own party and then she mishandled the challenges to her leadership at a crucial moment. The EU element was merely the trigger, the gun was already long in place.
No country is an island - the idea that you should produce everything, even when it makes little to no economic sense, is a product of a bygone era. Countries become richer overall by focusing on that which they are most efficient. For a country like the UK, that's knowledge and finance.
If anything, Thatcher's move to get the government out of the coal business was prophetic in many more ways than she could have realized. The market for UK coal was non-existent: the resource was already dead to natural gas and oil.
The modernization strategies of Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US and even Mulroney in Canada were painful, but necessary requirements of countries that were trying to stay ahead of the curve.
The fact that the UK is a net importer of oil is irrelevant, given that this has more to do with high consumption than it does the industry itself.
One way or another the UK is going to pay for it's energy. The difference between the coal mines that Thatcher ditched and oil is that with the coal the UK was paying for that as well.
Oil prices? The current oil price and the oil price during the time of peak oil production of the North Sea fields is publicly available and googleable as are flow rates and production stats.
..or the fact that the West used oil prices as a weapon against the Soviets? Again a much-written about topic that you can do your own research on quite easily.
TheOilDrum.com has a lot of good links to info. What is the point that you deem controversial and in need of sourcing?
Edit: Oh wait, I see the point that you need a source for, that was Scottie in Star Trek.
Second Edit: Now, if this isn't just a rhetorical point of yours and if you are seriously interested in the oil industry and trends regarding North Sea production, and the problems the UK is facing because it flipped from 4th largest exporter in the world to net importer a few years back, I'm happy to chat about it and do the leg work to find you some interesting reads on that, but this post probably isn't the place for it (though I'll be blogging from richarddjordan.com as soon as I get by github pages set up, and you can always ask me there). It's a fascinating topic, and one that often takes people by surprise when they learn some of the rather concerning details.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_the_Uni...
By all means though, if you want to undo Thatcher's actions and return the UK to a 19th century coal society, be my guest.
http://www.hi-energy.org.uk/Renewables/Why-Renewable-%20Ener...
Of course, Britain literally is an island... :)
Slight tangent, but it's not unsurprising that Brits, especially older Brits, might hold this view btw (that everything should be produced at home if possible). Prior to the world wars, the UK imported many things from the empire; during the war (particularly WWI), and with the closure of the seaways, there was a massive food problem because home industry was so far behind the modern times as to be useless. This has lesson has somewhat echoed down the years.
Isolationism is a fool's game, even for countries like the United States, let alone tiny Great Britain.
I doubt very highly that the UK could even physically grow the food it requires, let alone maintain all other industries a modern country needs to not only function, but expand.
Which alone should be reason enough to declare anyone a Saint and then give them the Nobel Peace Prize for twenty years in a row.
Is there a large percentage of the population in Britain that views WHAT she did as wrong or is it HOW she did it? I can understand the HOW, but why would people think that handouts aren't first hand-ins? Do people really believe there is a such thing as FREE milk?
When I hear about the mining strikes causing 3 day work weeks for the entire country, my thought is the same as any other sane individual: You, sir, are cancelled.
But while Thatcher shook things up and modernised many parts of the economy, she did it in an extremely divisive and many would say callous way - by devastating communities (especially in the north of England), destroying British manufacturing and putting unemployment up to 3 million (with millions more on disability, to make the jobless figures look better).
And these are legacies that still live on today - where I grew up there are still houses with barbed wire between neighbours who have lived there for years - as a result of the miner's strike. The north is still significantly poorer than the south, with much higher unemployment. The current government has just pushed through an extremely painful reform of disability allowance that appears to be punishing the genuinely disabled as much as the "skivers". And in Scotland she is so despised that you can't even say her name in public after shutting down much of the country's industry and taking North Sea oil revenue down south.
For the most part, nowadays, the question isn't whether the reforms were needed, but whether they had to be done so painfully and whether the benefits of those reforms were shared fairly. There is definitely a north-south divide within the country on that.
Was there a less painful way to do it? From what I've read, Britain was in some really serious trouble. I wouldn't say that they were at Greece's level of stagnation and financial trouble, but they were definitely hurting. People were going to get hurt regardless of what policy was implemented, and I think it was better to get it all done in one harsh, nasty blow than to slowly cut away the problems and create decades of uncertainty.
Some people think she was involved in a class war - I don't, I think she honestly believed in social mobility (unlike the current government which is rule by the rich for the rich). But she did devastate huge parts of the country and just regarded it as a fact, not even something to be regretted.
No. The milk was good systems thinking. In the post-war period it was cheaper to provide milk to help reduce the incidence of childhood malnutrition than pay for the resulting health problems.
People were happy to pay for it because it was cheaper than not paying for it. The miracle of the post-war government was that they managed to explain this to people. Perhaps wartime had trained people to believe in top-down authority and expect a decent outcome.
By the 1970s wealth and diets had improved and malnutrition was a smaller problem. Only children of the poorest and poorest educated had the problem. Thus it didn't make financial sense any more and the government cut it. But this really did hurt the poorest, most vulnerable people in the country. Political nightmare.
A similar argument applies for the mining and other industries. It was worth running unprofitable mines for a while since the cost to society of thousands of unemployed men would be too high. At some point this would change, as the employment opportunities widened with new technology. But holy hell this was a difficult period in British history.
Opinion is polarized: either Thatcher did a hard job with firmness and saved Britain, or she put economics (some say incorrect economics) over compassion and screwed the poorest to the benefit of rich and upper-middle class. Both of these things _could_ be true at the same time.
It's hard to explain now how passionately hated Thatcher was in popular culture back then. Imagine if the George Bush hating of the 2000's magnified until people rioted in the street and burned their own downtown area in their fury.
This is succinctly summed up in one of the dilbert books -
Phenomenon: Equal rights and representation of women in the workplace. Result: Everyone realises women are just as stupid and selfish as men.
I'm not trying to make a point here, just wondering really.
She could have been wrong, but as current events show, it is even worse to be led by politicians who have no idea where Europe will be ten years from now.
It looks like no plan is worse than a poor plan.
The actions taken towards the communities she "restructured" since her premiership seem to show evidence in favor of the latter. If thatcher and the tories were really concerned with improving the country as a whole, they would have taken action on the long-term systemic problems with our workforce (education etc) and given the communities they destroyed something to do between then and now. Instead what they did was simply replace the industry with foreign financial wizardry, while leaving the workers to rot. 30 years later, they use the gap in achievement between these two groups as a stick with which to beat the poor even harder.
And that's the last I'm saying on this subject today.
A number of questions arise, of course. Does finance employ the same people that worked in factory floors? No. Is finance sustainable in the long term? I doubt it, as it is much more mobile than manufacturing (Germany is attacking the British stronghold in finance). Would manufacturing decline anyway? Possibly; in the US it did, but in Germany it didn't. In the end, it is always a game of what-ifs.
Anyhow, I'm not in the position to have a sustained opinion on Thatcher's policies. I was way too young, and did not really study British history from the period. I have no idea if they were positive or negative overall.
She did have a plan, though. I wish current European leaders had one too, beyond "let's grab what we can while the Titanic is going down".
Overall, the big change with modern politicians isn't so much that she had a plan as her willingness to take radical actions that weren't part of the plan or some near-consensus view
This is pure sexism and stereotyping men.
Such a system could be unstable: A small, random increase in power by either group could accelerate over time the way tribes in survivor can create coïlitionsn and eliminate everyone else.
Now let's say we end up with all the positions of power held by the Sneetches with stars. A Sneetch without a star might make a similar comment. But perhaps, this Sneetch has the insight to see that what needs to be changed is the system, rather than merely shuffling the players around. Putting Sneetches without stars into positions of power in and of itself won't change the inherent problem of network effects. Perhaps things will realign around Sneetches from the West side of the Island, or Sneetches that like a particular sport, but still be discriminatory in a way.
This Sneetch might simply want to change the underlying mechanism of Sneetch society. Go for a cure, you might say, rather than relieve a symptom.
To suggest there is even a such a thing as being "like a man" is as inherently sexist as suggesting that all women are "too emotional" for any real position of power.
Goldman's argument is a version of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Uchikoma is correct to discount it for what it is.
Seriously?
Maybe I misunderstand you, but it sounds like the following:
Woman stands up: "All the positions of power are held by men, who promote other men into positions of power. It is obvious that men are sexist!"
To which you reply: "To suggest that men are something-something is as inherently sexist as suggesting that women are too emotional to hold power. You are a sexist!!!!!"
Black person stands up: "And another thing, all the men in power are white!"
Somebody else replies, "Possibly, but the fact is that we are colour-blind and never noticed it. You are a racist!"
:-)
(the problem) Emma Goldman had with feminism, if women are looking to hold the same morally bankrupt positions of power that men have then equality is a false hope for all.
i.e.: If women obtain power their positions should be different from men because men hold morally bankrupt positions. Women who obtain power by being competent at the game as it stands/expressing views similar to men are not worth celebrating at all.
I'm not sure what you are arguing, but this is the original point and of course it is obviously a sexist position.
i.e. that women entering these positions, which the commenter holds as morally bankrupt, won't make them better.
If tomorrow a woman was in the same position of power then it would still be morally bankrupt, because it is the position which leads to moral bankruptcy, not the person filling the position.
This is the kind of claim that is made by those arguing for systemic changes; i.e. that the system itself is corrupt and can't be fixed just by inserting "good people".
Personally, because I don't automatically view a position of power as corrupting, it's not a view I can support. 'Good people' make measurable differences everyday, and if women want to be those good people than all the power to them.
Anarchism is such a teenage fantasy.
Goldman's statement isn't saying that these positions of powere are morally bankrupt -because- they are held by men.
She's saying that the positions of power -are- morally bankrupt, and it doesn't matter which gender inhabits them, they are still bad.
We can disagree with her that she's wrong about the morality of those positions, but her statement is not a sexist statement.
edit: mpyne said it best somewhere else in this thread:
"He's saying that it's the position of power that
is morally bankrupt, not the man that happens to
be filling it today.
If tomorrow a woman was in the same position of
power then it would still be morally bankrupt,
because it is the position which leads to moral
bankruptcy, not the person filling the position."
Why not?
Proof positive that gender simply doesn't matter if you are the best at what you do.
Probably nobody has suffered more vile attacks than Clarence Thomas[2] for the crime of being Republican while black. To be an inspirational black politician, you must be liberal.
[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/tim-scot...
[2]http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,134324,00.h...
[2]http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/new-tone-naacp-silent-ra...
[2]http://rightpunditry.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/judge-c-tho...
http://www.factcheck.org/bushs_16_words_on_iraq_uranium.html
There's probably no-one truly objective on the subject, as politics are entwined in every aspect... but Clarke worked under four administrations. Tenet's book sheds light on the subject as well.
While some were truly evil, I tend to believe that Bush wanted to believe it enough that he convinced himself of it. The human mind is a subject of its own.
Liberals are not destroying the credibility of black republicans, the black community has a profoundly negative view of black republicans.
IG, was a similar case, though unpopular in west, due to the political situations back then, but here is a video, that dives into her personality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKiQboyDMUo
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/margaret-thatc...
Alas, it was downhill after that. Seriously, read Tony Judt's polemic to find out why.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-far...
PS: Grantham = Newton for me.
PPS: I was in Liverpool today when the news arrived. For various complex reasons, there are actually street parties happening tonight. You had to be there in the 1980s to understand this otherwise rather odd fetish like response. I have memories of arriving back in Liverpool Lime Street rail station on a visit from University in the late 70s, walking up Brownlow Hill and being turned back by policemen armed with dust bin lids to catch the bricks being lobbed at them. I had to take the undergound to get to the other side of the 'lines' to get to my Dad. We then had to drive 30 miles around the city to get home (New Brighton). Later that night we watched the smoke plumes over the Anglican Cathedral.
However, she rose to the top of an extremely male dominated field through conviction and sheer force of personality. And I think that deserves respect in itself.
Given the current issues surrounding gender equality in many fields, her example should serve as inspiration.
(Fact I have just learned; she was born just down the road from me! I'm quite surprised Grantham doesn't make a bigger deal of her roots there)