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Cos BA like BT and British Gas were shit before privatisation.
How much better are they now? Don't you think that selling off national assets is tantamount to theft?
Anyway.
Thatcher wasn't as good as the neo-liberals try to claim, and she wasn't as bad as the left try to claim. The trade unions had far too much power in the 1970s, and esentially held this country to ransom through pure greed because they were allowed to. Thatcher didn't let them, and the left will never forgive her for kicking them off the biggest gravy train they ever had.
Thatcher cannot be blamed for the collapse of the coal industry- Scargill can. The market for coal had collapsed with the advent of North Sea gas, as only heavy industry used the stuff, and they didn't need as high a quality as domestic customers. Scargil tried to bend Thatcher over a barrel, like he had done with the others, but Thatcher wouldn't be bent by the sheer greed of the NUM. Because of the strike British industry had to turn to foreign coal, and they never turned back when they realised it was far cheaper.
Much of the privatisation that Thatcher undertook was for the best. British Airways should not have been subsidised by the taxpayer to offer a commercial service, and nor should British Leyland, BAe and the rest.
But the way she let the mining communities die was pure spite, and that can't be forgotten or forgiven too easily. The Poll Tax was the fairest local tax system we've had yet- you paid for what you used- but because the left have never liked paying their way when the "rich" (curiously never themselves) can pay for everything instead it disappeared.
As for the Falklands, she was perfectly right to go to war over it. The Argentinians invaded our country as much as if they'd marched up Brighton beach, they had been given enough warnings not to do it, and they paid the price for invading another sovereign nation. They tried to invade our country because they didn't think we'd care, and we did. You won't find many Falklanders who were against the war, as they did not want to be ruled by Argentina through force.
I never claimed to be. However I'm not the one claiming that everyone who criticises her weren't out of their nappies when she resigned.
Compare BT and Royal Mail. BT seems generally pretty good. The Royal Mail is crap. Privatised companies are invariably more efficient and provide a better service. And it's not theft...Most people supported it anyway. And take BA or BT for example, it's pretty well-documented that in both companies service improved following privatisation and prices often went down too.
But no worries.
Not too long now..
Er would they? I doubt any statistical evidence suggests that...Wonder how she won all those elections if everyone thought that.
How did only a few people benefit? What about the improved service for millions of BT and British Gas customers? What about prices going down for customers in many of the things that were privatised?
To be fair you have a point about the Royal Mail. A few years ago it was okay but now it really sucks. .
I think the country is far better without three-day weeks, the telly going off after News at Ten, bodies rotting in the streets because morgue staff were on strike, and astronomical tax rates for all. But obviously I'm missing something vitally important- maybe life was better when we all froze to death because the miners and power station staff spent a winter on strike, and when we all lost well over half our earnings in tax if we dared to work hard.
Most people, not just miners and single mothers, ended up worse off under Thatcher. When she got into power 16% of children were under the poverty line. When she left it had more than doubled to 33%. The gap between rich and poor grew wider. The only people who benefited (as usual) were the upper class.
But then I couldn't care much even if she'd made life better for most people. She was still a odious supporter of racists, fascists and murderers.
Mussolini ran the trains on time. Hitler revitalised the German economy. Should they be revered by the Italians and Germans? No, of course they shouldn't. Some things are more important than others.
Depends how its measured. A lot of working class people benefited, people getting the chance to buy their council house was a good thing for a lot. And overall most people were 'better off' post-Thatcher than pre-Thatcher - more disposable income and a higher standard of living overall. Yes, the rich did get a lot richer but a lot of people became a lot better off.
It's inevitable and difficult to prevent in that just about every leader/country will end up somehow supporting some pretty shady regimes and figures. Your beloved EU for instance seems to keen to get pretty cosy with China.
Time you educated yourself to the hard truths of geo-political duplicity, Dis.
There are ways and ways of 'supporting.' Whatever relationship you think the EU/China have (regrettable but nothing more than a commercial one), it doesn't even being to compare with the support and open unashamed friendship the witch established with the repulsive mass rapist and murderer Augusto Pinochet. Even recently she defended and aided the mass murderer in his bid to escape justice, well after both of them were out of power.
Her (and above all her husband's) not-so-unkind words and actions towards the horrendous Apartheid regime aren't exactly things to be proud of either.
A whole different ballgame from countries simply mantaining relations with shady regimes.
The beneficieries of higher wages were people with jobs that required higher skills (which the economy started to increasingly favour since the 80s) and self-employed people. The disparity that increased was between these people with high skilled jobs and low skilled workers, as there was much higher demand for the former. The super-rich probably did benefit but it wasnt about them screwing over the poor, rather about changes in the economy.
Click
instant acsess to a human for problem solving.
problems very few and usualy fixed the same day.
and ...it used to make a huge proffit ...a lot of which subsidised the railways and buses.
textile workers steel workers miners ..heavy engineering ...smash the unions by all mean if she thought that was what was needed.
to throw millions of people on the scrap heap intentionaly for the pockets of a few is unforgivable.
some areas in wales have lost their engineering and mining ...plus the local shops that lived off these industries have gone...plus many self employed people on the dole.
thee areas now have heroin ...cannabis and coke.
there are few other comodities that people can trade ...still ...25yrs on.
This is for 1997, at the end of tory rule. It shows the bottom 10-50% of the population's wages growing at a faster rate than the top 50-90%. Yes, the top 10% are benefitting immensly, as they inevitably do but it shows policies started by thatcher and carried on have had a positive effect on people's incomes as a whole.
Yes, but the alternatives were even worse. And by defending the Falklands she directly led to the overhtrow of Galteri (who was a lot nastier than Pinochet).
Given Pinochet was one of the few dictators who have voluntarily given up power (rather than fleeing to France with billions of punds in a Swiss bank account) he actually seems to have been one of the better ones* (certainly better than the rather charming Honecker who had people murdered because they wanted to move to a different country and some of his equally charming fellow communist dictators). And he was certainly better than the neo-fascist he overthrew http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/12/wallen12.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/05/12/ixportal.html
* though that's relative.
Its going downhill because the bars on the left represent the growth of wages for low earners, and the bars towards the right represent the growth of wages for high earners.
house reposessions ...rocketing crime ...mass unemployment ...epedemic proportions of homelesness especialy amongst the young ...mass unemployment for the young ...hospitals with leaking roofs and little equipment ...schools with leaking roofs and no books!
the infrastructure crumbling ...
living in fear of your own rulers is not healthy.
this wasn't your usual anger or frustration at government ...this was fear for many people for many different reasons. fear of her government and its cruel selfish policies.
more than anything ...fear and hatred of her.
she was and remains the most hated PM of this country ever if i remember rightly.
Something that was run for the benefit of the country was sold and is now run for the benefit of shareholders. How is that not theft?
Yes it was a good thing for a lot of people in the short term. However in the longterm, its led to an increase in homelessness and people living in temporary accomodation (b&b's, hostels etc) because there is no more social housing. How is that now benefitting people?
Errrmmm...you seem to have quite a few facts wrong there. Leaving aside the fact that you think that Pinochet "was one of the better dictators" :eek:. What has Honecker got to do with Chile and what neo-fascist did Pinochet overthrow? Pinochet overthrew Allende who was a democratically elected socialist. Pinochet also stayed head of the army until 1998 and retained a lot of influence in Chile.
P.S.
Very disingenous article you linked to.
We should concentrate now on how Brown is destroying manufacturing in this country, for instance, and for selling all our gold reserves - practically unnoticed by the public ... today is the reality, not some old women from the past.
Get over it. Move on.