Thatcher: A Personal view

The dust has probably mostly settled. I have deliberately withheld my views on Margaret Thatcher as a mark  of respect to her family. I was not a supporter of Margaret Thatcher, actually I was not a supporter of the whole Conservative party ethos of the time. However I believe the protests at her funeral were in poor taste and unnecessary, actually pointless. I did my celebrating in 1990 when she left office and only breathed a sigh of relief finally in May 1997.

What do I remember of May 1979? Yeah, not as much as I would like. I was 13 and at my third year of senior school. We had suffered the "winter of discontent" in 1978-79 and the country was ripe for change. Wikepedia has an interesting article on the time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent

As with anything on Wikipedia you have to be a little careful. There is a game show on BBC Radio 4 where a contestant reads a spurious tract of almost complete rubbish but contained within are 6 facts and the other contestants have to try and guess what they are. That is how I feel about Wikipedia. Still the article gives some context to the rest of this blog.

The Seventies were considered tumultuous times as far as peace time goes. Union agitation, raging inflation industrial decline, high unemployment. It was the end of the post war dream.

So what did Thatcher bring to the table? Well to be fair it wasn't just her it was the entire Conservative led government.

As a matter of record the government fought inflation with monetarist policies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism

Where I grew up, admittedly a middle class area, many of the things they did were considered necessary. We were entering a new world of global competition. Many of the "standard" heavy industries were unable to compete with the far east on price and quality. So they had to go. They were bleeding the country dry so it was thought. Unemployment rose to unheard of levels and the only answer from on high was that they were all feckless losers because they didn't "get on their bikes" and search for work. Never mind that whole communities relied in one way or another for their living on these industries so the next job was a little more than a bike ride away, try a new city.

There was much massaging of the unemployment figures during this time, to try and hide the true scale of the devastation.

What was it that upset me? They way millions of people were thrown on the scrapheap, Whole cities were devastated for the sake of a political ideal. And nothing was done to find a new way. It has taken a generation for some of these places to fully recover. Liverpool and Manchester are now thriving cities but With little thanks to monetarist policies.

Then there were the coal miners. My opinion with 30 years of hindsight, was that the dispute and subsequent destruction of the coal mining industry was payback for what happened to the Ted Heath government in the early Seventies. The coal industry was union led and a constant thorn in the government side. So the Conservatives got rid of them. There was less demand for coal probably with the demise of British Steel but there were and are a lot of coal fired power stations in this country with which we have to import the coal from South Africa and China to power.

Here in the North East of England there are whole communities that have had the heart ripped from them with the loss of the coal industry. There has been the subsequent rise in crime and youth unemployment that sits squarely on the shoulders of the Conservative government. The so called benefit scroungers that this present government are seeking to prescribe are of their own making. They created a generation who would only know unemployment. It was their own policies that caused the levels of unemployment unheard of since World War 2.

Greed became good under Thatcher. conspicuous consumption was OK. And the nation became a little mean spirited. I want all I can have and I won't share it.

There was also a lack of investment in technology and science. A lot of pure research had it's funding stopped because it was of little immediate economic benefit. It is short sighted as without the pure research often the economic spin offs never come to light.

Never mind because the country was booming, and busting, in the Eighties. If you could you got on and if you couldn't you were left behind.

The Conservative government privatised the economy, but it centralised power making London the megalopolis that it is today. A recent report on the BBC website cited these changes (not just from Conservatives) are what has led now to the UK being a city state where all power and money resides in the capital and the rest of us can go hang.

I for one am not happy at being called a "Thatcherite" by Cameron. I rather resent it actually.

As an interesting footnote to the union saga There was a large collection of IBM facilities on my area of South East Hampshire. Throughout this period the workers that I came into contact with were very pleased to tell how much better off they were without union input. And they were well off. But it all came to an end in the early nineties as IBM regrouped and these very smug people found themselves in the dole queue as quick as you like and with little to show for it as they had no collective bargaining power that a union would have provided.

And so ends another chapter in British history