Thatcher

[Section_31]

I don't buy into this halcyon view of the past. You can't get much more (small c) conservative than that kind of rose-tinted retrospective.

 

I don't think it's rose-tinted at all, in fact I said i can imagine such a lifestyle being some people's version of hell, it'd probably be my version of hell as - in many ways - I'm not actually very social, don't like being a 'lad' and am not particularly into sport or drinking, but these kinds of communities were built around heavy industry in the north - that's just indisputable fact - and they solved more internal problems than they created IMO.

 

Towns like Widnes and Runcorn are prime examples. They were built around industrial giants like ICI. Virtually everyone over a certain age has worked there, everyone, they met their wives there, they got their sons jobs there, and the firm invested in social and community clubs. A worker would chat to his mrs in the canteen then go to work with his brother and his best mate, after work they'd go the club for a pint and on Saturday they'd play rugby. If the daughter in law was struggling to cope with her new kid the mum and her friends would help out - the state wouldn't need to get involved, you wouldn't need a surestart centre to tell a young mum how to change a nappy, her mother-in-law would and so would her nan.

 

ICI's successor is a company called Ineos. Many of the staff are on temp contracts, some have pensions, many don't, and the firm intermittently threatens to pull out of the country unless the Government gives it a tax break. Its philosophy is not conducive to long-term planning, people aren't secure enough to settle down around it and plan a future - there is certainly no sport or social programmes funded by it.

 

Anyone who considers themselves 'working class' and is over 40 will recognise both worlds, and will have seen one slide into the other - with all the social fallout it created. Me and you will never know it, neither of us probably care, but the difference between us, with all due respect, is I've lived with the fallout of the working class being stripped of their work - and I'd be willing to take one for the team in order to see that damage healed.

[VladimirIlyich]

The Britain that Thatcher inherited was in a pretty sorry state both socially, and administratively, after some pretty insipid leadership both Conservative, and Labour.

Agree with some of this first paragraph,the mess was administrative and there was a real need of investment in things like social housing as there hadnt been any real long term investment since the war ended.

As for socially,mmm.I was just becoming a teenager and I didnt know anybody out of work at the time and despite not having a lot of money there was enough to enjoy the odd holiday and have a nice christmas.Both my mum and dad worked,dad full time and mum part time.We all knew each other and kids could still leave bikes and toys out in the street without fear of it being stolen and you could generally still leave the door unlocked at night too.

 

A post war/post imperial mindset still existed, and the world had changed. The defeated Germany and Japan were now the merging industrial powers, America and Russia were the world superpowers, Europe was emerging as a trading bloc more important than the Commonwealth, and we could not get to grips with all of that.

 

We still had a car industry and despite the jokes in the media they were still selling well.Dont remember seeing many Japanese or German cars on our streets,maybe I just didnt take an interest.

 

The Left was a tainted force. Ideologically there was little evidence that Marxist/Leninist policy was the way forwards, and both the Unions and management were wedded to working practises which were clearly doomed. There was a yawning gap for anyone who could convincingly run an Administration and provide an ideological way forwards. Thatcher filled that gap.

 

I'll assume the comments about the Marxist/Leninist stuff were aimed at the Eastern Bloc as if you mean that it was Marxist to be a member of a Union and it was very difficult to sack a worker without a very good reason and him/her have a given right to take their employer to a tribunal or be given a negotiated pay off of a small sum to tide them over until they got another job then yes we had a Marxist state.

 

Initially most people were happy that the country was put back on its feet again. It WANTED to be put back on its feet. Administratively she did the job. But as she gained confidence so the ideology gained ground, and that is where her social judgement let her down.

 

Maybe you and your family and friends thought that but it wasnt the opinion in my neck of the woods.

 

Socially the sale of council houses that the council couldn’t be bothered to look after anyway was socially empowering, but the failure to care for the remaining stock properly was retrograde. The denationalisation of British Airways , BL and BT was 100% right, the denationalisation of the utilities a dangerous mess.

 

I cant agree with this at all.They were called British for a reason and they just needed modernising and investment to compete with the Germans and Japanese you mentioned earlier.We were dismantling our manufacturing base in privatising a British car manufacture and falling behind in technology by selling off BT too and we are now left with none.Privatising British Steel and BP,especially when North Sea Gas was plentiful was nothing more than lining friends pockets.As for British Airways,most countries have a national airline at least partly funded by the government so why not us?

 

 

The Miners Strikes, in retrospect was a foolish battle on the part of both sides. The industry was declining, and the social damage it caused immense and damaging to the Tories, equally it was a battle that Scargill could never win. If the Miners dispute represented an end to the workers v bosses battles of the past, Grunwick defined the future. In 1982 I knew someone who earned £50k a year on Fleet street for three night shifts a week, as a machine minder. They all knew that they were on a gravy train- and they were going to have to be hauled off it screaming and kicking. And therein lies a lesson, the bankers are not going to be weaned off their bonuses until dragged of screaming and kicking too.

 

On both sides?

What would you do if you were fighting for you and your families futures,just accept it and do nothing? Thats bollocks and you know it.Its a shame Scargill was demonised by the right wing press because he was 100% RIGHT.

As for your fleet street example,only you know if thats true and I cant dispute it.

 

The Falklands were lucky for her, just as the Country was doubting the direction she was taking us in after getting the country up and running again she had a war to fight. Psychologically I think that empowered her more than any Commons victory.

 

Economically, the strides we made in the 80’s are a matter of record. There was a social cost which was too high with social improvements too low on the agenda too. But with Japan and Germany energised from having been flattened and rebuilt, and America seizing the spoils of war ( we did not finish paying them back till a few years ago) industrial change was not going to be easy.

 

If you consider strides made to mean the dismantling of everything good about Britain of the time(see Sections excellent post for that)stripping away employment rights,condemning workers to little or no job security,creating a massive wealth gap and rebuilding Hadrians Wall North of Birmingham and lining the pockets of wealthy businessmen at the expense of the working heart of Britain then yes they were massive strides made.

 

The Poll Tax was her Iraq. Everyone knew it was going to be a disaster, and so it proved, and even now, she doesn’t get why, the link with the Miners Strike unmistakeable.

 

And that is as objective an assessment as I can offer.

 

It seems our versions of objective differ.

[Jack the Sipper]

None of the above options. The people who hate her though are mostly the layabouts, those who want something for nothing and the dregs of society.

 

Her policies were copied in almost every western nation, together with Reagan she destroyed communism and so freed hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe from the stranglehold of the Soviet system.

 

The reason Blair never reversed most of her policies was that he knew they were right.

 

What, like the deregulation of the markets that have led (since you posted this) to a financial crisis that's engulfed almost every western nation?

[Furmedge]

No, unfortunately not dead yet, but The Guardian tomorrow reports on Thatcher & her cronies considering abandoning Liverpool after the riots. Can't get full story yet on their site;

 

[Walton Park]

She did abandon Liverpool as well as most other Northern towns/cities.

[kelster]

No, unfortunately not dead yet, but The Guardian tomorrow reports on Thatcher & her cronies considering abandoning Liverpool after the riots. Can't get full story yet on their site;

 

 

I've read something (below) on the newly released papers and it was the likes of Whitelaw and Howe who wanted to abandon Liverpool, not Thatcher. She sent Heseltine up to look at regeneration against the advice of other ministers not to waste scarce resources.

 

Thatcher looked at arming police as cities erupted - Main Section - Yorkshire Post

[Jokerman]

No, unfortunately not dead yet, but The Guardian tomorrow reports on Thatcher & her cronies considering abandoning Liverpool after the riots. Can't get full story yet on their site;

 

 

Thatcher government toyed with evacuating Liverpool after 1981 riots

National Archives files reveal ministerial warning PM not to spend money on deprived city, saying decline was largely self-inflicted

 

Margaret Thatcher's closest ministers came close to writing off Liverpool in the aftermath of the 1981 inner-city riots and even raised the prospect of its partial evacuation, according to secret cabinet papers released on Friday.

 

They told her that the "unpalatable truth" was that they could not halt Merseyside's decline and her chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, warned her not to waste money trying to "pump water uphill" and telling her the city was "much the hardest nut to crack".

 

The cabinet papers released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule reveal Thatcher's closest advisers told her that the "concentration of hopelessness" on Merseyside was very largely self-inflicted with its record of industrial strife.

 

The files show that when Michael Heseltine pressed the case to save Britain's inner cities with his cabinet paper, It Took a Riot, they ensured his demand for £100m a year of new money for two years for Liverpool alone was met with a paltry offer of £15m, with the condition that "no publicity should be given to this figure".

 

Although they never articulated the case publicly at the time, those telling Thatcher that there was little point in spending money on Liverpool also included the industry secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, and her Downing Street advisers, Sir John Hoskyns and Sir Robin Ibbs.

 

In a confidential note in the immediate aftermath of the Toxteth riots, Howe said that Heseltine's plans for a "massive injection of additional public spending" to stabilise the inner cities had to be rejected: "Isn't this pumping water uphill? Should we go rather for 'managed decline'? This is not a term for use, even privately. It is much too negative, when it must imply a sustained effort to absorb Liverpool manpower elsewhere – for example in nearby towns of which some are developing quite promisingly."

 

Howe told Thatcher that Heseltine's plan for a cabinet minister for every deprived region should be restricted to a one-year lone experiment in Merseyside after arguing that if there was any extra money he would rather spend it on the more promising West Midlands. He decried Heseltine's role as "minister for Merseyside" as an attempt by the latter to create a "godfather role" for himself.

 

The cabinet papers also disclose that the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, personally warned Thatcher that Heseltine, despite his undoubted "zest and panache'', was not the man to save Britain's inner cities arguing he was "distrusted and disliked in the local authority world". Armstrong suggested Jim Prior or Lord Soames would do a better job.

 

In his paper, Heseltine concentrated on the "devastating impact" of 30%-50% unemployment in some inner-city areas and described the outcome of postwar policy towards Merseyside as a "tactical retreat, a combination of economic erosion and encouraged evacuation".

 

Thatcher went to Liverpool and told community leaders she had come to listen. Her memoirs show that she did indeed listen to the views of some young people in the town hall but was so appalled by their bitter hostility to the police that she quickly starting begging them not to riot again.

 

They had complained that the cause of the riot lay in the police tactics of the Merseyside chief constable, Kenneth Oxford: "He believed in slapping people down and keeping them down," says the official record of the meeting. "The police had attacked the very community leaders who had tried to bring the riot to an end. They said the Liverpool police regarded anyone who was black as a criminal and acted accordingly."

 

When Thatcher complained to the archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock, immediately afterwards about their "hatred of the police" he told her there was "a silent colour bar" operating in the city, saying there were only eight non-white police officers and neither councillors nor shop assistants from ethnic minorities.

 

But Thatcher said she was not concerned "about the colour of people's skins" and condemned the rioters as criminals. It was left to the Scarman inquiry to tackle the police racism that lay behind the complaints. The official papers confirm that the main response to the 1981 riots was to give forces better equipment and more powerful weapons.

 

The cabinet papers also show that a panicky Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir David McNee, told the prime minister at the height of the Brixton riots in July that he was unable to guarantee the security of the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, which was due to take place the following month without the introduction of a modern-day riot act. He raised the stakes by telling her that he had already raised it with the Queen.

 

McNee presented Thatcher with a list of equipment he needed including riot shields, water cannon, rubber bullets and armoured vehicles – preferably painted blue rather than kept army grey, CS gas and even a "heli-telly" – an early mobile surveillance helicopter – during a midnight visit to Scotland Yard.

 

He said he was especially concerned about the arrangements for the planned royal wedding fireworks in Hyde Park which foreign dignitories would watch from a stand without any cover.

 

The government responded by immediately providing 1,500 Nato riot helmets from army stocks, asked the army to provide more baton rounds and six water cannon to the police and opened three army camps to be used as prison overflows.

 

A water cannon demonstration was also laid on but the use of troops was ruled out. "If necessary the police should be properly equipped and even armed, before such a step was taken," said the Downing Street note of a conversation between the home secretary, Willie Whitelaw, and Thatcher on 11 July when riots erupted in Moss Side, Manchester.

 

The minister finessed the demands for a new riot act but conceded that the police should be given the discretion to use rubber bullets and baton rounds for the first time in mainland Britain. In typical Whitelaw fashion he only made this concession after the chief constables had privately assured him that they would not use them.

 

The 1981 riots were Britain's worst urban riots of the 20th century, running from April to July and involving violent confrontations between mainly young black people and police in Liverpool, Manchester and parts of London including Brixton and Southall. More than 800 police were injured and more than 3,000 people arrested.

 

The disturbances came as Thatcher's early monetarist economic experiment plunged unemployment towards 3 million and her well-documented reaction to the first televised pictures of rioting and looting in Toxteth – "Oh, those poor shopkeepers" – illustrated the limited law and order nature of her response.

 

While she stood firm against Heseltine's attempt to create a traditional Tory drive to save Britain's inner cities, Whitelaw set about re-equipping the police with more modern helmets, shields and batons that would prove as important as building up coal stocks in Thatcher's showdown with the miners in 1984.

 

Thatcher government toyed with evacuating Liverpool after 1981 riots | UK news | The Guardian

[Frankenhooker]

Oh, well that's just wonderful. Jesus fucking wept.

[G Richards]

Couple of great posts by Section 31 above. Thank you.

 

I recently turned 41 and grew up on a council estate in Birkenhead. My dad worked on the docks during my formative years, spent a long time on the dole under Thatcher, and then worked for the council at community centres after that. He has just retired (although that's sort of botched, as he's not officially retired yet, but he has just lost his job, got a small pay-off, and is now waiting a few more months until he retires).

 

Anyhow, all this is to say I clearly remember the former way of life with a greater emphasis on community, and in many ways it was all the richer for it.

[Redder Lurtz]

I've read something (below) on the newly released papers and it was the likes of Whitelaw and Howe who wanted to abandon Liverpool, not Thatcher. She sent Heseltine up to look at regeneration against the advice of other ministers not to waste scarce resources.

 

Thatcher looked at arming police as cities erupted - Main Section - Yorkshire Post

 

I've a feeling that particular detail wil slip way, way under the radar.

[markcd]

I've a feeling that particular detail wil slip way, way under the radar.

 

maybe because it isn't true? Heseltine did come up to Liverpool, and went back and said that the city needed £100m. We ended up with The International Garden Festival if my memory serves me right. She would have had the final say on any of this, so to try and pin the blame on Howe or any of those other cunts, is just wrong.

[Liverpool lad]

Are they just softening us up for when she snuffs it? Cannot be long now

[kalasoma]

Most here of a certain age will have a personal story about their lives under the Thatcherite junta. All I know is, my father was forced out of work as his factory closed (and this is in the dreaded south of England where everyone thinks shit was hunky dory). Forced the family out of the country because there was no hope. I can tell you many more stories like that. All taking place in London, Brixton, Notting Hill... Of course, I'm much stronger for having lived through it, but no less bitter about the experience.

 

I can't argue the impact of the long-term economic effect of her government on the UK any better than what some of you have already posted. All I'll say is that there'll be a sigh of relief from a fair few south of Milton Keynes when she dies. I'll most likely be among those looking back with a mix of anger and regret for what was lost.

[Ezekiel 25:17]

She winds Monty up so she's ok by me, i'd go so far to say that everything she did can be justified by the fact Monty would not approve.

[Section_31]

It doesn't really rile me that story because it's not surprising in the slightest. A couple of years ago some right-wing think tank said the whole of the North shoud be abandonned didn't it? And that we should all move to the south. Because the south has something in the water which magically creates wealth, it's got nothing at all to do with the concentration of wealth in the ruling elite that already live there, were educated there and who begat children who have done exactly the same due to having the same opportunities in life and the same connections. The notion that Liverpool's problems were self inflicted is laughable, but not surprising to hear from that particular demographic.

 

I said when the Tories won the last election I felt like I was living in an occupied country, and people wonder why. These blood-blooded types care as much about you and yours as the Nazis did about the French.

[Anubis]

One little decision to send some marginal funding our way on the back of a riot doesn't change in any way shape or form the blight she inflicted on the north as a whole, nor her economic policy of turning us into a country of service based industries, and freeing greed from it's shackles.

 

 

[torahboy]

Like Section 31 I am in no way surprised by the news that the 'managed decline' of Liverpool was in Tory thinking in the Thatcher administration. Howe's ruminations would merely represent a minor indication of what was actually being said at that time. One can only imagine the more intimate, and probably more vitriolic, conversations that ensued between cabinet members and their business friends with regards the 'management' of Merseyside.

 

It must have been some pretty persuasive invective as the city got starved of investment for years. Even Neil Kinnock, a few years later, seemed to share Howe's view on the expendability of our area for the sake of political expediency.

 

Thatcher was just another cunt in the cuntocracy that was/is British politics.

[VladimirIlyich]

Typical to blame this on a politician to who Dennis Healey described an attack from as 'like being savaged by a dead sheep.'

[bigbak]

I'm too young (39) to have an opinion. I grew up in poverty. Not the relative poverty that the current Plasma buying generation are subjected to.

I had my brother's hand me downs and when I out grew both of them, they refused to have mine so my parents had a mixture of new clothes and ones from jumble sales.

To this day I've never had a new bike.

A holiday was camping if we were lucky.

 

At 20 I was made redundant under a tory Government. It was too easy for a company to ditch people when the profit had dropped. I hadn't paid enough NI contributions and got no dole. My misses earned more than the £90 a week they decided us and two young girls could survive on. I was out of work for 9 months.

 

The way money is doled out now is ott. The way I was treated back then was wrong.

 

I've yet to be convinced that Thatcher was a necessary evil. If anything she's partially to blame for the banking collapse due to destroying manufacturing.

[robslappa]

I remember in the early nineties having a conversation with someone, who at the time had a fairly senior position in the Foreign and Commonwealth office. He said he'd heard of plans in the '80s to deliberately run Liverpool down as the then Government wanted to use the port of Liverpool to bring in vasts quantities of nuclear waste to the country for treatment. I personally thought it was a bit far fetched and one for the tin foil hat brigade, but obviously not.

[VladimirIlyich]

I remember in the early nineties having a conversation with someone, who at the time had a fairly senior position in the Foreign and Commonwealth office. He said he'd heard of plans in the '80s to deliberately run Liverpool down as the then Government wanted to use the port of Liverpool to bring in vasts quantities of nuclear waste to the country for treatment. I personally thought it was a bit far fetched and one for the tin foil hat brigade, but obviously not.

 

Very interesting and typical of the view many governments have of Liverpool,particularly Tories.

[Stickman]

And to think the money it cost to pay for her funeral (over £10 million, and Blair also wanted to give her a state funeral although it was pretty close to one) plus the likes of Osborne and co crying their eyes out and yet these are the sort of evil plans she was trying to implement.

Which incidentally doesn't seem to be getting any coverage on Sky or the Beeb....

 

Margaret Thatcher's secret plans to dismantle welfare state almost prompted 'Cabinet riot'

 

Margaret Thatcher secretly continued to pursue politically explosive plans to dismantle the welfare state even after ministers thought they had been killed off by a Cabinet revolt, according to newly-released official files.

The proposals - drawn up by Whitehall's think tank the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) - were among the most contentious and the most radical to be considered by Mrs Thatcher's Conservative government during her 11 years in office.

They included scrapping free universal healthcare and requiring people to take out private insurance, charging for education, and ending the annual uprating of benefits in line with inflation, as well as sweeping defence cuts.

The CPRS paper baldly stated: “For the majority the change would represent the abolition of the NHS. This would be immensely controversial.”

When chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe, who commissioned the report, introduced the proposals at a specially convened meeting of the cabinet on September 9 1982 there was uproar.

Nigel Lawson, then the energy secretary, later recalled in his memoirs that it was “the nearest thing to a Cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration”.

 

And when the so-called Cabinet “wets”, who opposed Mrs Thatcher's hardline economic policies, contrived to leak details of the report to The Economist it sparked a public outcry.

In an attempt to quell the political storm, Mr Thatcher felt compelled to use her speech to the annual Conservative Party conference in Brighton to declare the NHS is “safe with us”.

Mrs Thatcher later claimed to have been “horrified” by the CPRS plan which was deemed so contentious it was designated a “non-paper” in Whitehall.

 

But while the “wets” believed they had seen off the proposals for good, Treasury papers released by the National Archives at Kew, west London, show the prime minister and her chancellor continued to work behind the scenes to keep them alive.

 

On November 26 1982, P Mountford in the Treasury informed Sir Geoffrey that Mrs Thatcher had set up a series of meetings with the key ministers involved - health secretary Norman Fowler, education secretary Sir Keith Joseph and defence secretary John Nott.

“This series of meeting is designed to soften up the three big spenders. Without their support the operation will not work,” Mr Mountford wrote.

“Your main aim, I suggest, should be to ensure that no sacred cows are prematurely identified. Given the prime minister's concern about the NHS, this may be difficult.

 

“But we want to make sure that the ministers concerned a) do not close off any options at this stage, and B) if possible put their personal weight behind the exercise and encourage their officials to co-operate fully with the Treasury.”

Others however saw little prospect of success. GW Monger warned: “DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security) officials say there is no chance that Mr Fowler would agree to further study of this idea

.

“I imagine that in the circumstances, and especially given the prime minister's speech at Brighton, it is difficult to press them.”

While Sir Geoffrey remained adamant that radical reform was needed if public spending was to be brought under control, he was alarmed when the free market Adam Smith Institute intended to set out its own plans for privatisation and deregulation.

His political adviser Robin Harris said that while the portentously named “Omega Project” could be “politically useful” to the Conservatives in the run-up to a general election, there was a real danger it could “fall on its face”.

“The timescale proposed is very tight; one has legitimate doubts about the competence of some of those involved; and ill-researched proposals which will be portrayed as strongly resembling ours might prove an embarrassment,” he wrote.

Sir Geoffrey scrawled in the margin: “Every proposal will be seized on and hung round our neck. I see v great harm.”

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/margaret-thatcher-welfare-state-plans-cabinet-riot-a7438196.html

[cloggypop]

Let's exhume her next bonfire night.

[Priory Doctor]

So it wasn't just Merseyside, and the Trade Unions  that  were to have "Managed Decline " Status.

The root cause of most of the ills in our country/society today ,that witch.

Selling off Council houses- selling off all our natural assets, leaving people in hock to banks and Privatised owners of energy, water, landlords etc

[Lee909]

No surprise really

She and her kind really are horrible cunts. Should have been a fucking revolution here same time as the French and got rid of the parasites in the palace and wiped out a fair few of the Lords too