Maggie is Dead.

[Talkinpeace]

at last.

Great article. Mark Steel hits nail on head....again.

even on MN the anti Thatcher posters were flamed

I was called egocentric (that's hilarious) and mean spirited for starting a thread saying that I wouldn't be celebrating her death but but I feel an awful lot sadder about all of her peers who have died cold, hungry and alone because of the cuts she was instrumental in introducing, here.

I wonder what those same people said to the many who were actively celebrating.

So glad he wrote it. This baying condemnation of anyone who dares to voice disapproval of Thatcher is very disturbing. Just because someone's dies it doesn't change their actions.

bombjack

the problem with your article is that it is just about 0ne aspect of what Thatcher did.

"You can spot the people who are just parroting their family's beliefs about Thatcher. You'll only see them coming out with the bad, in ever more strident tones.

Or you'll see the old chestnuts... "She destroyed our community", "She ripped the heart out of...", "She closed our...""

its doesn't stop them from being true.

I think that Thatcher would be proud that she has once again in death succeeded in what she did in life. She has spilt the country.

Bombjack my DHs take on the 1970s is very different. He says it was much better than it is now and much easier to find work even with the 3 day week.
Here is a post of mine from an older thread. He was speaking to me while i was typing it. So i typed exactly the way he was speaking. These are his exact words.

DarkesteyesSun 03-Feb-13 00:43:41

Eliza ive just asked my almost 63 yr old DH (hes a baby boomer too but without the baby boomer attitude)
He says it was better in the 70s that is now and that it was easier then because he was doing 3 12 hr days so that was 36 hrs in 3 days and then the other 2 days they used a generator which was shared between 3 small factories (note the lack of "im alright jack" here.) this was shared between 360 employees between the three sites. Food and drink was laid on for the employees FREE. In the circumstances ive described here from DH he says it was easier then BECAUSE THERE WAS WORK and you could finish in one factory one day and start in another the next day even with this 3 day week.
While this was all going on they were given fuel ration cards but you only had to mention where you worked to the garage and they guaranteed you would have the fuel.
All these companies ive mentioned were looking out for each other. DH says it was easier back then that it is now. (fuel ration cards they were given didnt even have to be used. Can you imagine that kind of selflessness happening now? Ha. Not by some of the attitudes ive seen on here!
Within this ten mile radius there were 7 contract firms which did the work for the bigger companies.
Now they would be fighting each other for contracts but back then they simply helped each other out with steel,materials etc which never got delivered because of the shortage of fuel.
Eliza DH has just said it was a completely different world back then so it cant be compared.
And they got paid OVERTIME RATE even on the 3 day week.

Thankyou Darkesteyes for reminding me that the 70's were much so much better. We all looked out for one another. I loathed Thatcher but she was never so vile as this lot
We like your DH are old baby boomers

The problem is "darkesteyes" that not all places where the utopia that your 63 yr old DP remembers.

A friend of my parents had a run in with the shop steward were he worked, he was removed from the firm (the shop steward issued the strike ultimatum to the boss). the shop steward then had him "black balled" from the union, he could enter any firm that had a closed shop (one union) policy.

That would be bad enough but every time this bloke got a job the shop steward would appear and have a word with management, or shopkeepers or whoever had offered this man employment, and he would be forced to leave or the shop would not be supported by the shop steward.

He omly gopt a job that saved his marriage and family because Thatcher stopped the closed shop (one union) stranglehold.

I have no Love for Thatcher but quite frankly the unions can go fuck themselves up the arse with the rough end of a pineaaple.

I thought both ends of a pineapple were rough?

Progressive Taxation

I think my post wasn't very clear, sorry. I meant that we had progressive taxation 45-79

1970s progressive taxation and falling rate of profit means capitalists sulk and stop investing

From 45 onwards we had rising productivity & wages. This means demand for goods and services. I think another factor is that we had many more people being employed by nationalised industries and the introduction of the NHS. This meant workers had enough money to create demand for all privately produced goods/services.

The falling rate of profit is seen over any cycle, within any industry/business and over time. Because of competition, businesses invest in technologies to become more efficient. Efficiency leads to the falling rate of profit because less labour is needed combined with competition to bring down prices. Because you have this, capitalist sulk and stop investing or they invest elsewhere. I can't find a chart that specifically shows this in the U.K but I recall reading that sometime around 1965 (ish) profits slumped.

www.businessinsider.com/profits-at-high-wages-at-low-2013-4 graph one shows falling rate of profit in the U.S but a similar picture was seen in the uk.

"The body of evidence from a range of sources on measuring the US ROP since 1946 shows that there has been a secular fall in profitability since 1946 but that it has been interspersed with a cycle of up and down phases. There is mostly agreement that the first up phase was from 1946 to 1965, the next down phase was from 1965 to 1982 and then there was an up phase from 1982 to 1997
followed by a down phase afterwards. So there is a cycle of profitability, as well as a secular decline"

Falling profit has a wave or cyclical pattern with troughs and peaks thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/the-profit-cycle-and-economic-recession.pdf

We have seen rising profits over the last 30 years. However one thing that occurs to me is that this time (79 onwards) most of that profit is because of falling wages rather than technological advances, the demand has only come from the availability of borrowing because workers can't pay with their wages. So the profits come from debt. The other interesting thing is that the profits are not then invested into core business where value is created but into areas that create fictitious
capital.

When Maggie came to power she inherited stagflation, inflation, unemployment, which would still have risen because the capitalists were sulking and not investing. Without their investment the costs to the government of keeping industries which were failing nationalised and picking up the welfare tab would have been horrendous.

She created the conditions in which investment would be profitable, problem is we now need to be moving in the opposite direction and Scameron et al haven't caught on yet and business owners are unlikely to wake up until they are fighting each other for your last dime.

However with so much private sector debt & state debt sitting alongside huge levels of surplus capital which is essentially now fictitious capital, Keynes cure might not work???????? certainly investors are moving towards health/education/welfare to make money for them. The net result could be higher national debt and still no show from the private sector. What do others think?

A pineapple ouch !

"He says it was better in the 70s that is now and that it was easier then because he was doing 3 12 hr days so that was 36 hrs in 3 days and then the other 2 days they used a generator which was shared between 3 small factories (note the lack of "im alright jack" here.) this was shared between 360 employees between the three sites. Food and drink was laid on for the employees FREE."

Can someone remind him that it is not about him and how easy it was for him and how the food and drink was free for him

We were bankrupt as a nation, we were on our knees and Labour's Denis Healey had to call the IMF in, just like bankrupt countries do.

Unions could take strike action without balloting their members. They dictated many policies and they challened the Labour government who were ineffectual in curbing their power. We are a democracy and vote in a government on our behalf. We can't allow union leaders, Marxists and former Communists to dictate policy.

Heath was unable to turn things around, Healey invited the IMF in and Callaghan couldn't turn things around.

There was one person who could turn things around and that was Maggie.

'Thankyou Darkesteyes for reminding me that the 70's were much so much better.'

Inflation reached 27% in the 1970s

We were a basket case. If it had been allowed to continue, we would all now be wearing rags. Labour knew that the decline was out of control but thay did not have the strength and determination to put a stop to it.

The person who ended it was Margaret Thatcher. She saved the country.

claig it wasnt just his experience. They all got paid overtime rate not just my Dh and they all helped each other out. That is what my post says.

Can someone remind him that it is not about him and how easy it was for him and how the food and drink was free for him

How strange you should make this remark claig. After all it was Thatcher who said "there is no society only the individual"!!

Harold Wilson closed more mines in the 1960s than Thatcher did in the 1980s.

We are witnessing the real divide in this nation between leftwing activists who oppose any polcy of change implemented by a Conservative government and ignore teh changes made by Labour governments.

We are now witnessing the real hostility and enmity of some leftwingers to any policy that emanates from the right.

In Scargill's day, there were leftwingers like him who opposed the shutting down of a single mine and today we have some leftwingers who oppose the cutting of a single benefit after a Labour government left office and one of their MPs left a note saying there is no money left.

Things might have been good for some. Just in the same way that many older Russian's look back with nostalgia at the old communist days.

It doesn't mean that as a society though it was sustainable and the same applied to the UK in 1979. As a nation we had collapsed. It wasn't working.

It seems to me that those who were doing OK under the old regime hated the fact that change had to happen and unfairly blame Maggie for that change. But many actually did very well out of the changes she ushered in. Those people have been branded greedy capitalist pigs for having embraced change and worked hard. It's all bullshit to justify the fact that they didn't want to accept that the world changed around them.

We are now witnessing the real hostility and enmity of some leftwingers to any policy that emanates from the right.

Very true. I was having a conversation with a far leftie friend the other day who as usual was spewing unfounded bollocks about how the working class have now been priced out of uni education. And after 10 minutes of taking her through the REAL changes rather than the rubbish she was believing, even she had to admit that actually they weren't bad and in fact was more in line with left wing policy of taxing the rich.

What it taught me is that the left seem to only look at the rhetoric and pay little to no attention to the facts.

'How strange you should make this remark claig. After all it was Thatcher who said "there is no society only the individual"!!'

Yes, but Thatcher did not work for herself. She worked for the whole country, for everyone of us, and she survived a bomb in Brighton when working for all of us and for our entire society.

That Thatcher quote has been misinterpreted by leftwingers who try desperately to paint her as uncaring and even evil. She worked for the nation and those leftwingers who celebrate her death disrespect her.

We are witnessing a hatred of Thatcher and what she stood for. We are witnessing a real divide in our society by some on the left and the rest of teh public who voted her in three times and made her the longest serving peacetime Prime Minister of the twentieth century.

We are witnessing the difference in values between those who opposed any mine closures and who oppose any cuts and the rest of the public.

The media play Billy Bragg's song "which side are you on?"
In the 1980s, the public was mainly with Thatcher and I think that the silent majority still are today.

Actually claig we will be wearing rags in a few years anyway!

There is one other thing, around the late 70s containerisation came in which meant that cars and all sorts could be assembled in one place whilst component parts were made elsewhere. Moving goods, moving manufacturing around and moving capital became quicker, cheaper and easier. Computers came in and meant that moving money around the globe became as easy as pushing a button. That is what Thatcher faced, a sulky bunch of capitalists that would hop on the next boat out unless they got what they wanted. However what she did to our manufacturing industries has meant an over reliance upon the financial services sector and now we have unemployed de-skilled people. How are we going to turn things around now?

What do you want everyone to do, claig? No really, what is it you want?

You seem to want everyone to roll over and exclaim "Oh I SEE now! Thatcher saved us. She really was the best leader we have ever had. She really does deserve a state sponsored funeral, unlike almost every other PM. We are all wrong, and we are just brainwashed lefties. Thatcherism really is the only way."

That seems to be what you want, with your constant essays deifying Thatcher. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it seems.

People will not change their histories, their memories, the heritages and their beliefs because you are telling them they are all wrong.

How are we going to turn things around now?

Well in my opinion we invest heavily in high tech industries that will benefit us in the future. Things like microprocessor design, high end engineering and green technologies. Offshore the production of the actual widgets to China. Bit like Apple. They design the stuff, sell the stuff and make the profit. But the production is done in China.

To do this though we need massive changes in our society starting with our education system. Frankly it's shit. We've kids leaving with qualifications which are worthless in the real world competing for jobs with graduates who are better qualified and immigrants who will work for less.

Kid's don't see business and science as interesting career choices and too many are leaning towards the media/sports and other soft subjects which is fine in small numbers but it doesn't help us as a nation to be an economic powerhouse.

But such changes and return on any investment will take a generation to see. Our electoral system demands results in 5 years hence why politician's are only ever interested in quick fixes and do little to address our underlying structural problems.

PS the fact that she survived the bomb in Brighton is not testament to her strength of character. It was simply her good luck that she was not killed.

'However what she did to our manufacturing industries has meant an over reliance upon the financial services sector and now we have unemployed de-skilled people. How are we going to turn things around now?'

She did not get everything right, on that we can all agree. But she could not stop globalisation just as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Miliband can't either even if tehy wanted to which they don't.

The reality was that much of our manufacturing industry was not of the level of that in Germany. It wasn't Thatcher's fault of Labour's fault because all governments had spent billions on our state industries and were losing money hand over fist.

It was the fault of our managers, just like the banking crisis was the fault of our 'light touch regulators' and politicians who did not know what was going on under their noses.

We were in decline because the wrong managers were making the wrong decisions and were sitting on their laurels and not investing to modernise our industries.

We were lions led by donkeys, just like our soldiers were in the First World War. The upper classes, the bowler hat brigade and the upper class generals and earls who led our soldiers to their deaths were often incompetent. They were too comfortable and had not faced competition and were not sharp and educated enough. They led us up blind alleys and forced is to retreat and retreat while more dynamic societies advanced.

Thatcher changed all that. She smashed the system. She broke the class system and the bowler hat brigades howled at her in fury. She opened their comfortable ways up to competition, to global capital and finance. She had no time for them and they fought her unscrupulously but she never flinched from her determination to modernise the country and set it back on the path of growth for teh benefit of its hardworking working and middle classes who had for so long been lions led by donkeys.

The bowler hat brigade brayed like the donkeys that they were and the unions howled as their comfortable practices and ways were swept away.

The leftwing activists who cared only for themselves and not the country or its people opposed her very move. They despised her for changing things for the better and for exposing the fallacies of their arguments.

They hated her, they hated the middle classes and they hate the Daily Mail. But she never let their abuse stop her from doing what was right.

To Billy Bragg' song "which side are you on?", she would have answered that she was on the people's side, our side.

'What do you want everyone to do, claig? No really, what is it you want?'

I want these people celebrating Thatcher's death, passing around death cakes and singing songs about her death to have the decency to hang their heads in shame.

Criticism of her is fine, I disagreee with much of what she did. She was human and got some things wrong, but she does not deserve such hatred and disrespect for serving her country.

But, as has been proven, people doing that are in the small minority. The general consensus here seems to be that lots of people disliked her thoroughly, but they don't think it's decent to celebrate someone's death.

And you cannot change how people feel about her. I think she was a terrible, though impressive person - you are not going to change that. However I, like the vast majority, are not one of those people celebrating in the streets so I am not going to hang my head with shame. And I repeat the assertion that just because someone has died, it doesn't make them immune to criticism. Are Mark Steel and those agreeing with him among those who should be hanging their heads in shame?

'The general consensus here seems to be that lots of people disliked her thoroughly, but they don't think it's decent to celebrate someone's death.'

That's fine. I don't care if people dislike her and nor did she. She had the strength to ignore the jibes and criticisms of the left and their leaders and to put the nation above being loved by everyone.

She wasn't in a popularty contest, she was a conviction politician who wanted to do what was right.

I like Mark Steel. But I notice that the Independent article by him has a picture next to it of graffiti on a wall saying that Thatcher should "rot in hell".

I don't think Mark Steel put that picture there, I guess it was teh progressives on the Independent.

Thatcher didn't mind criticism. Kinnock criticised her every week at the dispatch box and she made him look a chump every time he tried it and the public knew and recognised that and never voted him in above her.

Criticism is fine. But the hatred displayed by some of the people who criticise her is not part of a tolerant Britain. However, it is very instructive for the majority of the people and the middle clases to witness it, so that they understand what lies beneath the mask.