Margaret Thatcher dies at 87

[Filuwaúrdjan]

87

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I see that the thread title has been changed

Hopefully - once things have calmed down properly in all senses - her death will be cathartic in some way. It's not a question of moving on as such, but in properly coming to terms with what happened during her destructive/transformative/etc (delete according to taste) premiership.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyways, I would be the first person to acknowledge that my initial reaction - like those (I'm sure) of literally millions of others - was in poor taste and, yes, was perhaps a little on the ugly side. Though I don't (and won't) regret it.

I posted this at the end of last year and stand by it:

Thatcher defined large sections of British society as her personal enemies and shaped government policy accordingly. Worse, she didn't even bother to disguise that fact. This is not something that normally happens in democracies. Normal rules of behavior don't exactly apply. Again, I don't deny that it's ugly, but British politics in the 1980s was ugly, and its legacy is ugly. There's no point in pretending otherwise; it never comes across as anything other than false.

Feel free to feel as disgusted as you feel, just don't pretend that this is a 'normal' situation.

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You may have missed another recent obituary, that of Alastair Milne. He was the Director General of the BBC and was effectively fired by the Thatcher government for political reasons. Try again...

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Vosem, I'm guessing you're not familiar with the London County Council or its successor.

Or the Metropolitan Counties. Or what Thatcher did to the rest of local government in the UK: Britain used to have some of the most powerful local authorities in Europe, this was certainly not the case by 1990.

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One thing that you won't see mentioned on the news (well, probably) is what the Thatcher government did with that massive windfall from North Sea oil...

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Posted this elsewhere, stuff about legacy etc:

Deregulation, privatisation and all the rest of it. Its obvious, but it is absolutely and utterly massive. This was particularly important with regards to financial services and to housing. Then there is also primary and secondary* deindustrialisation of a particularly rapid and savage nature. Perhaps the most important aspect of her legacy is the point at which those two things intersect, because that's our society now, like it or hate it: there were winners as well as losers, losers as well as winners. And they were not (are not) distributed in an even geographical manner. Centralisation of government and serious damage to all alternative sources of political power, including, of course, Trade Unions,** is something else to consider.

Thinking a little further, the destruction of the post-1945 social democratic state (which isn't the same as the destruction of all social democratic aspects of the state; far from it. I'm sure she would have loved to have pulled that off, but didn't), which, of course, covers much of the above. But also takes us to devolution and Britain's new existential issues: socialist unionism (which made a lot of sense before 1979) was certainly killed off by Thatcherism. No Thatcher, no Scottish Parliament (probably), no Welsh Assembly (certainly). And presumably no referendum on an Independent Scotland next year.

Plenty of other things, obviously. Changes to political language (don't ignore the importance of that). Changes to the BBC and to television (extremely damaging changes, I would argue), although that falls (to a point) under deregulation.

Then there is the misuse of the North Sea oil windfall.

And so on and so forth.

*Some of the places hit hardest by the collapse in manufacturing employment in the first few years of the 1980s were old mining areas that had already experienced initial deindustrialisation in the 1960s. People forget that, or never knew. Probably the latter.

**But that point can actually be exaggerated, surprisingly enough. Trade Unions in Britain are still stronger and more influential than in most other large industrialised countries.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's an excellent point.

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Right, but the BBC is governed by the British government; it isn't a private company. Callaghan's Ministers also had to leave office -- you expect positions to shift when you elect a new government, otherwise what would be the point of democracy? But privately owned leftist newspapers continued to function just as before.

Oh dear.

While the BBC is owned by the state, it is supposed to be independent of the government of the day (and all sorts of safeguards and guarantees have existed over the years to theoretically keep things this way). The post of Director General is no way comparable to a member of the Cabinet, in other words. Milne was nevertheless sacked (in a complicated round-about way) by the Thatcher government at the beginning of 1987 because he was a nuisance.

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That's because it was replaced by the Greater London Council (GLC). You can read a very good short history of the GLC (and the Thatcher government's role in its demise) here.

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(which, BTW, I have absolutely no idea, since it was modified before I arrived)

Oh, it was just a reference (an incredibly obvious one) to the Wizard of Oz.

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Did Thatcher shut down opposition news services? I did not think so.

As has been pointed out upthread, she had the Director General of the BBC sacked for political reasons in 1987, which is effectively the same thing.

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Really? They was two democratic elected politician, who both favoured their vote segment over the good of the country and both lacked any respect for informal check and balances and was willing to change the election structures to weaken their opponents. Chavec was nothing but a left wing version of Thatcher, no matter how much his supporters would hate to hear it.

There's a lot of truth to that, yes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I suppose the Thatchavez thing works with oil money and all that as well. Never forget that the Thatcher government wasted the North Sea windfall on free tax cuts.

though how did Thatcher lack respect for checks and balances?

...

Are you serious?

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Think he's referring to the dismantling of large sections of local government and the castration of the rest of it. Which, of course, was done purely because it represented an alternative source of political power to the one that she occupied.

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Actually there are informal understandings about the way power should and should not be used. No government respects these fuzzy boundaries and general traditions entirely (obviously), but the Thatcher government... oh dear.

And this is actually one reason why the Tory base love her so.

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To the point on checks and balances I would agree with forward '12 to an extent.

You are both wrong.

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What has that got to do with the price of coal?

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I was saying that it was in the Conservative manifesto to alter local government, so the changes at least had a mandate behind them?

Again, what has that got to do with the price of North Sea oil? No one is accusing her of being a dictator.

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She stood for liberty at a time when Britain didn't want it. She stood for western progress when her opposition pushed for Marxism.

What a load of mindblowingly absurd bollocks.

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What are you, twelve? Moronic opinions that are factually wrong to the point of absurdity do not deserve to be treated with anything other than abuse.

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I would like to know the answer to this too. I don't think I've ever heard anything about Clement Attlee's funeral.

He had an ordinary funeral like basically other PM bar Churchill and (now) Thatcher.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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[Filuwaúrdjan]

Owner of a local chain of greengrocers and head of this that and everything else in Grantham for more than a couple of years. A big fish in a small pond, so to speak. A very small pond, really, but that's not what matters to people like that (or what was passed on to his daughter).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

All Britain's industry was state owned

No it was not.

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No it was not.

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No it was not. Quite the opposite actually: coal was, in 1984, still foundational to the rest of the economy. This was before the 'dash for gas' and all that.

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You are doing what a lot of Tories do and confusing the Winter of Discontent with the Three Day Week.

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Don't be absurd.

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Bin men go on strike quite a lot, actually. Some high profile strikes of that sort in Birmingham, Leeds and Southampton over the past few years.

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There certainly were serious structural problems wrt British manufacturing in the 1970s, but the initial ultra-Monetarist economic policies of the Thatcher government (eventually abandoned, by the way, because they didn't work) would have caused factory closures and job losses on a huge scale even if that were not so.

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(Also, of note to UK posters, I'd never have guessed that Dan Hodges was her son!)

Yes, it is quite the random and bizarre detail, isn't it?

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Does this imply then that she was in fact not a transformative leader who's like we shall never (etc, etc, etc), then?

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Yes; people have been making that kind of (hilarious pseudo-Marxist on some level) claim/prediction/whatever for quite a few decades now. What should be noted is that pretty much none of the jobs created in technology (or whatever the buzzword of the time is) are to be found in the areas hit hardest by deindustrialisation.