Margaret Thatcher is dead

[Coito ergo sum]

Well I just gave you some, didn't I? Sheesh.

No, actually. You indicated that you thought that during her tenure unemployment went up, but you were not sure if it was higher or lower at the end.

Moreover, higher unemployment would not necessarily mean that "the poor" were worse off. It depends which jobs were lost (wealthy and middle class folks can become unemployed, too), and it depends whether they go back to work after collecting unemployment funds. Overall, the poor may have remained exactly where they were, or even improved their lot if the dole and other poverty benefits increased, or if there were fewer poor at the end than the beginning, etc.

[Audley Strange]

Well it depends on many great things, like what you mean by "better" for a start.

I mean "better" in whatever sense you mean it.

So, she made the UK worse then, in her 11 1/2 years -- things were worse in 90-91, than in 78-78, then? In your view?
[/quote]

In my view? Well yes many things were worse after her reign than prior to it. The economic state of most of the entire UK. what was squandered to focus on London. The prising of a larger distance between the working class and the middle class. The gutting of the National Health Service, education and ransacking of the infrastructure assets to sell off for a pittance (something opponents of Brown like to bitch about him selling off the war chest gold). The Disastrous bureaucracy of the regional councils, the poll tax. All the little regional experiments they'd test out randomly before implementing if it was a success and ignoring all those little failures that destroyed communities. The general unpleasant "fuck you" nature that took hold of the nation. The reliance on debt and dole. The retardation of our culture. Stop and Search laws, the criminal justice bill, You want me to go on?

However, my point wasn't that things were great under Major. My point is that if the awful things people are saying about Thatcher, which you echoed, are true, then she must have really stuck a fork in the already rather baked UK. Things sucked ass in 1979 in the UK, as Rum as pointed out too. So, if Thatcher was so horrible for the UK it stands to reason that things were worse when she left than when she got there. Were they? It seems to me that UK was doing better overall, by nearly every measure, after 11 1/2 years of Thatcher.

Economically I think we had a few good years between 85 and 88. Look. Let me put it this way, if we consider Britain was suffering from an ailment, say a cancer, we needed surgery and we elected a butcher who gleefully successfully cut it out, but took our knees as well.

How so? Can you expand on what leads you to believe that she reviled people and did not wish to serve the public?

Her rhetoric, her mannerisms, her use of the royal "We", her open contempt for the poor and the ill, the needy and her fawning almost servile attitude towards people like Pinochet and Murdoch and her positions on outrages like South Africa. Bitch wanted to be the New Victoria for a nation still reeling from losing its Empire.

[Svartalf]

The Good Lady is (as consequently am I) lucky enough to have been young enough not to recall with any clarity the mid 70's to Mid 80's and was a teenager until the mid 90's so has no real recollection of the political or social aspects to the revulsion towards Thatcher. Watching some thing about her last night she said to me that there was something odd about Thatch, that she didn't seem to be real, but almost like someone playing a character, a smug patronising and incredibly camp woman, but you could see through that by looking at her eyes which looked like the eyes of a creepy doll.

I think the truth is a bit more simple, she had no understanding at all that other people were actually real and was playing dolls house with an entire fucking country. She was only prime minister because she couldn't be an actual tyrant.

I wish she could die again, as an encore.

But, didn't the country wind up better in 1990 than it was in 1979? Or, was the UK even suckier in 1990 than in 1979? If that's true, you blokes must've been in a real sorry-ass state in 1990-91. Thankfully, everything was fixed under John Major. He likely set it all to rights.

Ask the mmillions who have been made career unemployed, possibly hereditary ones, due to her destroying all non tertiary sectors of the economy... the stock exchange and The City ended up better, not the country at large.

[Thinking Aloud]

Here's Wiki's summary of employment in the UK over the period...

1979 to 1997
A new period of neo-liberal economics began in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher who won the general election on 3 May that year to return the Conservative Party to government after five years of Labour rule.
During the 1980s most state-owned enterprises were privatised, taxes cut and markets deregulated. GDP fell 5.9%[52] at first but growth rose to 5% at its peak in 1988, one of the highest rates of any European nation.[53][54]
However, Thatcher's modernisation of the British economy was far from trouble free; her battle against inflation resulted in mass unemployment with the jobless count passing 3,000,000 by the start of 1982 compared to 1,500,000 three years previously. This was in part due to the closure of outdated factories and coalpits which were no longer economically viable; this process continued for most of the rest of the decade. Unemployment peaked at nearly 3,300,000 during 1984 before falling dramatically in the final three years of the decade, standing at just over 1,600,000 by the end of 1989.[55] However, the British economy slid into another recession during the second half of 1990, concurrent with a global recession, and caused the economy to shrink by a total of 8% from peak to trough and unemployment to increase from around 1,600,000 to nearly 3,000,000 by early 1993, when the recession ended, and the subsequent economic recovery was extremely strong. Unlike the early 1980s recession the recovery saw a rapid and substantial fall in unemployment, which was down to 1,700,000 by 1997.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of ... ed_Kingdom

To summarise:
1,500,000 in 1979 (pop ~56M) - GDP 231Bn;
3,000,000 in 1982;
1,600,000 in 1989 (pop ~57M) - GDP 557Bn;
~3,000,000 in 1993 (global recession);
1,700,000 by 1997.

[pErvinalia]

Well I just gave you some, didn't I? Sheesh.

No, actually. You indicated that you thought that during her tenure unemployment went up, but you were not sure if it was higher or lower at the end.

Moreover, higher unemployment would not necessarily mean that "the poor" were worse off. It depends which jobs were lost (wealthy and middle class folks can become unemployed, too), and it depends whether they go back to work after collecting unemployment funds. Overall, the poor may have remained exactly where they were, or even improved their lot if the dole and other poverty benefits increased, or if there were fewer poor at the end than the beginning, etc.

Yeah, and I have a pink unicorn.

Aside from that, it does raise a relevant point regarding you basing your measure on the beginning vs the end. Essentially your logic is that as long as everything is better at the end, anything in the middle is justified. I don't subscribe to that idea.

[Thinking Aloud]

And some interesting charts here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/data ... her-charts

[DaveDodo007]

I think things were better if you were rich, and worse if you were poor.

Do you have any hard numbers to support the notion that the poor in the UK were worse off in the early 90s than in the late 70s?

But, if the poor were worse off, are they still just as bad off, or have things gotten better, and if so, how did they get better for the poor from the early 90s to now? When did they start becoming better, and what actions were taken to make it better?

Considering Italy manage to overtake the UK in GDP for the first time despite having a chaotic political system means she wasn't good for the UK ecomony. She ripped the heart out of my city (Liverpool.) Which is still suffering from her legacy today. I personally had to move to London to find work and when I did buy a home there I lost it (15% interest rates, WTF.) She was just out to make her rich friends richer and to hell with everybody else.

[pErvinalia]

Wasn't your last post (rant) in support of her? (and hence my sarcastic "Great post!")...

[PsychoSerenity]

Well I just gave you some, didn't I? Sheesh.

No, actually. You indicated that you thought that during her tenure unemployment went up, but you were not sure if it was higher or lower at the end.

Moreover, higher unemployment would not necessarily mean that "the poor" were worse off. It depends which jobs were lost (wealthy and middle class folks can become unemployed, too), and it depends whether they go back to work after collecting unemployment funds. Overall, the poor may have remained exactly where they were, or even improved their lot if the dole and other poverty benefits increased, or if there were fewer poor at the end than the beginning, etc.

Yeah, and I have a pink unicorn.

Aside from that, it does raise a relevant point regarding you basing your measure on the beginning vs the end. Essentially your logic is that as long as everything is better at the end, anything in the middle is justified. I don't subscribe to that idea.

Not only that, but it's completely ignoring the massive influence of non-political forces. Science and technology tend to make everyone better off, and in Thatcher's time there was a huge surge of wealth from the North Sea Oil. What can be talked about without accounting for non-political forces is the balance of wealth throughout the country, and as a result of her policies and those she inspired, the country has become much more unbalanced.

Inequality.png (16.1 KiB) Viewed 417 times

[Mysturji]

Even in death, the bitch is still costing us a fortune.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... plans.html

The funeral is expected to cost more than £6million, with expenses being paid from Baroness Thatcher’s estate and the government.

Cunt.

[Rum]

I happened to be driving while the eulogy speeches were being reported on 5 Live (a rolling news/discussion station here)). Some of the speeches were excellent. David Miliband's was extreely well judged and Malcolm Riffkin (Foreign secretary under her and now in the Lords) was actually very funny.

[cronus]

I happened to be driving while the eulogy speeches were being reported on 5 Live (a rolling news/discussion station here)). Some of the speeches were excellent. David Miliband's was extreely well judged and Malcolm Riffkin (Foreign secretary under her and now in the Lords) was actually very funny.

There's so many people who feel like you Rum. Even I really, really miss her already.

[Rum]

I happened to be driving while the eulogy speeches were being reported on 5 Live (a rolling news/discussion station here)). Some of the speeches were excellent. David Miliband's was extreely well judged and Malcolm Riffkin (Foreign secretary under her and now in the Lords) was actually very funny.

There's so many people who feel like you Rum. Even I really, really miss her already.

I don't miss her. I couldn't stand the bitch. But the lazy, easy dismissal of one of the great bitches of political life here annoys me. Herd mentality at its worst.

[cronus]

I can't speak too ill of her. She's from these parts. Almost think'd like my wife thinks.

[Warren Dew]

What politician isn't divisive? Divisive just means that the other guys/gals disagree.

Many try not to be. The so called 'middle ground' is where politicians constantly say the 'battle will be won' here.

Winning the middle means ignoring the interests of the other wing. That's exactly what Thatcher actually did - she ignored the subsidized union wing and was good for the middle and for her own wing. It is, of course, what Labour did before her as well, favoring subsidized union industries at the cost of the rest of the country.

I think you're right about people who were not yet alive during Old Labour governments. Sometimes when people remember how "bad" things were at a given time, it's because they don't realize how much worse things were before that time.