The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #55540   Message #864755
Posted By: JudeL
11-Jan-03 - 06:43 PM
Thread Name: BS: Maggie Thatcher Day
Subject: RE: BS: Maggie Thatcher Day
1) the main reason her party stayed in power so long was not that people agreed with her policies but that her rich friends (who were getting richer) controlling the media ensured that the public were scaremongered out of returning a Labour govt , the Labour party then appeared to disagree internally about how to present itself to combat it's negative press and made the major mistake of dividing it's efforts by arguing internally instead of presenting a united front.

2) Whole areas of the country suffered massive unemployment because key industries were killed off. By shutting the mines in Wales, the pumping also stopped and as the water rose in the disused mines rivers started being poisoned by this.

3) We are now suffering a severe skills shortage because higher education has once more become something that you can only afford if you are rich. We used to have a system where most craft based employers took on apprentices, paid them an apprentice wage did some inhouse training and sent them on day release to the local technical college, and at the end of 3 or 5 years would take most of them on as permanent staff. Universities taught accademic subjects which were tax funded, students could concentrate on their subjects (lower drop out rates) and graduates were then available to enter professions such as teaching. Also because graduates tended to earn more they would be on a higher rate of tax and so pay more tax. The whole country benefitted by the investment in the workforce. Instead we now have very high vacancy rates, such that schools are trying to get teachers from abroad to plug the skills gap.

4) It was under the egg-snatcher that CCT was introduced. It has been proved repeatedly that handing the functions of local govt out to private contractors tends to end up costing more for a worse service, but govts of all persuasions are still buying into the lie that profiteering companies can magically make money without reducing the quality of the service. And this despite acknowledging that the quality of a service depends almost entirely upon the quality of the staff providing that service. If you don't pay them properly and you don't invest in their training do you really expect to get (and keep) quality staff? The phrase you pay peanuts you get monkeys comes to mind.

5) She engineered a change in our culture (controlling what is taught in schools and influencing media are very effective propaganda tools) away from collective responsibility and community values to self centred individualism. Made a virtue out of only looking after yourself and championed the idea that if someone has a problem, lost their job or are ill they must deserve it and are a "scrounger" and a "layabout" . This change in our culture now makes a virtue out of taking advantage of others.

For these and many other reasons I believe she did my country great harm. No, I do not wish her dead, the dead have peace, instead I would wish that having lost all her money (in some enron type disaster) she ends her days being looked after in an underfunded externalised care home where the insufficient, inadequate, undertrained, staff are all temps who are on their first shift and treat her the same way they treat hundreds of other elderly people that she condemned to the "delights" of lowest bidder care.