Subject: RE: BS: Nasty Thatcher rightly calls Palin nuts?
From:
Stu
Date: 11 Jun 11 - 07:02 AM
"But I hate blinkered liars who try to transfer the responsibility for fuckups to the opposition."
Nice. More name calling. The responsibility for the decline of British manufacturing certainly does lay partly with the unions I would agree, but Thatcher made a concerted effort to change Britain's reliance on manufacturing (a massive strength with a huge knowledge base and skill set) to an economy based on service industries and technology. Whilst we still lead in technology (for the time being - watch China) there has been the realisation since (and even John Major had the wit to recognise this) that the way to a more stable economy was to actually produce goods. Unfortunately, by the time Thatcher had finished turning us all from citizens to consumers, she had essential decimated a manufacturing base that had existed uninterrupted since the industrial revolution. Perfectly viable small family companies went to the wall due to her creating a US style sort of cut-and-thrust economic environment that encouraged the type of competition we still see today.
Of course, her failure economically was this total commitment to the free market. Their failure to regulate themselves (a pipe dream is ever there was one) led directly to the banking crash we are all still paying for (a global catastrophe to be sure, but the UK's own demise was overseen by pseudo-Thatcherite wonks Blair and Brown - but largely supported by the Tories except for the last 18 months before the election). The service industries she so loved are all heading en masse to the far east where the masses are cheaper to exploit and have few or no rights to get in the way of making shareholders a profit.
In the meantime, Britain has become a country of desolate, wind-blown out-of-town retail parks with their vast, empty car parking fields surrounded by gaudy, ugly corrugated metal sheds peddling their wares to the shuffling soporific masses blundering through them. Industrial and 'enterprise' estates built on green-belt land, inevitably half-finished with the human equivalent of factory farms squatting in a sadly threatening low-rise two-teired way, all receptions and meeting rooms and open-plan divided-into-booths offices where the employees of US hedge-fund owned companies blearily slave to try to keep their jobs from joining the exodus into the rising sun.
This is the result of the Thatcher years for ordinary people. In recent re-appraisals of the miners strike there can be little doubt that Thatcher's and McGregor's heavy-handed and brutal tactics to towards people who understood that their very communities and culture was under threat now looks (as it did to many at the time) unfair, vindictive and immoral. The police have never been the same since; Orgreave set in motion the sort of copper mentality that has repercussions this very day with thuggish yobs in uniform kettling peaceful protestors and assaulting and even killing them seemingly without recourse, or at least years of battle against the reticent, self-protecting authorities.
Nationalisation, the destruction of long-established communities, industries and cultures and trust between the people and the police, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the loss of our economic powerhouse, greed is good, no such thing as society, pander to dictators that are on our side and fuck the people they oppress, look after number one etc etc
These are Thatcher's legacies and now our fractured, sick society is paying the price.
And Don, don't ever call me a liar again please. If we differ in our opinions that's one thing and you can call me (if you must use names) a fat twat, smug bastard, pompous git or anything else that floats your boat, but calling someone a liar is bang out of order when they're not and I take deep offence to it.
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sj
