Nice post MRS. I think there is a lot of people wearing rose tinted glasses when looking back at our engineering/manufacturing base. It may be true that more could have been done to preserve certain parts but it was sign off the times and a failure of both manufacturing bosses and the unions to modernize and become more competitive. In a global open market it was unsustainable to keep putting money in poor performing sectors especially when your out classes in both quality and price.

Interesting that some people are suggestion that we are in effect subsidizing big business buy paying benefits to paid workers and that companies should be made to pay their full "living" wages; weren't we basically doing the same by subsidizing companies which should be been able to turn a profit by themselves?

In 1979 British Telecom had over 200000 employees and it took 3 months to get a phone line installed. BT currently employs 33000 people, and I suspect it wouldn't take more than a week to receive a new line. As for the poor miners, in 1979 the South Yorkshire miners were far and away the best paid manual workers in the land....

There's no doubting one fact - Margaret Thatcher was a true Marmite figure of the 20th Century.

I'm probably going to surprise you by agreeing. It's not right in one direction or the other... however, it's fair bet that the people who started those industries were not the people who owned them after the nationalise/privatisation cycle was over.

I suppose the rationale for nationalisation is the same as for tax: it's perceived as a public good that should be in 'public' ownership. And, of course, the government has all the guns...

I just hope she's joined by Tony some time soon.

In a democracy the vote of an idiot counts the same as that of a sane man. Not sure who's quote it was but it seems apt

Quite right. But what I was getting at is that the majority of people at the time (idiots, perhaps) held her in high enough regard to allow her to run the country.

A good number of those voters (I've no idea whether it would be a the majority or not) will still be alive today and yet it seems that the majority of people now ill think poorly of her.

Have those voters now changed their opinion of her? Or are they no longer idiots?

The newsreader on the BBC lunchtime news is wearing black, the men are wearing black ties and all are looking glum.

Can I assume that, in the interest of balance, the bright clothes and smiles will come out in the evening programme?

In a two party system, unless there is a convincing opposition people will tend to opt for a "better the devil you know" choice. The Conservative message at the time was a seductive one for a lot of voters who believed in the Thatcherite creed, had lost all faith in the régime that preceded it and didn't believe that the opposition was credible enough to change their minds. The Falklands War undoubtedly won the Conservatives the 1983 election, with Thatcher's Churchillian impressions a big factor. Another thing that the Tories were first to adopt was the widespread and effective use of media and advertising through Saatchi & Saatchi. The unprecedentedly slick and media-savvy campaigns they produced left Labour reeling and looking out of touch and old-fashioned. A lesson well learned by New Labour...

As someone who voted for her, I don't see how that's apt at all.

Three reasons Maggie got into power:

Callaghan
Foot
Kinnock

As it happens in descending order of suitability as PM. Not that Kinnock minds, he's had his snout in the Brussels trough for years now.

Well, if the cap fits!

Foot was a good man and would, I believe, have been a good PM, but he was one of the first victims of the electorates preference for personalities, rather than politicians.

And so was born "sound bite" politics...

Little catch phrases that steer the masses. The Thatcher government may have been first but the Blaire machine took it to the next level. To this day policy is little scrutinized, so long as it can be captured in a buzz phrase we lap it up.

Every policy nowadays is being implemented for the "Hard working People of the Nation" and everything will be done to target the "Work Shy" However if you need to sell the same policy to other groups it will be "Protecting the most venerable in society" and will target the "Fat Cats"
All meaningless twaddle but we all fall for it.

Sadly it will get worse. I'm amazed at the ignorance of "young adults" who have no knowledge or interest in anything which isn't a Facebook status.

Politicians have to rely on soundbites, youngster's attention spans don't run to anything in depth. As for Salmond giving 16 year olds the vote in the referendum

As I read somewhere, if he really wants independence, give the English the vote...

As I said, it was a lesson learned by Labour and implemented with obsessive fervour by the New Labour spin doctors. Another example of Blair learning from his mentor!

Michael Foot was an amazing man and Andrew's comment is spot-on. He was eminently easy to parody and his intellect and passion were vandalised by cheap jokes about his appearance.
Callaghan shared the thankless task of John Major and Gordon Brown of taking over the office of Prime Minister without the (unnecessary but expedient) virtue of winning a general election.
Kinnock was another - perhaps the biggest - victim of the Conservatives' skill with the media. It was coincidental but probably inevitable that Spitting Image would exploit this beautifully too. From what I know of him (not much, but not nothing!), Neil Kinnock is actually a pretty decent bloke.

That'd be the flat cap so beloved of the working man? Which has gone out of fashion as the Polish don't like them...

Not sure what your point is here, RK? Are you saying that Polish people are the new working class of the UK?

Sort of ironic how the anti-Thatcher protesters are celebrating by drinking champagne....

But a nationalised service meant that you got a line if you wanted a line and at a fixed price too. Even if you lived in the sticks and were not on the network you could get connected.

Today you can't have high speed broadband if it is not seen as being economically viable to bring it to you. Most of us don't have the option of cable services as they too won't supply if they don't feel its economically viable to deliver it to you, your town or village.

We ALL have electricity because the national grid built and paid for the infrastructure to link the UK power network and bring electricity to our homes.

We all have fresh water because the National water board built and paid for the infrastructure. The village where I live didn't get piped water until the 1950's. No private company had, or would, have ever considered such huge investment.

We have gas because the National Gas board paid for and built the infrastructure.

We the tax payer paid for our nations utility infrastructure, not private business. When the utilities were sold they were not sold at anywhere near what they were worth. They were sold to the Nation, so we could all invest and own a little part of them. Yet today almost all of them have been taken over by foreign investment firms and you can't even buy UK shares in them.

Today we pay most of our utility bills to venture capitalists and overseas investment corporations. These people don't take our money and re-invest in the infrastructure. They make huge proffits but if the infrastructure needs significant repair we are told it will be reflected in higher bills for us.

Gone are the standard unit prices. We now pay what the market will bear! And don't even get me started on the toothless utility watchdogs.

Should have had a smiley. I was referring to the fact that they are a significant part of our workforce.

Just to clear one thing, I am working class. My current salary and lifestyle may make me middle class (I don't know the criteria, no doubt Wikipedia could tell me), but as the son of a (staunch Labour) dockyardie's daughter, and an agricultural worker's son, I am well aware of my roots. My dad "improved" his prospects by joining the army. As I did the same I basically trod water in the working class pool.

I was exposed to right and left wing political opinion. For the first time ever at the last election my mum did not vote Labour. My dad stopped voting Tory when he died. I guess my dad had the biggest influence on me, but I can still recite the anti-Royal, anti-Tory, (and especially anti-Churchill) rhetoric of my "pinko" grandad. He died before Thatcher came to power, but I doubt he would have been a fan.

To be fair I wasn't particularly. I along with most on here, disagreed with the utilities sell off. However I agreed with breaking the unions. I can remember uncollected rubbish on the streets, the three day week, bodies stacking up in mortuaries and power cuts. Closed shops, wildcat strikes, striking in sympathy and restrictive practices? I don't miss any of them. The days of Unions representing the downtrodden serf were long gone before the 70s.

Why on god's green Earth would he want independence? He's a nationalist; all of his power comes from being able to bang on about how Scotland should be independent. If it actually is then he's out of a job

A few other comments about various things in this thread (I wish I'd had time to partake in it more)...

On Thatchier (even more Thatchy than Thatcher) - the first thing I think of when I think of her is her famous, "The lady's not for turning" speech. You can't argue that she could certainly give a speech.

Something that's bothered me for a long time though, is how it became good to 'principled' as politician and weak to U-turn. I want my politicians to listen to the electorate and, more importantly, change their policies if they're not working. When did that become unacceptable for politicians?

Nationalisation vs privatisation - I think most of us would accept that all of one or all of the other is bad. Private industry always has to have its eye on the bottom line, but, by the same token nationalised industry often lacks the motivation to succeed (look at British Leyland - years of churning out dreadful cars, different dreadful cars that were the direct competitors of the previous dreadful cars, stupid working practices, such as carting unpainted bodyshells 300 yards down the road, on a transporter, to be painted).

For me Mrs T went too far down the privatisation route, there was a lot of life that wasn't cost-effective, but was still valuable. Unfortunately her blindness to the difference between those terms seems to have been passed on to her ideological successors.

I can agree with some of this. There were elements of trades unionism that were out of hand, bad and needed to be dealt with. The trouble is far too many of the others, the progressives, got swept up in the union bashing and the balance went too far the other way.

I have a very similar background to yourself, but have served as a Trades union rep. I got into the movement in order to oust someone who was not acting in the best inerests of members. I was part of a progressive engineering team who saw partnership with management as being a far better way of getting things done. And this worked really well. Unfortunately a few years ago we were merged to form Unite. The local T&G team was far larger than us, far more militant and undermined all we tried to do. Not being prepared to fight the leadership, and having no other option I resigned as a shop steward and am no longer a union member.

I am regularly asked by management and colleagues to re-consider...

What water company provides your water? I suspect that a private company can and did make that investment judging by your location (as they did up and down the country).

I wonder what the UK would have been like without her. Like any humnan she got some things right and some things wrong.

I imagine without a strong/determined government there would have been a continued slow decline, more strikes, more subsidies of the nationalised industries and maybe in the longer term higher taxes, inflation and further bailouts from the IMF.

Maybe nationalised industries did create jobs, but that was an illusion that wouldn't have been sustainable in the long term.

On balance we could have had much worse.

Well there's some evidence that a right-wing coup was being planned in Britain in the 70s, to sort out problems such as industrial relations, so maybe by getting a strong right-wing prime minister we avoided a military government.

We'll never know.

And we all have railway lines because....oh sh!t, the government (Labour as I remember) ripped them up
(ETA - I suspect it was private money that laid them up here too - and there were loads)

And, actually, we don't all have piped water, I certainly don't have gas (though I suspect it comes from closer to me than you ) and certainly many of us have more precarious electricity supplies than others. Oh, and then there's the roads, and the mail (I pay twice as much for a parcel in twice the time) - shall I go on?

We're all equal - just some of us are more equal than others....

May the Iron Lady rust in peace !

Thirty years ago my father was shop steward for a bunch of lorry drivers. The union evicted him for being insufficiently aggressive/obnoxious... the drivers resigned en mass from the union until he was reinstated.

Ernest Marples (CON) appointed Beeching. Report was puplished in 63 and implemented by the Government (CON). Labour were elected with a pledge to halt the closures but didn't. By 67 they introduced legislation to protect line but by then many had already gone!



In 79 we had Maggie and then privatisation. The last 30 years have seen far less infrastructure investment than the 30 years previous!



Cool, I like that But to be fair you have chosen to live in Scotland... Maggie did more to destroy the Scotts than many of the tirants who preceeded her!

You do have to laugh at Amazon's top MP3 single download....

Mrs Thatcher. The only person known to have screwed more minors than Savile...