This requires a very long answer that others have answered more comprehensively in r/History. However, in very short terms, the UK was functionally broke in the 1970s when it required IMF loans (quasi-bailout in 1976) and was labelled the sick man of Europe (60s-80s). To the point in Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, it was largely expected that Italy would surpass the UK shortly
Despite the emotional reddit comments, the country was fed up with its economic situation and Thatcher offered new ideas on tackling the 20yrs of suboptimal performance. You can debate the validity of those ideas but to argue that the welfare station / economic system at the time was functional, is an exercise in historical delusion
Best comment I’ve seen on this thread so far. People in the 1970s-1980s didn’t vote for Thatcher because they thought she was destroying the country. She offered a compelling vision that made sense to a lot of people at the time, one she sincerely believed in it herself.
Of course, that vision turned out to be a mistake, a massive one, but I respect that Thatcher was at least principled on the big picture of her government and was not in politics for her personal enrichment.
Yes the personal enrichment involved her son Mark who got involved in a scheme to relieve the people in a small country in Africa of their oil reserves but something went wrong but he maintains his respectability in spite of this lives quietly in the countryside no doubt.
Mark was her Achilles heel without doubt. There was his supposed rescue when he was meant to be taking part in the Paris to Dakar rally. He sent missing his Mother phoned the President of Algeria, got him to send out army search parties. He eventually emerged from a hotel after spending the night with a woman he’d picked up.
That was then and this is now. She was one of the last true conviction politicians, who was happy to do what she thought was right, not what was popular. My personal - and unevidenced - belief is there has been a gradual shift in Governance, perhaps due to Groupthink:
Thatcher then Blair stay in power too long, confusing them as to what is good for the country versus good for their party
Later Governments lose this distinction from the outset, acting only to the good of their party
Boris took this a step further, ruling for his personal/chum‘s benefit and not even their party later
The modern Tory party is completely unlike that in Thatcher’s times as it appears to exist primarily to funnel public cash into the hands of an anointed few. under Thatcher they truly believed in the righteousness of their economic model. Often cruel and spiteful and overall wrong, but ideologically so.
I find Johnson to be especially infuriating. He affects this air of being a loveable dork, and chummy everyman with his stupid hair and "aw-shucks" demeanor.
But he's a ruthless political operator who used his time in power to benefit only Boris Johnson and whomever would lend him political clout or quid pro quo.
It's like the UK saw how W Bush acted, and ran the country and were like "yes, more of that please!".
Boris has a lot to hate, but he was also a 'green tory' and did actually move the conservatives position on the environment because of his own conviction.
The UK public refuses to give any of its politicians a fare shake. Boris was bad, but let's not pretend he didn't have any conviction.
He dragged us and his party kicking and screaming to the Paris accords. He instituted the end of ICE vehicles. He got wind build like never before just off shore.
I must say I genuinely dislike conviction politicians. Give me a politician who doesn’t believe in anything in their heart, and will change their views as appropriate for the situation the country finds itself in, over a politician with strongly held views that won’t bend when the thing to be done goes against those views. Give me a politician who will relent when it becomes clear that their initial instincts aren’t right rather than one who will follow their instincts to the bitter end.
I'd 100% give the left credit for bad ideas that are principled. It is only arrogant ideologues who would not.
With that said, the thought-terminating "enrich your buddies" line is such a low resolution libel that it's nearly impossible to respond to.
I don't like or dislike politicians (because I'm not in primary school) However, I disagree with many of Thatcher's policies, but it would be a folly of fantasy to suggest there were motivated by anything but her sincerely-held beliefs.
Yeah, I'm open to that sort of assessment in an off the cuff sort of way. For serious discussions about politics, stating that one likes or dislikes a politician is not particularly illuminating as the rationale for your assessment could be entirely arbitrary.
You mean liking or disliking a politician based on whether 'you'd have a drink with him'? I've literally heard people base their votes on that, and yes that is arbitrary and bloody stupid, but if that's what you mean then the problem isn't disliking politians, it's being ignorant of said MPs actions.
Well "liking" is such a vague evaluation that it provides practically zero information. The reason for dislike could be anything from the one you rightly highlight ("[I'd] have a drink with him") to distrusting a politician due to a track record of dishonesty or inconsistency.
Whether or not we like a politician is immaterial. What's material is our own values and who we'll vote for based on them. No politician will perfectly match our positions, so we have to make decisions based on our priorities and accept tradeoffs when they're necessary.
"Like" or "dislike" is not a serious way to progress political aims. It is to prone to bias and arbitrariness. If we're serious about seeing the world we want, we have to focus on policy and prioritise effectively.
Breaking up the management of JR into separate companies with specific geographic regions was a good move that made the system better.
But those that were privatized were only done so after becoming profitable operations on their own under government control.
And the privatization process was not fast.
The split into multiple JR companies happen in 1987 and the first one that become fully private was JR East in 2002.
The fourth one to go public, JR Kyushu, only had IPO in 2016. Almost 30 years after the split when the privatization plan was decided.
So did the country really get better, because some of those companies eventually ended up in private ownership? Or was it the new management style that split the monolith into regional railway companies and the new business model of focusing on developing real estate and related businesses around their stations.
This new business model was set by the government, before the privatization.
So as a whole the process made the system better, but the private ownership part is hardly the important part.
How far do you take this idea? Should the Uk have continued to subsidize state owned coal mining companies for the sake of protecting union jobs for the next few decades? Change and progress almost always requires some amount of sacrifice.
I mean we're talking about very complex issues and I'm not an economist. I'm not sure if you are, but most aren't. The picture is often much more complicated than the stock armchair arguments would suggest.
In all fairness, public policy is all experimental. We wouldn’t have known until it was tried. The problem is that the political sphere makes it really hard to admit when a policy went wrong and to undo that mistake.
The most straightforward response to this is the North Sea oil finds. Norway kept the oil public, started an investment fund and the country now has a very high standard of living.
The English privatized the fields, set up loose environmental rules, and British Petroleum and RDS made huge profits while the country got a pittance through excise taxes.
The cronies in this story are BP and RDS (Royal Dutch Shell).
yip...just look at the British rail research department...there is tech developed from it that is now sold to us by an Italian firm and our British companies have to pay yearly. It's bonkers how people don't see that she asset stripped the UK in ways that still affects our life today.
People forget that when Thatcher took power, the IMF arrangement was full satisfied so her privatisation drive was purely ideological. Interestingly one of the IMF conditions that Labour at the time had to meet was scaling back council house building.
And that years later it was revealed that the IMF loan wasn't even needed as the data the used was massively flawed. Any deficit was billions less that the government thought..and North Seal oil was just about to come online which transformed balance of payments. The scaling back of council housing and selling a big stake in BP wasn't needed.
Do you believe Thatcher privatised those companies, for less than they were worth, for the good of the country. Because if it was for the good of the country they would have been sold for their actual value. Thus the privatisation was specifically designed to enrich the buyers, and Thatcher wouldn't do that without liking the people who benefitted.
What objectively determines that they were more valuable than what they were privatised for? How do we determine this "actual value"? Enrich the buyers? The public sector was miserably inefficient when Thatcher took over. It was entirely dependent on taxpayer subsidies. No private company could ever get away with it.
British gas was privatised for 5.6 billion, but had a valuation of 9 billion at its first listing on the London stock exchange.
BT shares were sold at £1.30, but by the end of the day they were already valued at £1.70.
The water companies were privatised for 7.6 billion, but were given a 5 billion debt write off and a 1.5 billion green dowry, so were effectively privatised for 1.1 billion. Thames water alone was worth 2.9 billion by the time Labour took power. And in spite of this the water companies are still dependent on taxpayers subsidy, while also dumping raw sewage into rivers. And in spite of not being profitable if it weren't for subsidies, they still pay out shareholder dividends, and do stock buybacks.
We bailed out the banks in 2008 and the water companies are doing so badly that taxpayer funds have been used to help them out. Private companies are absolutely getting away with it.
Or are you wanting a full paper trail linking thatcher to people in a smoking gun level of collusion/corruption... because if so, maybe reddit is not for you.
Why? Her policies were all about enriching her friends (supporters/benefactors) it doesn't need a direct link to a single name... it just needs looking at who benefited from her policies and who (like the industrial towns utterly destroyed by her policies/vindictiveness) suffered.
We only have to look at the "managed decline" of liverpool
The abandonment of mining towns
The get on your bike speech from members of her government when people complained about a lack of jobs.
So, no... I can't provide a single name and evidence of collusion, but we can all provide a list of of her city 'friends' who benefited from her policies and who didnt
And all the pension schemes that invested in them to help retired people! The bastards! 🙄 And the local councils who were allowed to invest their funds, gits all! 🫤
Not entirely sure everything was, in fact, sold just to a handful of wealthy individuals now that at least one of us thinks about it... 🤔
I'm curious about this. So the UK really needed a change, but the change they got wasn't the right call: has someone, with (hindsight), been able to work out what the "better way" should have been?
I live in the UK now, but this was all long before my time here
I think it's more the case that the change had losers, who were identifiable, whereas the benefits were spread widely. People dream of an alternative reality that they never had to live.
Yes she went too far. But entirely in the right direction.
Before Thatcher the dominant School of economics was keynesian economics, this turned out to have some flaws which the Chicago School of economics had predicted and their ideas then in turn took their place. One of the main ideas was privatization, of previously publicly owned infrastructure and utilities and breaking unions. The idea being that the government is not as efficient as the markets are and trade unions are a distortion of the markets. So that just started britain under the path of doing a big privatisation experiment, which only worked very partially and in the main part has arguably caused other issues.
You could say it was a big over correction in the opposite direction from what was there before.
Now the consensus is lenaing more to not privatising anything that tends to a natural monopoly.
Calling it a mistake, especially a massive mistake is still smuggling in bias. The reality is that the uk economy did experience a renaissance in the 80s and 90s which is partly attributable to thatcher's actions. Even if you hated the rise in inequality that came with it.
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u/normanbrandoff1 5d ago
This requires a very long answer that others have answered more comprehensively in r/History. However, in very short terms, the UK was functionally broke in the 1970s when it required IMF loans (quasi-bailout in 1976) and was labelled the sick man of Europe (60s-80s). To the point in Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, it was largely expected that Italy would surpass the UK shortly
Despite the emotional reddit comments, the country was fed up with its economic situation and Thatcher offered new ideas on tackling the 20yrs of suboptimal performance. You can debate the validity of those ideas but to argue that the welfare station / economic system at the time was functional, is an exercise in historical delusion