Margaret Thatcher day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[psafloyd]

Never! the French can't have managed to increase the working week by that much

Yeah, JBM, I was rounding up by about 3 hours. But you take the point...

 

[psafloyd]

Of course tories shied away from poofterism (never happened in public schools did it? - to busy with paedophilia!

 

[psafloyd]

I hate this statement, 'we are all living longer'. I suppose in these times of improvement, with less infant mortality and less wars, better health and safety at work, the figure would suggest that. Of the people I started work with, I can think of only one who made it to the age of 65. I don't know many in their 90's.

Not everyone lives longer, alas, but our populations are simply not dying off as early. There are socio economic factors and other influences like industry, but put it this way. The people we used to think were old were only around 50, but not because we were younger, but they were older –-they'd often lived harder.
I know many people down my allotment in their 70s and 80s who you would be surprised to learn had given up full time work.
Living into your 90s is not the average, yet, but the incidence is much higher. So in the next decade, we will all know more people living to a later age.

 

[psafloyd]

Teaching has its rewards, but I can assure you all, they are not long holidays, or any comparison with a softie life fiddling about with a few beehives in the sunshine, and remuneration is just about a living wage!

It is well above the living wage, and the holidays are long, even allowing for work during the holidays.
It all depends on the teacher. The better/more committed teacher will do more preparation and use more of their holiday. No different for so-called 9 to 5-ers who work far longer hours because they have the same commitment.
Just because that commitment is not directed at children doesn't make it any less important, despite what teachers might like to think.
I might add I'm not down on teachers. Some of my best friends –-no, really -are teachers. But some people in the civil and defence services need to realise they really do have it better than the average UK worker. That's not rhetoric; it's fact.

 

[psafloyd]

I don't know, i sometimes enjoy listen to a pile of middle class tories talking B****** from atop their high horses.

No longer wearing pink and chasing foxes, mind...

 

[psafloyd]

Pargyle's posts in this thread pretty much sum up the facts of the situation.

Thacher was a remarkable women and people who harp on about how much ill she did this country seem to forget that no political leader since has tried to reverse her fundamental reforms.

People also seem to forget the 350,000 miner that lost their jobs prior to her ever getting into office.

Yes, she was remarkable. It is remarkable anyone can get away with so much without being impeached/indicted.

And her influence was purely malevolent, the ill effects of which we are still feeling.

And people also seem to forget (those who praise her) is that it's not just about the miners. There are plenty of reasons why her reign was a stain on our history.

 

[psafloyd]

You must find North Korea a very attractive model.

That is a ridiculous statement.

 

[domino]

That is a ridiculous statement.

It's a perfectly good analogy. This country was broke and the vast majority of this mythical industrial base was taxpayer funded.

 

[psafloyd]

It's a perfectly good analogy. This country was broke and the vast majority of this mythical industrial base was taxpayer funded.

Its a ridiculous analogy. North Korea bears no similarity to the UK of 30 years ago. You my not be able to see that from the depths of your bunker, Domino.

The taxpayer still funds industry that is supposed to be private now. Just look at the utilities and rail for a start. It is a myth that they are no longer taxpayer funded – it's just the exchequer never sees the profits.

 

[domino]

Its a ridiculous analogy. North Korea bears no similarity to the UK of 30 years ago. You my not be able to see that from the depths of your bunker, Domino.

The taxpayer still funds industry that is supposed to be private now. Just look at the utilities and rail for a start. It is a myth that they are no longer taxpayer funded – it's just the exchequer never sees the profits.

Yet no political party wants to renationalise industry outside the BNP and other loontoons.

 

[Swarm]

Yet no political party wants to renationalise industry outside the BNP and other loontoons.

There are probably loads who would love to do precisely that but are possibly put off from admitting it thanks to the BS propoganda spouted by others, most of whom are too bloody young to remember nationalisation and who definitely have no direct experience.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Why were the railways nationalised?
Because all the individual rail companies were bankrupt and on the point of collapse
Why were the coal mines nationalised?
Something had to be done to regulate unsafe mines and companies who had no thought for their employees.
steel the same.
Wasn't the perfect fix, but usually down to the people in charge who didn't want it to work.
Why were they de-nationalised?
so the tories and their cronies could get their mitts on them and then sell them to foreigners at great profit (they can't have been that bad or noone would have bought them.) and with them they sold our national utilities (a national resource which should never have been sold) and anything else they could drag down to the car boot sale
And remember - we haven't had a socialist government in this country since the seventies. Blair was not a champagne socialist - he was a tory who realised he'd never get into a position of power sometime soon after the mess thatcher had left - so he pretended to be labour.

 

[madasafish]

And remember - we haven't had a socialist government in this country since the seventies. Blair was not a champagne socialist - he was a tory who realised he'd never get into a position of power sometime soon after the mess thatcher had left - so he pretended to be labour.

Tony Blair won three elections in a row the first time any Labour Government was re-elected like that. He stood as a Labour politician and his policies were pretty clear after the first stint so what you are saying is that Labour voters would vote for a Tory if it wore a red rosette?


In other words Labour voters are dumb and would not recognise a Tory?

Pretty insulting to Labour supporters.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

A case of initially it was better than the first tories, and from then on it was mainly tories voting labour that kept him in.
I think the biggest insult for the british as a whole is naming a public holiday after the heartless harridan

 

[domino]

There are probably loads who would love to do precisely that but are possibly put off from admitting it thanks to the BS propoganda spouted by others,[..]

You mean they wouldn't get elected because no one would vote for them or their bonkers ideas.

 

[Swarm]

Not bonkers at all. I've direct experience of both, nationalised and privatised, the ones who have lost out are the consumer. Oh and the workforce, never mind the terms, the conditions are in the dark ages compared with when I started. It's backwards.
Trouble is, the people they are starting now think it's always been like this.

 

[pargyle]

What I find extraordinary about this thread is that nobody (apart from me) has made any suggestions as to what better course of action was available in terms of the mining industry (and others) to the Government at the time.

I suggested that a better way forward would have been a more gradual running down of the coal industry but the facts are that the coal industry in the UK was in terminal decline, a shrinking world market and cheaper coal from abroad put the nails in the coffin in the same way that the British lead mining industry had become defunct and the British Tin mining indudstry had also gone.

Arthur Scargill provided an ill founded but ideal opportunity for the Tory Government to carry out plans for mine closures that were originally written by the Labour Party. After a year long strike a large number of the pits were no longer safe to work, the uneconomic pits had become even more uneconomic and much of the country was sick of being dictated to by Union leaders who showed little concern for the greater good of the country. The Thatcher government took decisions that were inevitable in the longer term ... driven and aided by the communist idiot Scargill on his personal crusade. There are those who look on St Arthur as a working class hero .. but, actually, what did he achieve apart from speeding the demise of the coal industry by an ill thought out, untimely and (probably) unwinnable strike ?

You should also consider that, after a productivity deal was struck with the miners, giving them signficant opportunities to earn from improved production ... in some collieries coal production almost doubled, same miners, same equipment .. what does that tell you about the work ethic, previously, in some of the colliery workforce ?

Someone made a comment about whether my father would have swapped places with a miner ... that's largely irrelevant, he could have been a miner - his father was a miner - he chose to become a teacher ... miners were never forced to work down the mines. (Apart from those who were called up to work the pits during WWII ...whilst my father was crawling through the desert and subsequently half way up Italy as a mine disposal officer clearing paths through minefields and defusing Italian ****y traps - I doubt many would have changed places with him !).

I had many friends who were miners (and pit face workers) ... they did it for the MONEY. Coal face working was the highest paid manual job in the country ... it was not a vocation ! Not all colliery workers worked underground ... there were many surface jobs that, whilst not attracting the high wages of the coal face workers, were, nevertheless very good jobs and much sought after.

There are complaints in this thread that the Social Housing stock was 'sold off' by the Tories... well it may well have been - but who bought it ? Not the 'rich' and 'well off' ... Normal working families bought the homes they had lived in usually for more than 10 years, at discounted prices, and they counted themselves as fortunate to join the ranks of 'Home owners' rather than 'Council tenants'. Those who didn't wish to buy their homes didn't -again, nobody forced them to. I didn't see thousands of 'affordable housing' homes being built by the Labour Government during 13 years in office between 1997 and 2010 to replace the homes now in the private sector ?

As for Nationalised industries ... well, the vast majority of them were losing money hand over fist and had been for years ... requiring investment and modernisation and many of them facing competition from abroad (again ... strike ridden, inefficient and union led industries). The Government simply did not have the funds to give these industries the financial lifeline they needed and the only logical way forward was privatisation. Lose the billions it was costing annually to keep them afloat and give the headache of the future to private investors ...

The sale of the nationalised industries not only saved the country money by removing the huge losses they were making from the national purse... they actually started to CONTRIBUTE tax receipts to the economy. These are FACTS .... read this excerpt from the Centre for Policy Studies:

http://www.cps.org.uk/blog/q/date/2013/04/16/what-did-privatisation-do-for-us/

In particular "When the Conservatives came to power in 1979, the major nationalised companies were receiving large sums of taxpayers’ money. NERA’s report revealed that in the year to March 1980, the 33 companies it examined were contributing nothing to the exchequer: in fact they absorbed a total of £483 million between them, including £1.2 billion in loan finance. British Steel was one of the worst companies requiring £1.0 billion in the financial year 1980/81 on a turnover of just under £3 billion (thereby earning itself a place in the Guinness Book of Records).

This dismal state of affairs was shown to have been reversed. In 1987, the 33 companies examined by NERA contributed £8.4 billion to the exchequer. Net contributions then continued right up until 1995:"

Indeed, I would take the opportunity to remind people that the Labour Government contiinued the policy of de-nationalisation ... culminating in the privatisation of the Air Traffic Control System ...

And ... the model of de-nationalisation has been followed by just about every Western Nation - seeing the benefits of private enterprise in a changing world.

And ... more recently, lets not even get into the Banking Fiasco with a Labour Government, after grossly mismanaging the banking sector, bailing out Northern Rock followed in succession by a £37 billion bail out of RBS, Lloyds, TSB and HBOS ...

Kettles, saucepans, black ?

 

[psafloyd]

Yet no political party wants to renationalise industry outside the BNP and other loontoons.

And I'm not calling for renationalisation, either, unless there is a doomsday scenario for essential services. But their regulation is a joke, especially in the rail industry.

 

[psafloyd]

Pargyle,

I don't disagree with you about the mining industry, simply the means used to break the unions.

As far as I am concerned, it was both unconstitutional (in as far as anything can be in this country) and illegal.

That was the way of Thatcherism, and very few of her reforms made this country better, and have in fact bitten many of its citizens in the arse as they went for their pockets...

 

[mbc]

Pargyle,

I don't disagree with you about the mining industry,

I do.
Though broadly correct in that cheaper imports undermined(see what I did there) the viability of our own mining industry, they all came from countries where the mining industry was heavily subsidised by central governments, for the good of their own countries. Closing down our mining industry was a political decision, and much of it was to do with breaking the unions and to hell with the people and communities destroyed in this idealistic crusade, or the legalities of the pathway to achieving the objective.
I wouldnt dispute that Scargill was an egocentric nutter, but he was backed at the time by tens of thousands of decent ordinary people determined to do what they thought was best for the future of their families and communities. We shouldnt forget their sacrifice in all of this, if they hadnt held out for their principles for as long as possible, we would be further down the road towards a totalitarian state now.