Maggie Thatcher death discussion thread - Mod rules in first post

wonderfullife wrote: »

The bit i highlighted just illustrates how easy people find it to blame Thatcher and Thatcherism for things she isn't to blame for.

Ravenscraig steel works closed in 1992 for the loss of 770 jobs and indirectly caused the loss of thousands of jobs linked to the site.

First of all, Thatcher had left power in 1990.

Second of all, the steel industry has declined massively in all major western countries. There's some very good reasons for this:

In the 1950s, 450,000 people were employed in the UK in the Steel Industry. By 2003, that figure was 21,000 people. In 1953, of the 16 million tonnes of steel produced annually, that worked out at 35 tonnes per person employed. By 2003, due to new technologies, each person employed could produce 623 tonnes of steel.

Even by that fact alone, you now only needed 5% of the staff to produce the same productivity.

Then you had massive problems relating to over-capacity (way too much steel being produced relative to demand), you had problems with the value of sterling relative to the Euro being bad for export, then most of all you had the problem every industry faces in the West - the availability of cheaper labour, materials and so forth in China, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Where Thatcher DID fail, is in a lack of support given to nationalised industries when they went private.

But to blame her for the barren waste-lands around Motherwell is a nonsense.The days of steel and coal were numbered from the 1970s onwards. It was a matter of time before this happened and make no mistake, would have happened on anybodys watch - not just Thatcher.

If Neil Kinnock was elected somehow in 1987, Ravenscraig would still have gone to the wall. Nobody could reverse the reality of the situation.

The same happened in Chicago, Pittsburgh and all over the US. And, very like those cities, the problem Motherwell truly faced was spending decades neglecting the formation of other industries. It was all reliant on steel and coal when in truth they could see this coming for decades and little was done by anyone, Thatcher, Callaghan, Major, Blair, to step up and say "wait a minute, we need some other industries here".

Margaret Thatcher is an easy, catch-all target for the miners, ex-miners and surrounding communities. Actually she is an easy target for anybody who suffered bad times in the 1980s and 1990s.

Hank Schrader wrote: »

Thatcher is perhaps most associated with the death of Britain's mining industry. There is no doubt that the figures show the number of miners collapsed under Thatcher and afterwards: in 1980, the UK had 230,000 coal miners. By 1990, only 57,000 remained. By 2004, the figure was below 6,000.

But what may be missed is that even more mining jobs were lost before Thatcher ever came into power. Over the course of the 1960s and 70s, more than 300,000 coal mining jobs disappeared, while around a million vanished between 1920 and 1980.

Thatcher was the coal industry's most visible foe, but not the one who lost it the most jobs. The root of residual anger at Thatcher lies, perhaps, in that Thatcher was the first post-war prime minister to cut such jobs without finding or creating replacement roles

That isn't to say that manufacturing and mining communities didn't feel devastating change – from which some have not recovered to this day. By the World Bank's measures, industry (including manufacturing) fell from contributing 40% of the UK's GDP in 1979 to just 34% in 1990 – and has since fallen more dramatically still to just under 22%.

Such trends weren't confined to the UK, however: industry in the United States fell from 33% to 27% during the Thatcher era, and to about 20% today. Even Germany went in a similar direction – though to a lesser extent – from 42% in 1979 to 28% now.

Spook_ie wrote: »

Not likely to end until such time she is cremated on Wednesday. Even then it might not end then because people want to vilify the women instead of taking an overall view of the 11 years she was PM and will probably mount some kind of undignified protest, I'm not against protest but fux sake it is still a funeral

true wrote: »

what is (.......) the eighties.

true wrote: »

what is wrong with you? In most civilised countries there is respect for the dead. You would never think she was the first female UK p.m. ever, or the longestest serving p.m. of the 20th century. Those who "dance on her grave" show more about themselves than anyone else. Get over it. Be thankful she transformed and improved the UK economy immesureably between 1979 and 1990 ( all economists are agreed on that, given the awful state the UK was in in '79, with the IMF in etc ). The spin off was that she produced jobs for hundreds of thousands of irish people in the eighties.

bodice ripper wrote: »

Last time I saw anyone picket a funeral it was the Westborough Baptist Church. Good company.