OT- Margaret Thatcher Dead- RIP

Can I ask how old you are ?

It's a sensible enough question if you had never worked in Englan in the 70's: the British worker was a byword for bloody minded inefficiency. There was a widespread sense of pride in not doing a single thing you weren't contractually obliged to do, and a commitment to doing what you were obliged to do badly.

I'm sure there were exceptions, and that somebody took pride in a job well done - - I just never met him. That mindset is gone now, and English workers are the most hardworking and efficient on the continent. And yes that does mean that people who were purposely inefficient lumps 30 years ago are efficient workers now. Attitude is a huge factor

 

You are right, I am in my 40s and I didn't start work until the 80s. And it is true that the unions were bad news in the 70s. My dad actually became a shop steward in the late 70s because he was fed up of being on strike and wanted to do something about it. Strikes were being called in his place of work for all manor of trivial matters. However, the fault (and I can only rely on what he told me from his place of work) was not with the overall workforce, but with a select few who were fulfilling their own need to feel important by abusing the idea of a union. It was at the suggestion of the majority of his fellow workers that he stood on a ticket of less strike action. If it were down to lazy workers then how could those same workers be so different as soon as they changed jobs and began work at a japanese car plant? It didn't take 30 years for that change to happen. It was virtually overnight. British industry in the 70s was sick, but it was sick at the top and the bottom. It is overly simple to blame only the workforce, or unions, or for that matter management.

 

My understanding is, is that the government stopped artificially propping up businesses and they were therefore exposed to market forces. which meant only the fittest survived.. What she did also do is make it easier for companies to set up here and make it easier for companies to trade. It seems apparent to me that the country was just rotten, and good people like your father got sullied with the same brush... I dont think anyone with perhaps more right wing tendencies would assume every worker was the same.. As clearly they are not. But the vast majority were as fredd has intimated. our country was on the brink of collapse... I genuinely dont believe that through spite she did anything to intentionally ruin anything. To me it was simple economics that destroyed our industry and global consumerism leading to freedom of choice of goods and products produced in other places cheaper and debatably better.

 

I think the main factor isn't that the workers were lazy: they were actively encouraged by the union leadership to be uncooperative and unproductive. There was almost a sense that it was disloyal to use a bit of common sense and put in a bit of extra graft to sort out a problem - - that was being a traitor to the union and a pawn of the management.

As you say, that sat badly with a lot of the workers who, frankly, just wanted to get on with things. When allowed to do so, they did.

 

Oh, and I'm sure there was crap management too. I never had anythign to do with management at the time, though, so I can't really say.

 

this made me chuckle;

THE UK TAX SYSTEM EXPLAINED IN BEER

Suppose that once a week, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten
comes to £100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something
like this: -

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay £1.
The sixth would pay £3.
The seventh would pay £7.
The eighth would pay £12.
The ninth would pay £18.
And the tenth man (the richest) would pay £59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every week and seemed quite happy with the
arrangement until, one day, the owner caused them a little problem. “Since
you are all such good customers”, he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost
of your weekly beer by £20. Drinks for the ten men would now cost just
£80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the
first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free but what
about the other six men? The paying customers? How could they divide the
£20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share? They realized that
£20 divided by six is £3.33 but if they subtracted that from everybody’s
share then not only would the first four men still be drinking for free
but the fifth and sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his
beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fairer to reduce each man’s
bill by a higher percentage. They decided to follow the principle of the
tax system they had been using and he proceeded to work out the amounts he
suggested that each should now pay.

And so, the fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (a 100%
saving).
The sixth man now paid £2 instead of £3 (a 33% saving).
The seventh man now paid £5 instead of £7 (a 28% saving).
The eighth man now paid £9 instead of £12 (a 25% saving).
The ninth man now paid £14 instead of £18 (a 22% saving).
And the tenth man now paid £49 instead of £59 (a 16% saving).

Each of the last six was better off than before with the first four
continuing to drink for free.

But, once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings. “I only
got £1 out of the £20 saving,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the
tenth man, “but he got £10″

“Yes, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved £1 too. It’s
unfair that he got ten times more benefit than me”

“That’s true” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get £10 back when I
only got £2? The wealthy get all the breaks”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison, “we didn’t get
anything at all. This new tax system exploits the poor”. The nine men
surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next week the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat
down and had their beers without him. But when it came time to pay the
bill, they discovered something important –they didn’t have enough money
between all of them to pay for even half of the bill.

And that, boys and girls, journalists and government ministers, is how our
tax system works. The people who already pay the highest taxes will
naturally get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much,
attack them for being wealthy and they just might not show up anymore. In
fact, they might start drinking overseas, where the atmosphere is somewhat
friendlier."

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics

 

Except, of course, that under our tax system,the 5 - 8th men would pay the bulk of the cost. The 9th man would incorporate himself and be entitled to pay the same as the 4th man. The 10th man, being a non-dom receiving an income from an off shore trust, would drink for free while being able to write off the depreciation to his drinking trousers against his contribution to the crisps bill. As his contribution to the crisps bill was £0 (see non-dom status above) the depreciation to his drinking trousers entitled him to 20p a week net refund.

 

That only really applies to the super rich... As opposed to a normal top rate tax payer.

 

Man number 9 is the person who should be the normal high rate taxpayer, but he can afford an accountant to reduce his income to the lower-middle band (taking income as a mixture of wages and dividend, splitting the dividend income with his wife and leaving any funds which would have resulted in he or his wife exceeding the lower middle band in the company, where it is subject to 20% corporation tax only, after allowance for all appropriate deductions such as depreciation, home office expenses, etc).

Man 10 is, as you say, a seriously wealthy man and thus exempt from taxation.

The only people who actually pay top rate tax are men 7 and 8, who have good jobs but nowhere to hide.

 

Nice one!


This thread has sure been useful for ousting political leanings... Now we have to wait 40 years til Blair dies to do this all again...

 

Hope that it won't take that long.

Damn, that's me outed then.

 

We've heard talk here of price of goods. Well, I bet that German steel is still dearer than Chinese or American steel. But if I wanted to build something that's going to last I'd get the lads on the Ruhr to get the stuff in. And before Thatcher we would have got the steel in from Consett, Redcar and from a certain city in South Yorkshire.

There lies the problem that the British worker suffered from, you think of German production and you think of quality, you think of Chinese then you think cheap and nasty. Before WWI the German worker was considered to produce shoddy material, yet now they are considered amonst the best in the world. I think the perception of the British worker has changed aswell, alot of big foreign companies have plants back in Britain, encouraged by big encentives by governments but i can not remember any staff unrest or strikes lately. However France now seems to where we were at in the late 70s, recently a big US tyre company CEO caused uproar in France when he was offered an old Perelli tyre factory rent free and he declined saying he would be crazy to work with French people.
American heavy industry would also be dead if it were not for thier military. The early 80s was a difficult pill to swallow yet it was preferable to the pain of the late 70s, which is why Maggie was elected 3 times

 

A lot of the anger against Mrs Thatcher seems to revolve around how she killed the coal industry. This I find strange as Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister, did a lot more damage to the industry than Thatcher ever did. He closed 290 pits ( and miners went on strike against these closures ) yet Thatcher only closed 160.
Now tell me who caused the most job losses?

 

While I never agreed with Margaret Thatcher on a lot of points. I feel that so called party's , dancing on her grave are all wrong.
Some should take a step back and think about her family and show some respect. No matter how much you dislike a person at a time like this, show respect.

 

... I think that's a complete misreading of the situation. The b**** took our milk!!!

Perpetuated one of the biggest wealth divides in history...

Created what was in essence slave labour...

And she sold off natural reserves for a fraction of the price just to pay for the above...

Essentially created civil war through her intolerance and lack of respect for the working classes... She used the police as a private army in the war.

She was a complete megalomaniac, with self-interested politics and self absorbed character...

I'm fairly sure she was sucking-off Reagan...(My lawyer has advised me to say that I don't know for sure... pure guess and should not be taken for defamation)

She was in favour of sporting principles almost universally questioned by everyone at the time and since. Please tell me, all those martyring her, how would you like not being able to go to games because, even though you'd done nothing wrong, hadn't the required ID badge to attend?

She had a disastrous effect on many industries besides coal, my friend, and left many people in abject poverty. Unemployment rose to record figures because she destroyed manufacturing bases.

The Augusto Pinochet affair...

Any small villages completely cut off from public transport links, but with old dilapidated shelters hinting at a brighter age, near where you live?

Whatever people say about her "humble origins", they were evidently Javert-esque in inspiring contempt for the rats from which she escaped, rather than instilling any sort of sentiment or connection with the masses.

I don't agree with enforcing politeness or encouraging rhetoric to make her grieving family feel better. Two converging sides usefully displays the discord in the debate.

If anyone actually gets within 20 yards of her moldy corpse to dance on or near it, they deserve REP, considering the vast expense they're putting into the security and shoving her in a hole.

I think David Cameron is cementing himself into a similar narrative given he's enforcing a bedroom tax, has stunted all forms of industry, he's causing soaring unemployment and cutting benefits of those who are now forced to survive on it... £10 million pounds for a funeral in such austerity? Bargain!

But that's why people put them in. Labour see us through many years, then f*** up because they become too much like the conservatives, so people get pissed off and vote for blues hoping the change will do us good, then the conservatives say "look what these labour tossers have done... we'll have to raise taxes (except for the rich) and cut benefits and stunt trade", then everyone gets pissed off and votes labour again... Endless cycle of bulls***.

 

I didn't particularly care for her, and I don't think that she was actually all that competent when it came to implementing policies even when right about things, like staying out of the Euro. She seemed to have a bit of a spiteful/vindictive side too.

On the other hand I don't understand this negative cult of personality either. Much of what happened would have happened anyway. The UK's entry to the EEC (as it was then) and GATT (now WTO) have had far more profound effects on the rich/poor divide and the loss of manufacturing than anything that thatcher did per se - see every other OECD country - and the UK entered those long before her administration.

And as for strong unions protecting the living standards of the ordinary working person before thatcher that's just a pile of ****e. Yeah, certain workers had protected positions and were able to demand high wages and big pay increases in the 70s, but lets not forget there were many marginal workers (like in the mills) about whom the unions could not give a monkeys ****, and who were living in dire poverty. Maybe if the TUC actually did what it said on the tin instead of protecting little fiefdoms and serving as a vanguard for the USSR she wouldn't have won the election in the first place. But they didn't, so she got elected more or less on the basis that she'd put an end to a minority of workers holding the rest of society hostage. It's as reasonable as if someone now were to be elected on the basis that they'd actually sort the financial industry out.

And the really woefull things that she presided over, like ruining the education system were really more or less a continuation of Wilson's policies from the 60s.

Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly care for her. But I think her opponents give her too much credit and also delude themselves into thinking that she was some sort of unelected hitlerian tyrant. What's more, and I'm speaking in generalities here, I don't think that people who were quite happy to see an out and out war criminal re-elected ought to be taken all that seriously; at least as far as sober analysis of Thatcher's legacy is concerned.

Also I'm glad she snatched the milk, because I am lactose intolerant.

 

Everyone who shows the least bit of sympathy towards Thatcher and her poxy family on this thread, up yours you dreary deluded fools. Everyone who recognises her for the enemy she was, I salute you and accept you as my comrades.

Expletive deleted.

 

I'm not from Canada, but I couldn't agree more with this.

It's strange that so many people demonise her - she was elected in three times via General Election and was only removed because her own party stabbed her in the back... When you consider that MT was solely responsible for clawing back over £70billion from Europe, it seems odd that people would question her recieving a State burial.

It was all a bit before my time to be honest - I only turned 18 in 1990 so it was all over for her by then.

I remember John Major though...

RIP Maggie.

 

Ok... avoiding the temptation of repeating several points about how crippling to manufacture and industry she was etc etc... £10 million pounds when the government are taxing people to the heavens and cutting help for people out of work because of their enforced policies, is plainly ludicrous and unjustifiable. She was staying in the flipping poshest Hotel in london, her family and her are loaded. Let them pay for a nice funeral, not the economy that supposedly leaves Osbourne with coldsweats and a headache...

 

I remember the three day week and power cuts in the 70s bloody Ted Heath.
My husband's Uncle was a flying picket and introduced us to Arthur Scargill in Barnsley but then jumped at the chance to buy his council house which was something Maggie Thatcher brought in, very strange.