UK before Tatcher was a depressed society with stagflation, rising crimes, crumbling infrastructure; that couldn't even clean its own streets. It was a society completely hamstrung by old unions that would happily collapse the economy in face of global competition, as long as their jobs gave the same pay - nominally.
Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason.
Honestly, I'm not an economist, even worse I was not a fully functioning and critical thinking adult before the Thatcher era, you could well be right but I find it really hard to believe.
For example the UK has also had subsequent Conservative victories for the last 12 years or so but every single argument made in 2010 about their approach has been proven true. To the detriment of every person in the UK.
So it doesn't necessarily follow in my eyes that an election win means that what you're doing is the right thing, only that you are popular and you can convince people you will do something to help them.
I can't argue with you on the recent Conservative track record, they're a pale shadow of the party they once were. The only thing that's saved them is that Labour under Corbyn was plainly, obviously such an utter catastrophe in the making the Cons couldn't help looking good.
There certainly was an aspect of that back in the 80s. In the early years Labour was lead by Michael Foot, basically a likeable version of Corbyn but just as unelectable. But then, the Labour Party back then was properly Marxist and had actually pushed forward a programme of nationalisation and unionisation that worked out about as well as you'd expect.
The most egregious example of waste was the coal industry, hence the strikes. The tax payer was subsidizing coal to the tune of £1.3 billion a year which was real money back then, just under 1% of total national GDP, not including the increased costs to power and steel industries that were prevented from using cheaper alternatives. When the mining union leader Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.” That's what we were dealing with. That's just coal, but swathes of industry had been nationalised and was a horrible rotting carcass of waste and losses dragging the country down. Reforming that lot was incredibly painful but it had to be done.
Maggie is generally portrayed as being incredibly unpopular, and the way she was lampooned by a generation of up coming British comics was cruel though frankly hilarious, but she won resounding election victory after victory. The economy she built transformed the country into the modern nation it is today. Notably when Blair and Brown brought in a Labour government in 1997 they changed essentially nothing substantive because her reforms palpably worked. All the proposed changes reverting Britain towards a statist socialist economic agenda were quietly shelved and never talked about agin until Corbyn came along.
Since then Conservatism on both sides of the pond has suffered an appalling moral and intellectual collapse. The conservative and republican parties are mocking parodies of their former selves. Back in the 80s there were serious, major economic and social problems that desperately needed fixing and economic liberalism had the answers. Nowadays that's just not even vaguely controversial, instead the focus of the right has shifted towards damaging reactionary dog whistle issues like culture wars and blind nationalism. That tendency has always been there, but now it's all they have.
Thatcher is what I like to call a "Marmite politician": either you absolutely loved her, or absolutely hated her. She was a politician of her time, by which I mean she was exactly the politician we needed at the time that we needed it. I doubt that any other politician could have achieved what she did in the UK. Everybody else would be too willing to compromise.
As someone who was born at the start of the 70's, I think you really had to live through the 70's and early 80's to realise how bleak it was. And I say this as someone who grew up on mostly free school meals, had their phone cut off for non-payment etc.
>"The conservative and republican parties are mocking parodies of their former selves. Back in the 80s there were serious, major economic and social problems that desperately needed fixing and economic liberalism had the answers. Nowadays that's just not even vaguely controversial, instead the focus of the right has shifted towards damaging reactionary dog whistle issues like culture wars and blind nationalism. "
The conservatives of the 80's had a problem to solve, stagflation, inefficient socialism, big state. Neo-liberalism solved those problems, but created new ones.
The conservatives today have another problem to solve, mass immigration, rampant crime, loss of sovereignty and ability to reform to foreign bureaucracy, dependency on foreign manufacturing, etc.
Part of these problems are residues of the same economic neo-liberalism that was enacted in the 80s. Reagans and Thatcher's neo-liberalism saved society from the socialist dystopia, but over time it has thrown society in a neo-liberalist dystopian path that few people like, beside the corporate elites.
The conservatives have moved on to new, real problems. You seem stuck in the past.
Where we differ is I just don’t see any of the problems you list as actual problems. I’m in favour of immigration, it does us a lot of good which is why conservative policies actually encourage it, and illegal immigration is a tiny fraction of it overall. Crime rates are down significantly from the 80s. Even in the EU we had all the sovereignty we could ever need, and negotiated opt outs of huge swathes of regulation we decided wasn’t for us.
A friend of mine tried that line about manufacturing on me a few years ago and I asked him what kind of factory he wanted his so. To work in when he grew up. He looked at me as though I’d just shot his dog. We don’t need factory jobs, we’ve git near full employment anyway. That’s why we need immigration to solve our demographic issues with our ageing population. We’ve got plenty of jobs much higher up the value chain, the main problems are around training and education.
If you can't see that immigration is having a negative impact, which so many voters perceive, then yes you have a minority perspective. Crime in the UK is so bad in some areas that Ukrainian refugees were shocked.
They perceive what the media tell them, not what’s actually happening, because fear and xenophobia sells newspapers. On average immigrants are younger, more law abiding, more likely to be employed, consume fewer benefits and make less use of health care than native born Britons. Also Britons who live in areas with large immigrant populations are the least concerned about immigration.
As for the crime rate the perception is divorced from reality, I’ll quote from Wikipedia: “The United Kingdom's crime rate remains relatively low when compared to the rest of the world, especially among first world countries.” Our crime rate is a fraction of that in Ukraine before the war. Their murder rate was three times ours.
> Also Britons who live in areas with large immigrant populations are the least concerned about immigration.
Maybe if you define immigrants with passports as Britons. There's a reason why the BNP, British National Party, won the two seats they ever won in counties most affected by immigration. This effect would also be exact opposite of that in Sweden, which is intriguing, because here the sub-urb ghettos are split between social democrats, which the immigrants vote for, and the nationalists, which the few non-immigrants left vote for.
The fact that you are trying to argue that areas affected are the least concerned, when the case is exactly the opposite across Europe; says a lot about your "reality". Modern leftists are a scourge.
Modern leftism has certainly lost it's way, and frankly so has a lot of the right. I say that as a life long conservative voter. I'm that odd combination, both an economic and a cultural liberal.
You're downvoted but I don't think you're wrong. In general it seems to be the case that if you're waging a war and you're not getting completely crushed the electorate (or at least the "undecided" voters") tends to rally around whoever happens to be in charge. And indeed I think it's fairly safe to say that most agree that Thatcher benefitted electorally from a strong response to the invasion.
I should add that as a Scot I'm definitely not a fan of hers (you just grow up there knowing "Thatcher Bad") but I'm not quite at "put a stake through her heart and garlic round her neck"[0] :)
They are. That war was also unusual in that it was an attack on a country far away that wasn’t a threat to the US or UK, and there was little to be gained.
I think that was the reason for one of them, certainly. But then she and our armed forces did a tremendous job in reclaiming the Falklands from a fascist dictatorship.
> UK before Tatcher was a depressed society with stagflation
Hardly a problem local to Britain, and hardly something Thatcher solved. It was a crisis that also passed in countries that did not elect viciously anti-state, anti-working class governments.
> crumbling infrastructure; that couldn't even clean its own streets
Bit of an exaggeration, and I'm not sure how Maggie "Minimal State" Thatcher has supposedly helped with that.
> Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason
If it weren't for the Falklands she would have been a one term president.
It's not over yet, we're yet to see the how the opposite of mass immigration multiculturalism affects a european nation too. Jusging by Sweden and Germany who has applied it the most, it is and ending that goes "no more please"
Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason.