I think it's sad that people feel the need to demonise a senile old women who, whether they can see it or not, did a hell of a lot more for the social mobility and job prospects for the kids of working class people like my own parents than Callaghan ever could have, given the same economic conditions she inherited. I'm living proof of what a merit based education system and a flexible customer oriented economy that her policies created, can make of people who were otherwise destined by accident of birth for a job as a truck driver and a life in a council house.
Thanks to Thatcher, I got a full grant to uni, I now own my own house, and my employment is shock horror, in high tech manufacturing. I can still be at ease in a social club, but I would not baulk at a night of culture either. I feel no sense of being trapped in any class, but it didn't turn me into a Boyce or Hyacynth type, and while I may never own a Rolls Royce, I'm not so insecure I would feel jealous of someone who does, whether that's through graft or birth
I don't see myself as an I'm alright jack either, I just don't want other people's success to be reliant on me paying for it (unless it is through sensible programmes like giving grants to kids who show actual promise, not just because someone decides everybody has a 'right' to go to uni, no matter what the course or the need of the economy). Your sense of social responsibility only goes so far though when you even see members of your own family earning 'wages' in the form of government handouts, and getting free 'council' houses simply for being stupid enough to get pregnant with absolutely no means of supporting the baby, in addition to what they get free from you and yours because unlike the government, they justifiably are your problem to take care of. You tend to look at your own PAYE contributions to the fairer, caring society, a little differently then.
I'm not averse to the government trying to ensure everybody has a nice house and a good prospect of a job and the best start in life, but fuck me I'm not daft enough to want the economy to be ruined in the course of paying for it. When you realise how much is actually spent on just the welfare budget these days, even as a proportion of total tax, never mind absolute numbers or pounds per head of population, just to get the amazing results it does even now, you can't do anything but cringe, and wonder what the hell Ed Miliband could actually do with such a dysfunctional edifice, if we are to believe he would give it more than just lip service if he ever got in. Deckhairs and shuffling comes to mind.
I don't curse Thatcher and pine for the era of the mines or the ship yards, because I know that it was horrible horrible work. It only seemed good at the time because, what a lot of people seem to forget, these communities sprang up along previously green river banks like Scotswood because people migrated from even shittier existences out in the country, or the slums, or the workhouse, to the relatively well paid and good conditions in the yards or the mines. But there simply was no mass employment 20th century replacement for these sorts of industries that Thatcher could have turned to once the needs of the country had outgrown them; it's not by accident that the economies of China et al are following this exact same path from the field to the mine/yard/factory to the internet/service/added value economy. Callaghan had no better model outside of managed decline, that's for sure.
No doubt people bemoaned the leaders of those times aswell as they bulldozed cottages to build factories, but they ushered in all sorts of economic and social advances by breaking balls and making hard decisions. The society of those times didn't exist in aspic, it was a product of change, and it was always going to change again. Just because Thatcher had the balls to get things moving and get this country out of a terrible malaise, she gets unfairly blamed for a lot of the bad shit in life nowadays that was simply inevitable if any other western country on the planet is to go by. Neighbourlyness, fairness, politeness, community spirit, basic morality, whatever, all of these have been eroded by other fundamental changes in people that were patently not affected by whether the politics of their day was left or right.
And when Thatcher said, no such thing as society, like it or not, what she was trying to do was get people to get back to relying on the family and the real community as their support network and inspiration, rather than relying on some faceless DSS bureaucrat to get you a job or a house. But it was always going to be pie in the sky pointless stuff, whether it was her saying it or Callaghan. Just like it's pie in the sky nowadays to hope that a speech by Blair or Cameron could somehow stop the rise of the charver underclass or the culture of celebrity. Certain things in life are inevitable, in politics what counts is what kind of start you can give the next generation, and without doing it by crippling the current one, as it seems was Brown's model. A guaranteed place in a factory is not it.
The idea that things would actually have gone better for the country if Callaghan had won, is simply laughable. At worst, he could have had the country limp on for another few years before there was anarchy (the country was literally bust, not just technically as we are now). The country was producing shit, and paying a high premium for it. At best, well, you only have to look at the 70s archive material on the box recently to see what was classed as good times back then.
There's a reason why Britain of the 70s is the chosen decade of mockery by the likes of Top Gear and anyone else who actually remembers them. Nobody can look at what union reps at the likes of BL were claiming about 'the management' during one of their many wildcat strikes, and not have their jaw drop in amazement at the short sighted stupidity of it all. Nobody is to blame for the demise of their industry but themselves. Less so for the shipyards and coal mines, which nonetheless were riven by militantism, but jesus christ, the writing was on the wall for fucks sake. Adapt or die. That's not Conservatism, it's evolution. It's served the human race alright so far, and 70s socialism was certainly not going to offer anything better.
Some of the things the nissan workforce have done to become the most efficient plant in Europe, would have had those 'working class' blokes wanting to kill them. What Nissan has done is Thatcher through and through. If you're daft enough to ever believe Thatcher didn't want any industry in this country, then, well, you are actually just daft. She wanted it, she just wanted it to work, be productive, be competitive, and be flexible. She didn't want British production to be hallmarked by shit basically, which in the 70s it was. Some of the stories you read about what things British designers of the 70s had actually pioneered and wanted to make here, only to see some asshat of a union rep kybosh it, and then have it get taken up by the likes of Toshiba, well it just makes me insane.
I feel sympathy for the lass a few pages back whose bus driver dad had the breakdown, but it's harsh to blame Thatcher - by the 80s bus deregulation was simply a necessity or services would have become unsustainable due to an ever increasing cost base. In the 70s nationalised British Leyland built a brand new factory in Workington which was basically the first production line for a bus. The intention was to cheaply renew all the post war bus fleets around the country, which by then were all nationalised, thus providing cheap services in the UK, and make a healthy profit off of exports.
If this had been a success, we could have maybe avoided the first few disastrous years of privatisation by having no deregulation at all. But no, the factory never even got close to half capacity due to militancy. And you could count the export orders on one hand, such was the quality compared to products being built by the likes of Mercedes-Benz. Into the 90s they had to blackmail London Transport into giving them a whole year's worth of orders to make the factory look a little less elephant shaped and white coloured, which they then proceeded to fail to fulfil anyway.
Within a decade, all those short sighted self-interested assholes were working for Volvo, who unsurprisingly shut the plant and transferred production to another UK plant that was never nationalised, and thus had adapted (anyone who thinks Britain only has Nissan and Vauxhall as volume automotive manufacturers today are misinformed). Have a guess who is one of the most succesful bus builders in the country still, today? It's not fucking Leyland. Not British anyway, because funnily enough, an Indian company that BL invested in the 50s, Ashok Leyland, is now a major global bus builder. Off the back of growth kick started by the British designs that mulletted wankers in denim couldn't be bothered to build over here unless their endless demands were met.
Similar balls ups occurred in British Rail, people don't know how lucky they are that thanks to Thatcher we managed to come out of the disasterous 70s with foreign companies still willing to buy (rescue) our native train manufacturers, even though unlike cars/buses it was basically a captive market for them. Similar tales of idiocy can be found in the other sectors Thatcher supposedly destroyed, if you care to look beyond the soundbites. But these are the sort of facts of history that get ignored when people are going on their demonic Thatcher rants. But it was Callaghan/Wilson that presided over this sort of mess, while the bosses tore their hair out (those of them that still retained some sort of commercial perspective - by this time, doing a shit job and working for your own self-interest was getting so ingrained, it was even becoming part of the management culture)
There's a lot of things I like about being Geordie, but when it comes to self-indulgent delusional whinging through massively rose tinted specs, then I think we even out-do scousers when it comes to Thatcher. The idea of celebrating her death is just pathetic really. Anyone who seriously does that when she does peg out needs to have a long hard look at their own lives, and question whether they really were held back by her, or something else entirely outside of her control or even influence.
