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The Myth of Margaret Thatcher (part one)

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When Thatcher came into power in 1979 one in seven children lived in poverty, only a year after she was in power it was one in three. I don't call that progress. She created strife where there was none before, accusing the miners of being the enemy within. Even police officers now admit they were ordered to start the violence against them. She destroyed them as revenge for the perception that they had brought down the Heath government. We import (virtually) all of our coal now. Britain, the country built on coal & the instigator of the Industrial Revolution that changed the world. Hitler united Britain against a common enemy & even after five years of carpet bombing Goering couldn't destroy British industry. Thatcher succeeded where Hitler & Goering failed, maybe she should have been awarded the Iron Cross.

Thatcher never actually delivered economic success after excessive government overspending, that is the myth. In 1945, the Labour government, even with heavy debts from WWII developed economic regeneration & created the NHS. It also eventually built hundreds of thousands of new houses. It was all very well for Thatcher to get people to buy their council houses, but now we have a social housing shortage & the 'Victorian' bedroom tax. The starship private enterprise yet again didn't magically intervene as Thatcher consistently claimed it would. Over thirty years before Thatcher was elected the economy grew by 150%, since Thatcher it has only grown by around only 100%. She squandered the 16% North Sea Oil revenue by giving it away as tax cuts to the wealthy instead of reinvesting it Keynesian style.

Thatcher reduced taxation for the middle classes & the wealthy whilst simultaneously increasing it in stealth taxation *believing that it would stimulate growth & produce a trickle down effect. It didn't. Thatcher didn't encourage any retraining or investment in any infrastructure expecting private enterprise to solve the problem. It didn't. The water companies are still losing 50% water in leakages & have never tried to improve after privatisation. They just made people redundant & now the shareholders are making a profit from what were once industries owned by the taxpayer.

Thatcher's ultimate con-trick was to sell off public utilities to foreign shareholders that had been paid for & owned by the British taxpayer. The railways went the same way. Thatcher asset stripped the country & effectively sold the crown jewels to give tax concessions to the already wealthy expecting them to boost the economy & reinvest in infrastructure.

She also introduced hundreds of stealth taxes, such as taxing take out food like fish & chips. Our economy slowing was a direct result of the oil crisis of the early 1970s which itself was a product of the conflict in the Middle East. OPEC then had the Western world over a barrel (literally millions of barrels). The Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia) proclaimed an oil embargo. It was OAPEC's decision to 'punish' the US for its support of Israel & this had a 'knock-on’ effect on all Western economies. Also there was manufacturing gravitating towards Asia even then. Thatcher stopped all state support to industry expecting ‘market forces’ to magically restore everything. It didn’t. Even Friedrich Hayek claimed that Thatcher misunderstood his theories. She was quick to wave a copy of 'The Road to Serfdom' at the opposition but it is debatable on whether she actually read any of his works. He certainly didn't recommend complete deregulation. It is this deregulation, predominantly of international banking, that has caused the crisis we are now in. Well done Maggie!

The worst of the Thatcher deregulations were almost certainly the railway networks. The railways never really made much of a profit even when they were first built. It was only because of the fact that Britain had an empire & channelled wealth from its exploitation that kept the railway network running. State ownership was inevitable. Now the British railway network is owned predominantly by German & French state-supported railways. Their railways are much cheaper to travel on & better maintained. When British railway companies lose money, the British taxpayer bails them out. When they make a profit it goes to the foreign owned & subsidised companies.

Thatcher promised less government interference & yet probably presided over the most over centralised government Britain has ever seen. She destroyed the unions so that there was no labour balance & deliberately instigated high unemployment as she knew that unemployment benefits are only a small percentage of the social security infrastructure funding. Pensions & child support being the majority. She knew high unemployment would keep inflation down & did not care about the millions of ‘moaning minnies’ whose lives she had destroyed. There is no empirical evidence that high inflation leads to low growth. Many Victorian & contemporary Pacific Rim economies have had high inflation & high growth rates. Wrong again Maggie. The acquisitiveness her policies subsequentally engendered have done nothing to create social cohesion in Britain & we now live in a more socially divided society since WWII.

I doubt Thatcher would have been elected in a second time if it wasn’t for the patriotism & outrage generated by the Falklands conflict. A conflict she could have easily prevented before it happened but chose to ignore the warning signs. Even though the MOD had warned her at regular intervals. We have three main political parties. Progressively less people voted for the Tories, the majority of the vote was split between the Labour & Liberal Democrat parties. In the UK you don't vote directly for the Prime Minister but for local representative political candidates selected from three (or more) parties. Thatcher repeatedly got in on a tiny minority vote in a non-proportional system. Technically she was statistically the most unpopular Prime Minister of all time.

Speaking of the Falklands War, there was a victory parade held on the 12th of October 1982 starting at Armoury Place & ending at Guildhall.

Thatcher gave her speech at the Guildhall after the parade at the ‘Salute to the Task Force’ luncheon including the lines:

“We, the British people, are proud of what has been done, proud of these heroic pages in our island story, proud to be here today to salute the task force. Proud to be British.”

All very well & good to be proud Margaret. But how many people have forgotten about how you didn’t want the maimed, disfigured & injured troops to attend the parade?

Soldiers who had the ultimate right to be there. What was she so scared (or ashamed) of? *

Shame on you Maggie, if you ask me.

General Leopoldo Galtieri who led the military junta at the time had a variety of domestic problems and certainly made it known how the junta felt about the Falklands. This was almost certainly sabre rattling and many doubted that an invasion was really on the cards.

Notwithstanding that Thatcher was allegedly making plans for legislation to change the national status of the Falkland Islanders themselves. Plans which oddly never came to fruition, especially after the conflict itself.

Eventually Galtieri seemed to have painted himself into a corner and couldn’t back out without losing face.


The MOD had their suspicions but Thatcher wouldn’t listen to any advice on the possibility of an invasion and seemed to not act on any of it.

Timeline: *

March 28:
Argentine fleet sets sail under the guise of naval manoeuvres.

March 29:
Submarines sent to Falklands. Fort Austin sails from Gibraltar to replenish HMS Endurance.

March 31:
British decoders intercept radio message to the Argentinian submarine Sante Fe, which orders her to examine the beaches around Stanley for possible landing sites.

April 1
British nuclear submarines, HMS Spartan and HMS Splendid sail from Faslane bound for the Falklands.

April 2:
Argentine forces mounted amphibious landings of the Falkland Islands, following the civilian occupation of South Georgia on 19 March, before the Falklands War began. The invasion met a nominal defence organised by the Falkland Islands' Governor Sir Rex Hunt, giving command to Major Mike Norman of the Royal Marines. Events included the landing of Lieutenant Commander Guillermo Sanchez-Sabarots' Amphibious Commandos Group, the attack on Moody Brook barracks, the engagement between the troops of Hugo Santillan and Bill Trollope at Stanley, and the final engagement and surrender at Government House.

~ (Information on April 2nd by courtesy of Wikipedia)

Every previous British government has heeded the warning signs and taken action beforehand to prevent Argentine aggression. *

Some people have conjectured on whether she deliberately allowed the conflict to escalate for the advancement of her own career.

What went wrong for Thatcher? Was she just too myopic to see the danger or did she just not care?

I have a free health service in my country. Millions of Americans have no health care. Thatcher wanted to destroy our National Health Service. She failed in that as well. Our NHS was envied & imitated by the Western world. I have the freedom to universal health care. That's real freedom. Thatcher was quick to talk about social parasites & the enemy within. The real parasites are those British residents who have 23 trillion pounds in offshore accounts to avoid paying any tax in the UK. I'll give you a hint, these aren't poor people. If they paid their taxes we would be financially fine. Who are the real parasites? Thatcher squandered billions of pounds of oil revenue to give tax concessions to the rich. Why didn't she invest in infrastructure? Oh yes, I forgot, she totally disregarded Keynesian economics. Which is odd because her own party had to resort back to some of it. Maggie Poppins & her distorted tendentious monetarism never worked even once.

Eventually she was an embarrassment to her own party & was finally even thrown out of it. Maggie Poppins didn't get anything right it seems. Especially with the EU. The Poll Tax didn't get it right either for Maggie. She once claimed that she had never been wrong about anything or ever made a mistake in her entire life. The hubris of that statement is particularly telling. Perhaps she should have studied the history of the last time a poll tax was introduced into England in 1381.

The Benthamite laissez faire utilitarianism that Thatcher promoted was discredited over a hundred years ago (predominantly by J.S. Mill in his essay ‘On Utilitarianism’). She didn’t actually do anything new. She claimed that social darwinism was scientific & therefore beyond any moral questioning. She didn’t care about the consequences of her actions to the majority who were destroyed by her policies. At the end of the day, her misunderstanding of monetarism & disregard for the warnings of Hayek & Adam Smith about total deregulation led to her often repeating the same old tired formulas. These so nauseated her own party eventually that they got rid of her.

At the end, even wielding her magic handbag didn't help. There never was any magic. It was all make believe. She did nothing for my country. A spoon full of monetarism didn't help anything go down. It doesn't matter how much you click your heels together on the yellow brick road, say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or pray for Maggie Poppins to drop down out of the sky on her monetarist brolly. She didn't get anything right.

Not even in fairy tales ...
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Comments

  1. cafolini's Avatar
    Not in fairy tales like yours. Definitely.
    ROFLMAO
  2. Red-Headed's Avatar
    Nothing I have written has anything to do with fairies. Thatcher failed so badly her own party conspired against her. Perhaps you should read the blog again & try to understand it a little.
  3. cafolini's Avatar
    No, no fairies. Red fairies. LOL
  4. Red-Headed's Avatar
    Is there anything in the blog that needs explaining to you? Or is this just an immature attempt at trolling? Or are you about 12 years old? If so, I suggest you study harder at school.