What exactly did Thatcher do?

Mr. SW said:

Unfortunately people like Derek Hatton, Michael Foot, Arthur Scargill and Ken Livingstone played into the anti-left consensus at the time. Hatton with his cheeky Liverpudlian rhetoric; Foot, who at the best of times looked like a bundle of rags tied up with string; Scargill and the Miner's Strike, held at the wrong time, splitting the Miner's union and accelerating Mine closure; and Livingstone, for just being, well, Livingstone.

That was the opposition.

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And didn't they do a good job.........................
for the Tories.

I do agree that personal responsibility is vitally important, not only for looking after our physical health, but our mental well-being as well, and perhaps as a society we do expect others to pick up the pieces too much.

But then isn't there also a collective responsibility to to look after each other?
At the end of the day, we are not creatures such as tigers, bears, alligators, etc, that have evolved the means to live solitary lives and still survive and thrive as a species. Provided they are not wiped out by human endeavors.

We are pack animals that are interdependent on each other. To my mind, we need to ask ourselves what kind of society we wish to live in. Do we want a society with a cutthroat, fragmented, everyone-for-themselves attitude? To say to those who are unable to thrive, at this time, for various reasons, to pull yourselves together, get on your bike, and get a job? And if you can't, well tough luck.

Because that is the attitude that Thatcher and many in the Tory party seem to portray.
I refer you to the Labour MP (can't remember her name, who gave the speech about people who had their benefits cut and then dying and Tory frontbenchers smirking and laughing).

I feel we need to ask ourselves what the role of government actually is. Is the government there to govern and serve the people, or to line their own pockets and feed their self-serving desire for power and the interests of their corporate friends?

Yes, people do need to take more responsibility for their health and lives. But then can we blame people for not doing so when just about every type of packaged food contains at least 1 type of sugar, I recently checked the ingredients of bread and there were 4 different types of sugar contained within, trans fat is allowed to be added to food, corn syrup is disguised as honey, and the government won't even stop supermarkets displaying chocolate on the counter?

If the government really cared about people's health then why do they subsidise farmers that use pesticides and yet give nothing to organic farming, meaning organic food is out of the reach of many people?

Then we have social media companies that employ psychologists to design their platforms so that people's brains receive dopamine hits and then become addicted. The media scare parents to the extent that they are afraid to send their kids outside and schools are teaching kids that ambition is wrong.

There are many other ways that the everyone for themselves ethos and the structure of society has led countless people to severely struggle with their mental health and many people have just given up on life.
And good luck trying to get help from mental health services where even suicidal teenagers are having to wait at least 8 or 9 months for treatment. The best most can help for is perhaps 6 or 12 sessions and a prescription from their GP.

Maybe the personal responsibility vs collective responsibility debate is for a separate topic, but in my eyes, Thatcher's government sowed the seeds of separation and self-serving attitudes.

I had the pleasure of being in the same place as Margaret Thatcher, when she was leader of the opposition, I was at a fete that she was due to open. It was organised by the local Conservative club. She gave a speech that went on and on and was being relayed by loudspeaker, so you could not escape. This was before she had elocution lessons to tone her voice down.

MP33 said:

I had the pleasure of being in the same place as Margaret Thatcher, when she was leader of the opposition, I was at a fete that she was due to open. It was organised by the local Conservative club. She gave a speech that went on and on and was being relayed by loudspeaker, so you could not escape. This was before she had elocution lessons to tone her voice down.

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Sounds like a fete worse than death.

Lost property said:

Thatcher's legacy has endured for how many years ?....and will continue well into the future. She will be enshrined in UK history for her merciless attacks on those in the population whom, she felt, should be suitably deferential. Even today, her hectoring, rabid, arrogant, patronising and condescending inflection, that epitomised her, still induces anger.

Truss, on the other hand, will become a pub quiz question given the, thankfully, brief tenure even if she and Kwarteng did manage to wreak fiscal havoc in her 49 days

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She kept winning elections at the time.
Very popular at the time iirc

I'm not saying Thatcher's governement are solely responsable for the mess society is finding itself in. And Thatcher is just a product of a Western ethos that has gone back generations of the self above all else.

Labour have not exactly covered themselves in glory either. Yes they provide support but then they have the socialist ethos that government knows best and the individual is incapable of looking after themselves. Nannying people does not help them and keeps them like dependent children. And the unions were becoming too powerful.

Of course we need to take responsability for own lives and no matter how much help someone receives, their lives won't change unless they take that responsability.

Yet we can't just abandon people. They are human beings FFS. But people just bury their heads in the sand and pretend all is good. We, as humans, tend to take an arrogant attitude, but we would not be the first major society to collapse.

Yes coal was an outdated technology and we needed to move on. Plus people do tend to hold onto the past and resist change. Yes the unions had become too powerful and unreasonable.

But Thatcher acted like a tyrant, bulldozed over people, and in all intense and purposes went to war with the miners. She militarised the police, my Dad's cousin was in the police and he told us stories of how officers would take off their id numbers and start fights to intice riots.

Could the government not have acted in another way? Offered people retraining and other opportunities? Treated them like adults and explained why the mines needed to close and worked with communtity leaders instead of treating the miners as the enemy?

farleigh said:

She kept winning elections at the time.
Very popular at the time iirc

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Easy when the Labour leader is Michael Foot.

farleigh said:

She kept winning elections at the time.
Very popular at the time iirc

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Yes, she did win elections. However, her most fervent supporters were in the South / S.East which benefitted from her regime and remained unscathed...unlike many other areas of the UK.

That said, she remains reviled and detested / loathed as being the personification of a callous, power crazed dictator.

Very interesting thread.
I can remember school milk when I was at infant school in 73/74.
I hated it, wished she'd canned it sooner.

Lost property said:

That said, she remains reviled and detested / loathed as being the personification of a callous, power crazed dictator.

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Which of course only goes to show the extent to which, if people keep repeating falsehoods sufficiently, they can end up becoming lore with people believing them - because clearly Mrs. Thatcher was no such thing, as any comparison with real dictators would show (think Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin or Nicolas Maduro - there's just no comparison!)

DynamicSpirit said:

Which of course only goes to show the extent to which, if people keep repeating falsehoods sufficiently, they can end up becoming lore with people believing them - because clearly Mrs. Thatcher was no such thing, as any comparison with real dictators would show (think Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin or Nicolas Maduro - there's just no comparison!)

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There are NO fallacies or folklore about her, or her regime. She was as dictatorial in her own right as any of those who you've selected to exemplify.

Thatcher's rise to power was a case of good timing and the fact the British Public wanted change.

It's a touchy subject but some of the changes brought in such as banning secondary action and ballots as well as a notice period in my mind were a good thing in the long run. Scargill's own arrogance was what caused the miner's strikers to end so badly for him.

DynamicSpirit said:

Which of course only goes to show the extent to which, if people keep repeating falsehoods sufficiently, they can end up becoming lore with people believing them - because clearly Mrs. Thatcher was no such thing, as any comparison with real dictators would show (think Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin or Nicolas Maduro - there's just no comparison!)

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I think people believe what they want to believe.
Some people who didn't agree with Thatcher demonise her, and attribute her with things which probably aren't true, but it helps them to believe that they are.
Conversely, her supporters - like my bonkers MP Esther McVey - idolise her in a totally inappropriate way. Esther speaks with a picture of Thatcher on her platform.
I think I can read the mind of every PM since Wilson, with the exception of Liz Truss. So I think I understand some of what motivates them to do what they do. Liz I can't fathom at all. But Thatcher I could, and I agreed with some of it. And I voted for her.
I agree with you that she was no dictator, she cared very much about improving everyone's future, but the way she went about it wasn't the one that many people agreed with. And her power was constrained by our democracy.
EDIT And of course I’m doing it also - Esther McVey isn’t really bonkers but it suits me to think that she is.

Lost property said:

There are NO fallacies or folklore about her, or her regime. She was as dictatorial in her own right as any of those who you've selected to exemplify.

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Oh don't be so silly!

As shown by numerous dictatorships across the World, typically actual dictators generally don't allow themselves to be subjected to free and fair(-ish) elections. they ruthlessly suppress criticism of the Government, lock up or otherwise persecute political opponents on trumped-up charges, make sure the media and the judiciary are controlled and sycophantic, prevent dissemination of information about what they are doing, etc. etc. In contrast, the Thatcher Government ran elections as normal, always abided by the results, followed normal democratic procedures in recognising and providing the normal support to the Opposition in Parliament, raised no objection to having a free press - much of which mercilessly attacked and poked fun at the Government (remember Spitting Image?), always allowed itself to be subject to rule of law, etc. In short she lead what by all accounts was a Government that generally followed the norms that you'd expect in a typical modern democracy. I myself - as someone who had very left wing views in the 1980s - remember going on a number of large-scale demonstrations against her Government: Demonstrations that passed off peacefully and with a lot of media publicity in a way that would never have been allowed to happen if Mrs. Thatcher really had been a dictator!

There were a few issues around the edges, as there inevitably are with any Government: In the case of the Thatcher Government, some question marks about treatment of arrested demonstrators and notably the actions of the police at Orgreave, on occasions some attempts to hide information, the obvious issues with our electoral system, a right wing bias in much of the printed media although balanced by strict impartiality requirements in the broadcast media, etc. etc. But nothing that really changes the broad nature of the Government as a democratic one.

jfollows said:

Conversely, her supporters - like my bonkers MP Esther McVey - idolise her in a totally inappropriate way. Esther speaks with a picture of Thatcher on her platform.
I think I can read the mind of every PM since Wilson, with the exception of Liz Truss. So I think I understand some of what motivates them to do what they do. Liz I can't fathom at all. But Thatcher I could, and I agreed with some of it. And I voted for her.
I agree with you that she was no dictator, she cared very much about improving everyone's future, but the way she went about it wasn't the one that many people agreed with. And her power was constrained by our democracy.
EDIT And of course I’m doing it also - Esther McVey isn’t really bonkers but it suits me to think that she is.

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Haha, yes very true. You do get people on the right who idolize people like Thatcher (and demonize people on the left) to just an absurd extent. But people like that seem not to hang out much on railforums, so that's a discussion we rarely get to see

(Edited: proving->providing)

In my opinion Thatcher let UK industry decline and die, or allowed bits to be sold to overseas interests.
In her first 4 years as PM, there were, on average, about 2000 lost jobs - every single day.

Selling council houses to occupiers may have been a good idea - but the theory was that one new house should be built fpr every house sold. But - houses were sold at well below market price, and central government did not provide enough funds for local councils to build those new houses.

Poll Tax - grossly unfair unless you were rich. Council tax a bit less unfair, but still fails to recognise that current income and ability to pay is not always related to the supposed value of your house.

Bus deregulation and privatisation. Services got steadily worse; outside London, many disappeared except on a few trunk routes. There was simply not enough business to justify the "competetive structures " that she favoured. Speculators made multi-millions by closing and selling bus stations to property developers.

She encouraged the "greed culture" - "gimme, gimme, gimme, damn the rest of you".

I suspect she may even have wanted to sell NHS if she had thought that she could get away with it.

The only good thing she did was drive the Argentinians out of The Falklands It helped her win the 1983 General Election, but perhaps just as important was that the Labour leader was Michael Foot (mentioned previously, and a 1980s equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn - sincerely believing in far left policies, but totally unelectable by a UK population.)

Bevan Price said:

The only good thing she did was drive the Argentinians out of The Falklands It helped her win the 1983 General Election, but perhaps just as important was that the Labour leader was Michael Foot (mentioned previously, and a 1980s equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn - sincerely believing in far left policies, but totally unelectable by a UK population.)

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Why was that a good thing? Arguably Argentina has at least as good a claim to las Malvinas as the British.
I wonder why Foot and Corbyn were deemed unelectable? Not because of any faults in their policies or presentation (though of course neither of them were perfect), but because of the sustained and relentless pressure of Murdoch and similar right wing media forces. Much of which consists of dog-whistles and so impossible to challenge.

Mrs Thatcher was not dictatorial. She did not have to be and would have been removed immediately if she had been, there being plenty of opponents within the Tories themselves. Edward Heath had not gone away and someone like Heseltine, Joseph or Tebbitt would have taken over. But she increasingly vested executive authority in the Office of the Prime Minister by use of the Poll Tax, Rate Capping and the abolition of the Metropolitan Councils (An act of pure spite to silence Ken Livingstone and Derek Hatton et al.) as well as other seemingly innocuous legislation. Succeeding Prime Ministers inheriting this power have probably recognised this and exploited it to their own advantage, to some extent. I suspect Welsh and Scottish devolution have had something to do with this, as were the creation of metropolitan mayoralties in an effort to offload the overburden.

Dear Sad Sprinter,
... and what have you 'learned' from the many words in the over 100 contributions to the thread you initiated?
I note that since your 'starter' you have made one contribution along the way- in relation to school milk.
People tend to report matters through their own lens of experience and opinion, of which many are reflected here. You could attempt to analyse the frequency and intensity of expression, which would tell you something about contributors perhaps.
Myself? I hated Thatcher and still do. She was selfish and self-centred. She brought insecurity and destroyed the idea of 'permanent jobs, Shipobuilding, mining, steelworks, manufacturing- she laid waste to them all. On the other hand she promoted enterprise in the form of 'private enterprise'. She blamed and 'rate-capped' 'high-spending Labour councils- high spending because their populations were poor. She brought about Brexit by blaming 'Brussels' constantly. Enough. She lives on.
Are you any the wiser?

urbophile said:

Why was that a good thing? Arguably Argentina has at least as good a claim to las Malvinas as the British.
I wonder why Foot and Corbyn were deemed unelectable? Not because of any faults in their policies or presentation (though of course neither of them were perfect), but because of the sustained and relentless pressure of Murdoch and similar right wing media forces. Much of which consists of dog-whistles and so impossible to challenge.

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I heard that Argentina never intended to go to war and their intention was to force Britain to the negotiating table. That was why they sent in mainly 18 year old conscripts.

DynamicSpirit said:

Which of course only goes to show the extent to which, if people keep repeating falsehoods sufficiently, they can end up becoming lore with people believing them - because clearly Mrs. Thatcher was no such thing, as any comparison with real dictators would show (think Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin or Nicolas Maduro - there's just no comparison!)

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I agree. I feel it is unfair to start comparing Thatcher to dictators who oversaw and ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of their own citizens.

She wasn't evil, maybe misguided and a little cold in some of her ideals and beliefs.
Although I do not agree with a lot of her policies, the country was in a mess and something needed to be done. Thatcher was the first female PM in a government of Old Etonian men, so she probably needed a tough attitude just to survive.

Maybe she was misguided in a lot of her policies and perhaps there may have been more helpful ways of doing things, but I feel we need to get things into perspective.

I feel it is easy to criticise, but I certainly would not wish to do the job of PM.

joebassman said:

I heard that Argentina never intended to go to war and their intention was to force Britain to the negotiating table. That was why they sent in mainly 18 year old conscripts.

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My reading has always been that Argentina went to war as a distraction from the internal problems that it was suffering. The reasons for sending so many young conscripts were partly that that was the way the army was still organised, i.e. to use them as cannnon-fodder, but also (according to a Uruguayan) because they wanted to keep the professional army back in case they needed it to act as a back up if they had to put down internal dissent. And Britain was already considering an, in retrospect, deeply embarrassing agreement (read ‘sell out’) at the time: if the Argentinians thought that invading would force the issue in their favour, they really weren’t paying attention.

EDITED to improve clarity of grammar in second sentence.

The most surprising thing I discovered at the time of the Falklands War is that I'd have signed up and fought there - I was a student at the time and I'm reasonably cynical and never had any desire to have anything to do with the armed services or "the establishment", but when it kicked off I'd have gone there without much doubt. Never realistically going to happen, but my brother was in the Royal Navy at the time so ended up there on a survey ship repurposed as a hospital ship ferrying injured people on both sides to Uruguay.
It didn't make me vote for Thatcher in the next election, that was already a done deal as far as I was concerned anyway, but it clearly did for others.

joebassman said:

I heard that Argentina never intended to go to war and their intention was to force Britain to the negotiating table. That was why they sent in mainly 18 year old conscripts.



I agree. I feel it is unfair to start comparing Thatcher to dictators who oversaw and ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of their own citizens.

She wasn't evil, maybe misguided and a little cold in some of her ideals and beliefs.
Although I do not agree with a lot of her policies, the country was in a mess and something needed to be done. Thatcher was the first female PM in a government of Old Etonian men, so she probably needed a tough attitude just to survive.

Maybe she was misguided in a lot of her policies and perhaps there may have been more helpful ways of doing things, but I feel we need to get things into perspective.

I feel it is easy to criticise, but I certainly would not wish to do the job of PM.

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I think the Great British railwayjourneyer and former next Prime Minister Mr Portillo thinks the same!

urbophile said:

Arguably Argentina has at least as good a claim to las Malvinas as the British

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You can argue it but it would be a very poor argument. The islands had no indigenous population when we turned, the Argentine argument essentially being the pope gifted the western hemisphere to Spain

BrianW said:

Myself? I hated Thatcher and still do. She was selfish and self-centred.

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Yes and Britain has changed to reflect those values.

joebassman said:

I agree. I feel it is unfair to start comparing Thatcher to dictators who oversaw and ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of their own citizens.

She wasn't evil, maybe misguided and a little cold in some of her ideals and beliefs.
Although I do not agree with a lot of her policies, the country was in a mess and something needed to be done. Thatcher was the first female PM in a government of Old Etonian men, so she probably needed a tough attitude just to survive.

Maybe she was misguided in a lot of her policies and perhaps there may have been more helpful ways of doing things, but I feel we need to get things into perspective.

I feel it is easy to criticise, but I certainly would not wish to do the job of PM.

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I also agree with these sentiments. I did vote for her 3 times.

renegademaster said:

You can argue it but it would be a very poor argument. The islands had no indigenous population when we turned, the Argentine argument essentially being the pope gifted the western hemisphere to Spain

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So the white English speaking inhabitants are indigenous then? By what right did we settle there? Imagine the outcry if some far-off nation had settled in the Isle of Wight. Or even – to be a fairer comparison – in one of the uninhabited islands of the Hebrides.

urbophile said:

So the white English speaking inhabitants are indigenous then? By what right did we settle there? Imagine the outcry if some far-off nation had settled in the Isle of Wight. Or even – to be a fairer comparison – in one of the uninhabited islands of the Hebrides.

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So you are using the proximity argument then?

urbophile said:

So the white English speaking inhabitants are indigenous then?

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I think you'll find that the English-speaking inhabitants of the Falkland Islands are indigenous to about the same extent as the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Argentina

For those who don't understand a dictator / dictatorship can take many forms, not just the so called classical methods, Thatcher was as much a dictator as were others.

She purged her Cabinet of "wets", or moderates to be more precise, and coined her immoral / immortal phrase " is he one of us ?" when confronted with prospective candidates for Gov't related positions.

The "Spitting Image " sketch involving her ordering steak and being asked what about the vegetables ?...summarised her perfectly.

Although on the subject of other dictators, she extended her open arms and hospitality to another...a certain Gen Pinochet

Assuming LNER are actually running trains, how many of you have felt inclined to make a pilgrimage to Grantham and worship at her statue / shrine.

DynamicSpirit said:

I think you'll find that the English-speaking inhabitants of the Falkland Islands are indigenous to about the same extent as the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Argentina

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Indeed!