[Asta]

Hi! My name`s Asta. I`m writing a diploma paper that is dedicated to public opinion of the british people on Thatcher reforms in 1980-1985... and I need help of people who knows about that period... the reforms are connected with privatization, employment acts and the closure of pits...



Maybe you know where I can find the resuls of some public polls connected with that period.

I am very interested in your opinion.

Thank you in adnvace!



p.s. I`m terribly sorry if I post the topic in inappropriate place.

[JohnRawls]

There are people from that time period here , like potemkin and carteronian which can tell you more about ms.Tatcher , but mostly she is hated by that generation because she was a real bitch to the common folk .

P.S. Not many people visit this forum , better post this in Gorky Park i guess .

[Potemkin]

*sticks another pin in his voodoo doll of Thatcher*

[ingliz]

The signs pointing to how awful a Thatcherite government could be were easy to spot long before she reached the dizzy heights of No.10 - 1971- "Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher".

[JohnRawls]

Author of this thread you can ask specifical question it would be better by the way for you . Since its pretty hard to begin from nowhere ....

[William_H_Dougherty]

Author of this thread you can ask specifical question it would be better by the way for you . Since its pretty hard to begin from nowhere ....

Yes,

Also, while I'm not a Brit and my readings of Thatcher have highlighted some mistakes, I think you would be offerring an incomplete analysis of her influence post-Prime Ministership if you failed to mention that the Labour party incorporated much of the economic, social and political tenets of Thatcherism after gaining office.

In other words, while some of her policies might have been unpopular at the time, she is undoubtedly the most influential PM the UK has had since Churchill. Whether this is a good or bad thing is open to debate, and there are arguments on both sides of this. The truth probably inbetween.

She seems to be one of those politicians that a group of people hate very much, but somehow "magically" kept getting re-elected (i.e. did have support amongst the general populace during her "reign").

- WHD

[ingliz]

her policies... whether... good or bad... is open to debate

By 1983, in the space of only four years, manufacturing output had dropped 30% and unemployment had more than doubled to 3.6 million.

[Ash Faulkner]

Nice of you to selectively quote facts there ingliz. Literally a line above the Wikipedia article from which you poached, verbatim, what you posted, it says "A month later, in January 1982, the worst post-war slump bottomed out, inflation dropped to 8.6% from an earlier high of 18%, and interest rates fell...By 1983, overall economic growth was stronger and inflation and mortgage rates were at their lowest levels since 1970...".

She broke the undemocratic unions who had held the country to ransom for decades, increased the national wealth after the consensus had been the inevitability of decline, made Britain a voice on the world stage again, and won a generation of working class people away from socialism by giving them the right to own their own homes and manage their own lives. Margaret Thatcher was an almost universal success, and the left - who have been irrelevant ever since - will never forgive her for it.

[ingliz]

made Britain a voice on the world stage again

A little Argy-bargy in the Malvinas may have given her an election but it did not give the UK an independent voice on the world stage. The UK was, and still is, America's yapping little poodle.

[kingbee]

My opinions are that she absolutely stank.

She ruined my country (Wales) by closing the coalmines and not preparing any work for those newly unemployed: hence the depressive conditions often seen in the Valleys, where we have the UK's most people on long-term sick and where drugs and crime are absolutely rampant. The conspiracy theorist in me wouldn't put it past her doing this on purpose to Wales and to the north of England: destroying areas that never have and never will vote conservative.

All of that and the petty jingoism at the cost of lives in order to win the election of 1983. Namely the Falklands War.

[William_H_Dougherty]

Well,

I guess the one thing we can all agree one is that Thatcher was influential .

- WHD

[Ash Faulkner]

A little Argy-bargy in the Malvinas may have given her an election but it did not give the UK an independent voice on the world stage. The UK was, and still is, America's yapping little poodle.

Strawman, I never said she gave Britain an 'independent' voice, few countries, if any, have that. I said she strengthened the voice, which is just a matter of historical fact. She pushed for a rebate of funding from the European Community, which against all the odds she won, and she helped direct Europe towards a stronger free market by taking a lead on the Single European Act. She was also key in convincing Ronald Reagan of the potential value of Gorbachev as an ally, and in pressuring George Bush to take military action against Saddam in the Gulf War.

The conspiracy theorist in me wouldn't put it past her doing this on purpose to Wales and to the north of England: destroying areas that never have and never will vote conservative.

That conspiracy theorist would have to be pretty ignorant of history then, because the Conservatives had a perfectly respectable showing in Scotland and the north of England before Thatcher - it was precisely the Thatcher era that made the Conservatives unpopular in these areas.

If you want to blame someone for the problems of the 1980s, you're going to have to go back a little further than 1979. I always find it funny that those on the left, even Marxists, become oddly enamoured with the Great Man theory of history as soon as the topic of Thatcher comes up. Suddenly this ravenous harpy appears, smashing Britain's wonderfully healthy industry and the laws of history all at once, joyfully destroying communities - which, as we know, is always a vote winner. Please. Thatcher inherited a country that was on its knees. Thirty years of socialism had syphoned entire parts of Britain off from economic reality, and when things finally came to a crunch, the country turned to someone who had the guts to put it right. That is why they kept re-electing her, and that is why every party that has any serious pretentions to power accepts what she did as correct. The nearest party to the policies of the 1970s are the BNP, and they don't seem to be doing so well, do they?

Margaret Thatcher was the leader this country needed. If you want villains in this story, blame the idiots of the Labour Government who nationalised huge parts of the economy for purely dogmatic reasons. Blaming Thatcher for the undeniable strife of the 1980s is like blaming the doctor because the medicine tastes bitter.

[kingbee]

That conspiracy theorist would have to be pretty ignorant of history then, because the Conservatives had a perfectly respectable showing in Scotland and the north of England before Thatcher - it was precisely the Thatcher era that made the Conservatives unpopular in these areas.

I must admit my conspiracist's knowledge of northern English voting tendencies isn't too hot, but he would like to point out that conservatives have historically done shit in my part of the world, as he pointed out.

And on the other part of your post, I don't think anyone thinks that the UK was doing well until Thatcher came: it's just that she made the place a whole lot shitter than it should have been. If she 'put it right' as you put it, I'd hate to see someone who made it worse.

The nearest party to the policies of the 1970s are the BNP, and they don't seem to be doing so well, do they?

Yeah, cos they're really going to do amazingly in this election

[ingliz]

She pushed for a rebate of funding from the European Community, which against all the odds she won

Thatcher only secured a modest increase in the rebate. Under the terms of its entry to the EEC in 1973, Britain received back from Brussels £1 for every £2 it paid over in excess contributions; a rebate of 50%. In '84, at Fontainebleau, Thatcher managed to win a rebate of 66% after threatening to bring the business of the EC to a halt. Mr Murdoch and 'The Sun' painted this as a historic victory when in reality it was a humiliating climbdown. She had originally insisted on 100%.

Francois Mitterrand, the late French president who once famously said that Thatcher had the "eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe", believed his adversary had suffered a humiliating defeat which saw her cry in private.

And as to you saying she increased national wealth when the consensus had been the inevitability of decline?

The consensus was correct;

The European Commission yesterday dealt an embarrassing blow to the British government, in a confidential report to ministers on Britain's rebate from its contributions to the European Community budget.

To the relief of British officials, the report recommends that the rebate, under which Britain has got back almost 9bn pounds of the contributions it has paid to the Community over the past five years, should remain unchanged. But the Commission's reasoning may embarrass the government. It argued that the justification for the rebate to endure is that Britain has become dramatically poorer in relation to its EC partners over the past eight years.

In 1985, according to the Commission paper, Britain's GDP per head was 3.1 per cent higher than the EC average. By 1992, although Spain and Portugal had dragged down the average, its per capita GDP was 5.5 per cent below it. On some counts, Britain is the fifth poorest EC member.

"Maggie" was in charge for 6 of those 8 years; she resigned in 1990.

[Tainari88]

I know she was none too popular with the Scottish either. The Welsh and the Scottish did not like her policies. Scotland did not respond well to her poll tax. She was an upper middle class shopkeeper's daughter with a merchant's mentality and her brand of conservatism was individualistic, class conscious and detrimental to most of the working people in the UK.

She was popular for her Reaganite style of rhetoric, and I found her incredibly anti-working class. As a leader she was influential only because she supported the upper middle class, and the ruling class ,and made their lives easier. And they as a class had more 'clout'.

She was a conservative that I thought only made things worse for the lower classes. And for that alone I don't support her policies and find her a politician who is an opportunist without any true sense of social service. As most conservatives are self-serving and snobs anyway. Of the worst kind.

[Potemkin]

She was an upper middle class shopkeeper's daughter with a merchant's mentality and her brand of conservatism was individualistic, class conscious and detrimental to most of the working people in the UK.

She was lower middle class, actually. She was the daughter of a provincial greengrocer, and it showed. As Heseltine once said, he found that what she called "gut instinct" was usually little more than lower middle class prejudice. She was highly class conscious, but against both the working class and the traditional upper classes - essentially, she saw social value only in her own class of lower middle class small proprietors. Ironically, her actual policies had the unintended effect of decimating that class with a series of sharp recessions interspersed with unsustainable booms. The ones who benefited were the financial whizzkids in the City, and we all know how that ended....

[Tainari88]

Well Potemkin that makes her even worse that I thought. Lol. Thank you for your elucidating evaluation. Lol. She sucked.

[William_H_Dougherty]

What I don't understand, is you get all these leftists on these forums bashing her and saying "she was none to popular"...

...why did she win elections?

3 majority governments if I'm not mistaken.

- WHD

[ingliz]

she was none too popular

1979 General Election - 44% of the vote on a 76% voter turnout

33% support in the country - Conservatives won 53% of the seats

1983 General Election - 42% of the vote on a 72% voter turnout

30% support in the country - Conservatives won 61% of the seats

1987 General Election - 42% of the vote on a 75% voter turnout

32% support in the country - Conservatives won 58% of the seats

...why did she win elections?

The British electoral system and a bit of gerrymandering always helps.

[The bill] immediately lays the Conservative Party open to the charge of the greatest gerrymandering in the last 150 years of British history.

[RonPaulalways]

What I know about Thatcher is that the UK was known as the "sick man of Europe" in the 70s before she came to power. Unions had a stranglehold on society, freedom was limited, and individuals were persecuted by the socialists in the government (e.g. it was illegal to own a phone).

After she came to power the top income tax bracket was reduced from 92% to 30%, and tax revenues increased significantly. Regulations and state monopolies for unions were eliminated, and the economy began to grow.