[spodi]

I was bored a few nights ago so I rented The Iron Lady starring Merryl Streep. As much as the movie in my opinion was garbage and it was a stupidly surreal political film comparable to JFK by Oliver Stone I would like to know what you conseratives think about Mrs. Thatcher and what she did and did not do for Great Britain. I'm all eyes.

[nucklepunche]

As a center-right American here are my views on Thatcher. She was necessary at the time she came along in history because Britain truly was crippled by unions and bureaucracy. To consider her to have been "far-right" is absurd, if you want to see the true radical right come to America. She kept the NHS in place for one and unions had run amok in Britain more than they ever have in the USA at her time. By American standards of today she would be a moderate Republican which goes to show both how radically leftward Britain drifted in the 60s and 70s and how rightward America has drifted.

Thatcher was closeley associated with Reagan so I can't assess her without also commenting on him. Reagan was America's Thatcher, like Thatcher he came at a time when he was needed. He was a great communicator and could rally the American people. He did change the consensus of America in the right direction on some things. On the other hand Reagan also was somewhat responsible for introducing "sound bite politics" that have hurt American discourse today. He is given too much credit for ending the Cold War but his economic policies did usher in a 25 year era of prosperity from 1983 to 2007 (although repealing Glass-Steagall in 1999 set this up to fail). Reagan and Thatcher were not perfect leaders but better than the alternatives at the time.

The difference between Reagan and Thatcher is the direction their respective parties have taken since that time. The Tories have unfortunately become politically confused in recent years. They are too much like New Labour light and their main problem is that they try to please everybody far too much. This is why UKIP is so popular, but if UKIP is too extreme it is the Tories fault for allowing them to rise up for not standing up for any set of principles. If the Tories problem is being too unprincipled the Republicans have the opposite problem.

I have always said politics is about finding the golden mean between pragmatism and principle. Republicans have shown the dangerous side of being simply too principled. There is this sort of "fall on our swords" attitude in the GOP today where everybody is trying to one up each other, if the Tories fail to have a coherent program because they want to please everybody Republicans cannot have a coherent program because everybody sees everybody else as being a traitor to the party. This is why in spite of Obama's unpopularity the Republicans are not winning in landslides, because too many moderates see a party obsessed with alienating them as much as possible.

[OllytheBrit]

What a brilliant and succinct post - my compliments on it nucklepunche, and it exquisitely sums up my thoughts and conclusions. 'Cometh the hour, cometh the man/woman'? Reagan and she were the last of the conviction leaders, and we (the US and the UK) have been cursed with poseurs, egotists, career politicians, and nondescripts ever since. Statesmen/women? Forget it - they're a thing of the past. But at the time she was shafted by traitorous amateurs she was at the point of going the way of all those used to power, and delusional signs were beginning to appear: so she arrived at the right time, and changed the global reputation of this country from one to be pitied to one to be respected. Now look at it - little better than a failed banana state. RIP.

[nucklepunche]

Basically here are my views on what Reagan did wrong.

First, the Iran-Contra thing is a stain on his career. I believe the evidence shows Reagan was asleep at the wheel on this one but that he himself was not culpable for the actions taken. He should have had better control of his administration, but so many presidents have run into this.

Secondly, I think he pushed the War on Drugs too hard. I am not in favor of legalizing any currently illegal drug for recreational purposes (although I am in favor of some medical uses) but I think fighting an actual war on drugs with the goal of a drug free society is utopian. Society will never be drug free, it should be acknowledged that drug laws exist to keep drug use as low as possible but not eliminate it.

Mandatory minimums in particular got too long, in the end it must be realized that it is not the severity of sentences that deters crime as it is swift and sure enforcement. Our nation seems to have turned the corner on this, but it should be remembered that in the 80s and 90s most mainstream politicians were on the "tough on crime" bandwagon, not just Reagan, in fact Clinton carried it forward too.

As for Margaret Thatcher her main blunder was the community charge. Although from my reading of history poor people got charged a lower amount poll taxes are political disaster and this is her pushing ideology too far. In a sense it was like when Romney came out and said the 47% stuff. It is one thing to think it but in politics you cannot just give your opponents a major gift like that. Thatcher's opponents long argued she favored the wealthy at the expense of the poor and she basically said she was going to give them an issue to run on that basis.

[OllytheBrit]

Basically here are my views on what Reagan did wrong.

I have no comment on what Reagan did or didn't do because I didn't take as much interest; my main interest is in domestic politics.

Secondly, I think he pushed the War on Drugs too hard. I am not in favor of legalizing any currently illegal drug for recreational purposes (although I am in favor of some medical uses) but I think fighting an actual war on drugs with the goal of a drug free society is utopian. Society will never be drug free, it should be acknowledged that drug laws exist to keep drug use as low as possible but not eliminate it.

Anyone who thinks that particular war can be won should read The Cobra by Frederick Forsyth. The denouement is devastating in that the US government, at the very point of imminent success, orders the operation to be cancelled and the status quo ante restored.

As for Margaret Thatcher her main blunder was the community charge. Although from my reading of history poor people got charged a lower amount poll taxes are political disaster and this is her pushing ideology too far. In a sense it was like when Romney came out and said the 47% stuff. It is one thing to think it but in politics you cannot just give your opponents a major gift like that. Thatcher's opponents long argued she favored the wealthy at the expense of the poor and she basically said she was going to give them an issue to run on that basis.

I don't agree it was a blunder, because the rationale was that everybody should be entitled to all social services and so everybody should pay something for it according to their ability to pay. As an example, my nephew was unemployed at the time but could easily pay the extremely small obligation from his welfare payments, and not being a freeloader was willing to pay it without complaint. TBM's mistake was making both heads of families responsible for the central charge individually. The result was that the replacement (the Council Tax) led to many anomalies, an example being that a single person living next door to 3-4-5 wage-earners must pay the same amount because the houses are of similar value. And so the freeloaders, now being exempted, are free to (as before) spend the saving fecklessly - think drugs, booze, fags, mobile phones, Playstations etc., because more often than not they have more disposable income than a full-time tax-paying wage-earner who is supporting a family, and is obliged to pay more Council Tax (to cover the shortfall?) than would otherwise be the case. So her mistake was giving in to the 'empty vessel' siren voices rather than making a small tweak in the joint heads-of-family obligation.

[nucklepunche]

I did mention that the blunder was a political one, not a moral one. I think that the opposition sort of was able to frame the debate to their terms, this happens in politics sometimes. In the USA we have property taxes and since home ownership is more common even among working class people (for renters it is generally built into rent rates) it is the main source of local revenue.

[Max Linder]

Thatcher was a vindictive cunt. Her failings were moral as well as political. I agree that the unions needed dealt with; but she flooded the mines in an act of economic sabbotage/mindless vandalism. The community charge meant that the multi-millionaire duke paid the same as the road sweeper. Fairness would have been a land tax; not a tax on living. She gave birth to casino economics and destroyed our manufacturing industry. She deliberately forced millions on to the dole in a bid to lower wages.

[spodi]

Thatcher was a vindictive cunt.

God damn, Max! Did you at least watch her beautifully built biopic and did it, in any way, sway your opinion of her in her favor? A teeny bit?

[Drlee]

I agree generally with what knucklepunch said. I would also point out that Thatcher too was able to make Brits feel better about themselves.

I think she as Reagan, though friends, were further apart economically than their public pronouncements indicate.

Reagan grew the deficit exponentially, raised taxes in 6 of his 8 years in office and almost singlehandedly changed the public perception of our middle class from our greatest accomplishment to the very definition of mediocrity.

Thatcher was smarter than Reagan by a long shot. (But then so is Brittany Spears.) They movie about Thatcher was pathetic. It was a political hatchet job filled with overacting and under-researching. I watched it in First Class on Delta Airlines which should have set the tone for the movie. Even that didn't help.

Most importantly.

Thatcher would have looked much better in Bangs. All women do.

[spodi]

^Agreed about the movie. As for Thatcher I don't know much about her reign as I am a Yankee but relating her to Reagan, is she more remembered as a great personality vs policy and you could tie that into today's current president.

[blackjack21]

The movie was total garbage.

I thought Thatcher was long overdue for Britain. The UK was rudderless in the early to mid 70s, much like the US at the time and right now as a matter of fact.

The problems with the UK then had a great deal to do with a scholarly elite trying to impose top-down control on the economy and effectively stifling growth and innovation. In the US it's best characterized by John Kenneth Galbraith and his ilk. Barack Obama epitomizes that sort of attitude. The problem is that elitists see complexity and embrace it as a reflection that they are smarter than everyone else. There is a certain laziness in elitism. They optimize policy for a particular slice of time, and then fail to make ongoing adjustments as the underlying assumptions change. That an optimization often works initially is part of its deceptive allure. The underlying assumptions always change, so the best laid complex plans always fail in time. That's very consistent with the law of entropy, but this is not obvious to an elitist.

Thatcher, like Reagan, understood that bureaucracy was the problem, not the solution. Bureaucracy and scientific management were 19th Century models for a simple mercantilist empire that has far outlasted a simpler economy and an imperial administration. As the economy became more complex, simplicity became more desirable. Complexity doesn't scale, but it can be encapsulated on a smaller scale in high scale systems.

First, the Iran-Contra thing is a stain on his career. I believe the evidence shows Reagan was asleep at the wheel on this one but that he himself was not culpable for the actions taken. He should have had better control of his administration, but so many presidents have run into this.

Reagan was successful in toppling the communists in Nicaragua. Note that the story blew up when Oliver North decided to cut Israel out of the action. Somehow, Caspar Weinberger blew the whistle and got away scot free.

Secondly, I think he pushed the War on Drugs too hard. I am not in favor of legalizing any currently illegal drug for recreational purposes (although I am in favor of some medical uses) but I think fighting an actual war on drugs with the goal of a drug free society is utopian. Society will never be drug free, it should be acknowledged that drug laws exist to keep drug use as low as possible but not eliminate it.

It was fought, because the proceeds were going to fund communists insurgencies. It had nothing to do with utopia.

[nucklepunche]

I think she as Reagan, though friends, were further apart economically than their public pronouncements indicate.

Reagan grew the deficit exponentially, raised taxes in 6 of his 8 years in office and almost singlehandedly changed the public perception of our middle class from our greatest accomplishment to the very definition of mediocrity.

Thatcher was smarter than Reagan by a long shot. (But then so is Brittany Spears.) They movie about Thatcher was pathetic. It was a political hatchet job filled with overacting and under-researching. I watched it in First Class on Delta Airlines which should have set the tone for the movie. Even that didn't help.

Thatcher was better than Reagan. The thing with Reagan is I feel like he appealed to the goofus wing of the GOP too much. They were really just reactionary Southern Democrats and not true Republicans. Although I think it was purely political on his part he did too much to welcome them into the fold. I am more with Nelson Rockefeller when he said, "The Republican Party must repudiate these people," on the floor of the '64 convention and he was talking about Goldwater and Goldwater found them too extreme.

My views on Goldwater (please correct me because I knew the man) is that lot of his supporters supported him because they thought he was more on their side than he actually was. He was never in favor of segregation or any of that, but a lot like the far-right believes Reagan was one of them they believed Goldwater was (this was pre-Internet of course) one of them but he actually was not. I think that Nelson Rockefeller, for all his wishy-washyness, did warn Republicans back then of what the party could become and unfortunately he was right. The sad thing is now Rockefeller and Goldwater would both be shaking their heads at what it has become.

[Max Linder]

Thatcher, like Reagan, understood that bureaucracy was the problem, not the solution.

Funny that it was Thatcher who introduced managers and other bureaucrats into the health service. So clinical decisions were being made by non-healthcare professionals. Her monetrist policies were a complete failure as inflation and interest rates increased simultaneously.

[Drlee]

The sad thing is now Rockefeller and Goldwater would both be shaking their heads at what it has become.

Absolutely. There really is no party platform anymore. They run like hell to the right to get the racist, disenfranchised, sexist vote in the primaries and then claw their way to the middle for the election. Look at the recent ship-jumping over same-sex marriage. The dear republicans never really meant that gays could not actually get married. It was just the gerhatcehated legal principle of helorphica as you all knew all along.

Goldwater hated large government at a national level. He felt stuff is best handled at the state level. So when he opposed federal hand-out programs it was not because he disliked hand-outs so much as he felt that this was the responsibility of the states.

My favorite Rockefeller quote:

It is essential that we enable young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most exciting eras in history, and to have a sense of purpose in relation to it.

Reagan actually did this pretty well all the while destroying any chance young people had to actually do it. Nixon, the last real conservative president, knew that he had not only to appeal to the youth vote but actually respond to it.

Sadly, these days, young people are irrelevant in the political process. So is anyone without much money.

[spodi]

Drlee, on youth participation I couldn't agree more. 2008 my generation was mobilized. I left my hometown for a few years and when I came back and talked with peers who were motivated back then, now sat there with a bong talking about how they didn't even follow politics anymore. The same thing happened even more extremely in the late 60s and early 70s. In both cases idealist youth's hopes going down the drain with government's policies and the social situation they found themselves in. Youth today went to school to work at a starbucks. If they got something better then minimum wage its not much more and now we find 28 year olds living at home when they thought they would be a parent, not living with theirs. It is depressing and that's why they've given up. Disenfranchisement. Here in America its stagnant and depressing, at least in the middle east and Europe they tried but they also failed more so then America's occupy movement.

Also because this thread is about Thatcher well Thatcher to The U.K., the U.K. to the Clash, the Clash to Career opportunities, the song. That sums up the situation for people in there 20s around the world today.

[blackjack21]

Thatcher was better than Reagan.

She had a lot more privitization to do. British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways, and so on. A lot of the utilities were privatized too. In the US, it was more about deregulation than privatization. By contrast, Reagan had Conrail?

The thing with Reagan is I feel like he appealed to the goofus wing of the GOP too much. They were really just reactionary Southern Democrats and not true Republicans. Although I think it was purely political on his part he did too much to welcome them into the fold. I am more with Nelson Rockefeller when he said, "The Republican Party must repudiate these people," on the floor of the '64 convention and he was talking about Goldwater and Goldwater found them too extreme.

The Democrats maintained a 40-year majority in the House because of people like Nelson Rockefeller, and that was their basic design--just as it is with John Boehner and his ilk.

Funny that it was Thatcher who introduced managers and other bureaucrats into the health service.

She also privitized over 40 major British firms.

Her monetrist policies were a complete failure as inflation and interest rates increased simultaneously.

Interest rates break the back of inflation. The interest rates increase when inflation increases. What would you expect?

[nucklepunche]

Drlee, on youth participation I couldn't agree more. 2008 my generation was mobilized. I left my hometown for a few years and when I came back and talked with peers who were motivated back then, now sat there with a bong talking about how they didn't even follow politics anymore. The same thing happened even more extremely in the late 60s and early 70s. In both cases idealist youth's hopes going down the drain with government's policies and the social situation they found themselves in. Youth today went to school to work at a starbucks. If they got something better then minimum wage its not much more and now we find 28 year olds living at home when they thought they would be a parent, not living with theirs. It is depressing and that's why they've given up. Disenfranchisement. Here in America its stagnant and depressing, at least in the middle east and Europe they tried but they also failed more so then America's occupy movement.

I don't think Obama was just going to wave a magic wand and fix everything, he sort of ended up about how I thought he would. When he ran in 2008 there were people who genuinely thought he would transform America, some were very excited others were terrified. I remember thinking how hyped he was by both sides and it turned out exactly how I said. I don't blame him for everything that has gone wrong but I do share a different governing philosophy than he does.

This being said what did you expect him to do? I have seen this same phenomenon where people really thought they were just going to wake up in a prosperous America the next day. The 1929 depression lasted up until about 1940, it took no less than ten years to recover from. We had the largest economic dip since that time (in fact conditions would be nearly as bad if our GDP did not have a significantly higher level to fall from than 1929). It took ten years, so people who are wailing about the end of America should come talk to me around 2018-2020. The main thing is to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, but I view the 2008 crash as a sort of once in several decades type of thing.

She had a lot more privitization to do. British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways, and so on. A lot of the utilities were privatized too. In the US, it was more about deregulation than privatization. By contrast, Reagan had Conrail?

It is true that Britain was much further to the left than America ever got. The thing about the British system is it allows faster change, it allowed the nation to move to the left faster but it also allowed it to move to the right faster. The founders of America wanted things to move slowly. Reagan did privatize Conrail, but I think the breakup of the Bell Telephone monopoly also occured under him. He never got around to privatizing Amtrak.

[spodi]

^Yeah, youth idealism, we're stupid, I admit it. I saw my teenage cousins a few weeks back and they want to major in English or the arts when they go to college. Duh duh duh debt. I didn't crush their unattainable hopes and dreams. Does that make me bad?

[nucklepunche]

^Yeah, youth idealism, we're stupid, I admit it. I saw my teenage cousins a few weeks back and they want to major in English or the arts when they go to college. Duh duh duh debt. I didn't crush their unattaible hopes and dreams. Does that make me bad?

I am not sure, there will probably eventually be a bailout of student debt. Although I would favor a restructuring of the whole system toward universal income based repayment as a compromise although ideally I think the student loan system should be abolished as too many people attend college. I think public education should be limited to K-12 as it is necessary people get a minimum level of education, but I think in absensce of public colleges and trade schools private trade schools will fill the gap.

[spodi]

I am not sure, there will probably eventually be a bailout of student debt. Although I would favor a restructuring of the whole system toward universal income based repayment as a compromise although ideally I think the student loan system should be abolished as too many people attend college. I think public education should be limited to K-12 as it is necessary people get a minimum level of education, but I think in absensce of public colleges and trade schools private trade schools will fill the gap.

Yeah but their is a second problem with education today. Academic inflation. Too many college educated youths and not enough jobs for their specified field. Well major in something practical right? How about a STEM degree. Inflated too. India had an epidemic of too many American educated engineers in 2006, before the stupid recession. Public intellectuals recommend skilled trades as an alternative to college which is great, right? Not when you have unemployed and underemployed college grads competing with the working class drop outs who don't have the money or mind for the scam of today's higher ed. Those apprenticeships were designed for the common sense possessing blue collar 18 year old, not the 28 year old with a masters in general literature analysis. Third alternative? Join the military, become an officer and be a leader. Great right? Flooded again. So the military sends the kid with an undergrad degree to the enlisted side, which you need not much ed for. Here's your former Starbucks barista with his or her bachelors degree in philosophy questioning why his or her lieutenant makes more money then they do but have the same degree in philosophy. I'm sure high school guidance counselors are still recommending the obsolete undergrad degree to get ahead in life. "Don't worry John or Jane your different then the rest and if you follow your dreams, you will go far, trust me, I'm your buddy, buddy". Top that off with out sourcing which may be as dead as the job market with the future of job automation and you have any even smaller pool of jobs with more competition. Mathematically its not possible, just like the rising cost of living with stagnant wages. It is quite scary and quite global. As humans who hate change and are comfortable being stuck in our ways, our future is going to be rough. We're only at the beginning of the road into the 21st century trip. Whats interesting too is no one has a solution. We all reconize these problems but can't find a solution. Both the drop out and the doctorate holder can't find a solution. These problems are too complex. If you disagree, please inform me of a new alternative. Lastly, if you want to tap into the collective consciousness today Google "job market is". What word is to the right of the first auto search result?