Some people seem to have a strange psychological need for a firm whip in somebody else’s hands …

It also pays to remember that Thatcher and her policies were profoundly unpopular until the Great Patriotic War against the Argies.

Thatchers’ policies were most certainly bankrolled by north sea oil and the sell-off of state controlled industries. The liberal rhetoric was just that and nothing more.. Those who believe that the economic success of the 80s was something to do with economic liberalism and the leadership style of Maggie are living in cloud-cuckoo land.

The neo-liberals in the UK have had two historic economic windfalls in North Sea oil and globalisation – trousering most of the money themselves and pissing the rest away on tax cuts.

Another good article.

Love her or hate her, she made a difference to Britain depending where you stood on any of the important issues. Having survived her reign of terror myself, it’s a very mixed bag of results from a personal point of view.

Looking first at her as a Conservative ……not too good but suitable for the time. She was naturally business and middle class orientated. Not so with aristocracy, academics and ‘talking-head’ politicians. I would also say she was slightly cruel in her attitude to those below her. As one writer put it at the time, “her attitude to colleagues says it all “you only made me your leader because I’m the best man amongst you all. Now you will follow me without question and I don’t want your opinions” Amusing ? Maybe now but not at the time when we realised that her tough no-nonsense attitude was going to keep her in power for 11 years !

Looking at her as a woman – wow ….yes I said wow so tough, I always fancied her.

Looking at her as a fellow human being – scary ! She did however show her human side when Mark got lost in the desert.

I can understand tories wanting somebody like her again. It would at least put clear ground between the parties again and make Labour come forward with an alternative policy for cuts.

Thatcher’s greatest crime in my eyes was her assault upon the working class, which she, in true rabid small-shopkeeper mode, detested. However, for all the praise for her in the right-wing press, the fact that even today Thatcher’s idolators still rabbit on about trade union ‘wreckers’ when resistance is mooted against the Con-Lib cuts shows that they feel that her efforts in this field didn’t go far enough. And that is scary.

@ 5. Dr Paul

Not sure on that one ? Suspect she grew up in a working class economy as a shopkeepers daughter, saw working class in their shop almost every day but had absolutely no knowledge of them as people.

Um, I think it was Attila the Hen, which did rather pin down her tendency to nag rather than reason (to be fair nagging was the only form of discourse your average middle-aged Eighties male Tory would pay attention to from a woman).

Actually in a lot of ways she was actually less ideological than those who came after her. She tended to reject advice to those who gave it and then act on it after consideration. She would probably have never have privatised the railways like Major or air traffic control like Blair.

The real danger is her legacy. While she tended to use ideology and rhetoric to cover what were often more pragmatic positions, those who followed after her (in all three Parties) really believed all that rubbish and it has become the worldview of the comfortable political classes. Any gap between theory and reality can be papered over, as the quote from Dobbs suggests, by repeating the theory louder.

Anthony Barnett wisely reminds us that Thatcher’s “success” was based on oil money and privatisation receipts. Rather than reinvesting (compare the Norwegians with their sovereign wealth fund) this subsidised the lowering of tax rates – and incidentally oil company profits. Subsequent governments have scratched around trying to repeat this but the cupboard is bare and the wells running dry.

The demands for the “smaller state” – without actually saying which bit of the state you want to get rid of – is the latest meaningless mantra from the political classes. As Barnett implies, the worst of it is that gesture now substitutes for thought. The result is a near religious belief in the power of the markets, providing the right sacrifices are made (always by other people). Of course those preaching this gospel may be no more sincere than many a medieval churchman, but, like them, they know its personal advantages.

Thatcherism, like fascism is a disease, and once you have been infected there is no cure. Notice how The far Right always needs enemies, dragons to slay. Dobbs is an idiot, Ireland is in the mess it is in because it adopted the Thatcherism claptrap that he claims to support. But then Thacerites are always lecturing people to take responsibility, while never applying it to themselves. Responsibility, like taxes and morals are for the little people.

Thatcherism was just a polite way of selling fascism, and the loner she went on the more people in her own party realised it. In the end, just like Hitler in the Bunker, she destroyed herself.

An arguably more balanced and extensively documented critique of Thatcher’s government is Simon Jenkins: Thatcher and Sons (Penguin Books, 2006).

Whatever else, I’m unpersuaded about interpreting the resignations of Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson as clear indications that Mrs Thatcher had become deranged near the end of her premiership.

On the advice of the late Alan Walters, her personal economic adviser, she was sceptical about the claimed benefits of joining the Pound to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), a policy they were set upon. It fell to John Major, as Chancellor following Lawson’s resignation in October 1989, to actually sign Britain up to the ERM. As events turmed out, her scepticism was well-founded.

It’s perhaps especially worth recalling – since many get it wrong – that the railways and the coal board were privatised by John Major’s government, not by Mrs Thatcher’s governments during the 1980s.

IMO Brian Walden’s assessment of Mrs Thatcher yields important insights:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4655204.stm

He makes the telling point IMO that she really wasn’t in the Conservative tradition at all. Harold Macmillan famously likened her policy of privatising the nationalised industries to “selling the family silver”. Even so, privatisation of state-owned business assets was widely emulated in many other countries. She acknowledged the inspiration from Nicholas Ridely:

“Free-market economics was always Nick’s passion. And he had a longer, better pedigree in that respect than most Thatcherites—or indeed I may add—than Thatcher herself. His first vote against a Conservative Government bailing out nationalised industries was in 1961. To be so right, so early on, is not to have seen the light—it is to have lit it…He would have been a superb Chancellor.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Ridley%2C_Baron_Ridley_of_Liddesdale

See also this from Brian Walden on Mrs Thatcher’s early preference for John Major to be her successor:

“In 1987 I interviewed her in Downing Street for the ‘Sunday Times’ and she said in answer to my question about her eventual retirement that she intended to go ‘on and on.’ After the interview she asked me to stay and have a drink. Then she asked if she could tell me in confidence who she thought her successor should be. I agreed, and she said ‘John Major.’ I was speechless with surprise. This was before Major had been Foreign Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer, both jobs she later gave him. I think he was Chief Secretary at the time and wasn’t anybody’s front runner for Tory leader – except hers. . . Major wasn’t a Thatcherite, quite the opposite. Later on after she’d helped him to become leader and Prime Minister the relationship between them became poisonous. How she can have possibly supported that Major, who later pronounced her ‘mad’ and ‘loopy’ and wanted her, as he put it, ‘isolated and destroyed,’ shared her views is beyond my understanding.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_westminster_hour/3701928.stm

Btw “During Margaret Thatcher’s premiership public spending grew in real terms by an average of 1.1% a year, while during John Major’s premiership it grew by an average of 2.4% a year.”
http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/05ebn2.pdf

Worth remembering after 13 years of Labour government, this country has higher levels of inequality than it did after 18 years of Thatcher/Major Conservative governments. Under Thatcher manufacturing fell from 25.8% of GDP to 22.5%; under Blair it fell from 20.0% to 12.4%, a rate of decline which was almost three times faster.

Thatcher was bad, Blair was worse.

@10: Thatcher was bad, Blair was worse.”

Compare this news report from March last year:

“The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and better education than their parents is lower in Britain than in other western countries, the OECD says”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility

The Thatcher ‘legacy’ is a myth, fervently believed in as much by many of her detractors as her worshippers.

Let us be in no doubt; Thatcher was a formidable class-warrior, and a powerful figurehead, but putting the focus on her is to fall foul of the ‘Great (Wo)man theory of Politics and so ignore, or skip over the very real class attack that went on in the Tory years.

After the miners defeated Heath in 1974, the radical right of the Party set about ensuring their side would win next time. Planned long in advance a list was drawn up by the late and unlamented Nicholas Ridley of the stategy and tactics that were to be used:

- tooling up the Police
- swingeing changes to employment law, especially regarding unfair dimissal
- draconian anti-union legislation
- deploying MI5 and Special Branch to infiltrate the NUM, to the point where Scargill’s number two was an MI5 plant
- giving police unprocedented powers to stop the free movement of people
- organising scab labour well in advance
- organising a breakaway union

They then took on the big unions one-by-one while keeping the miners quiet by ramping up pay and production while promising a great future for British Coal. When there was a big enough stockpile the Tories timed their attack virtually to the minute.

Scargill was between a rock and a hard place, as the Tories had planned him to be. The miners were already out – they knew what the score was, as did everybody else in the Country, and Scargill rightly backed them and called for solidarity across the NUM in defiance of the Tory laws. He knew well enough what would happen if it they had balloted – the courts would have found a way to negate the ballot, delay it, or whatever, and the fight would have been lost then and there.

In any event, the die was cast long before the first pit shut, and putting the blame on Scargill’s ‘deranged and undemocratic syndicalism’ (incidentally I respectfully suggest a little more research on syndicalism eg The Wobblies).

These were class forces at work, and it is profoundly wrong-headed to focus on the individual actors when looking at those years. John Major was far more successful in terms of pushing through attacks that were far more damaging than Thatcher’s, yet no-one talks of his ‘legacy’,chiefly because he wasn’t the Media creation she was

2nd to last paragraph should be
“In any event, the die was cast long before the first pit shut, and putting the blame on Scargill’s ‘deranged and undemocratic syndicalism’ (incidentally I respectfully suggest a little more research on syndicalism eg The Wobblies) is misguided, to say the least.”

there was a larger gap between rich and poor after13 years of labour, but remember thehmeless i cardboard city wreen’t on the register during the 80s so they didn’t count and secondly child povert did fal during Labours time, notas small as in was in 79 , but still better,
Regarding the law on movemnt during the Miners strike,there had ben no change in th law, some police even quiestioned was blocking miners from kent going through the Dartfoord tunnel legal, I reall David Owen had a hand in setting up the democratic union of mineworkers it waqs nowt to do with the Tories,

@12:

Nicholas Ridley proposed the strategy for dealing with industrial relations in the coal industry in The Economist of May 27, 1978 (p.21-23). The article was there for anyone to read:
http://www.co-opnet.coop/viewtopic.php?t=367&highlight=ridley+report

The fact is that the TUC, the Labour Party and other unions backed off supporting the mining strike because in Yorkshire – where the strike started – there was no strike ballott. The strike was enforced through intimidation.

As for external influences on the NUM, try this:

“Also named is Vic Allen, a retired professor of economics at Leeds university, who was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and went on the first Aldermaston march. A firm Stalinist, it is alleged he passed on information about CND to his East German handlers.

“After the revelation this weekend that he had been ‘an agent of influence’, he said he had no regrets. . .

“Prof Allen was an ally of Arthur Scargill during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. In 1987 he published a book, The Russians Are Coming. His pro-Soviet views were well known. . .”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,271697,00.html

I regret nothing, says Stasi spy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/09/99/britain_betrayed/451366.stm

The fact is that both the Thatcher and Major government sank billions of taxpayers’ money into supporting the nationalised coal mining industry. Check out the massive external borrowings of the nationalised Coal Board in David Butler: Twentieth Century Political Facts 1900-2000, page 444 – which is hardly a partisan source:

1979 – £600m; 1980 – £700m; 1981 – £800m; 1982 – £1,200m; 1983 – £1,000m; 1984 – £1,200m; 1985 – 1,700m; 1986 – £400m; 1987 – £900m; 1988 – £900m; 1989 – £800m; 1990 – £1,300m; 1991 – £900m; 1992 – £600m; 1993 – £800m; 1994 – £1,400m; 1995 – £700m.

The strike was about sinking even more taxpayers’ money into the nationalised mining industry when, up to the strike, there were increasing problems in finding new places above ground to stockpile surplus coal for generating electricity.

Subsequent financial viability problems of the nationalised coal industry were exacerbated by the fall in world oil prices. From about mid 1985 through to mid 1986, the world oil price about halved.

Tks esp Roger and Bob B. I was not trying to assess Thatcher’s period in a balanced way (much too long for Sunny) I was looking at the present day cult. Old Trot gets it wrong. Of course they prepared for a showdown. But the miners in Yorkshire would have voted against a strike at the height of summer which is why, I have it on good authority, Scargill decided not to ballot them. They had much better sense of the balance of forces than he did.

Roger @ seven calls it right. She was not ideological, at least to begin with. The very cautious 1979 manifesto is clear proof. All UK elections are won from the centre and she was fortunate in 83 and 87 that the Labour Party was even more bonkers than she was. She fell from grace when she actually started to believe all that Road to Freedom nonsense. Unfortunately, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron all mistook her electoral succcess as evidence that history will judge her as being correct. The prime minister who drags us out of the present, third and greatest of the Thatcherite recessions will be the one (Conservative, Labour or non-neo-liberal Lib Dem) who returns us to the Keynesian growth policies of the immediate post-war period.

The whole issue of balloting was a diversion, and was used time and time again as a stick to beat the miners with. Even if there had been a ballot for strike action the media rottweilers of the Tories would still have savaged them. The BBC would still have lied, the Police, re-inforced with squaddies would still have beaten the shite out of them. Workers don’t go on strike easily, certainly not at the speed with which the strike grew, and it was ballot enough that they’d walked out.

By Summer, the momentum was there to carry the strike through, but yes, it was Summer, with massive stockpiles left on the ground. Scargill didn’t want to waste that momentum and argued that the stockpiles weren’t big enough to carry through the winter. This, however was not strictly true, as the import of coal increased, allowing the lights to stay on. And this is a criticism many have of Scargill, he called it wrong on that point. But this is what I meant by him being caught in a dilemma.

The lights stayed on and the miners lost. Nonetheless, it was touch-and-go. As Thatcher herself later acknowledged it came within a whisker of her resigning. In spite of the stacked deck, they nearly won. Which of us can say we would have called it differently in Scargill’s position? Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

Since the strike, we have seen in recent years a number of decisions by the British courts ruling strike ballots illegal through the tiniest of procedural niceties. Do you honestly think it would have been any different then? This was precisely what the whole balloting question was about. As for public support for the miners, it remained in the majority right up until the end of the strike. And when they went back we all felt defeated not by Thatcher herself, but by the whole fucking system.

Whatever the reasons, Scargill screwed up, but it was most certainly not because he was even more “undemocratic and deranged” than Thatcher. In fact I find that whole line of argument perfidious. The line “Thatcher may have been bad, but Scargill was worse” is nothing short of apologism for the savaging of the UK trade union movement and the concommitant destruction of entire industries and communities. That’s the true “Legacy”

@18: “The whole issue of balloting was a diversion . . ”

Naturally, it’s a curious coincidence that Hitler and Stalin, as well as every despot in between, also regarded uncontrolled balloting with deep suspicion.

It’s curious too that some NUM areas permitted strike ballots in 1984 – Wales, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, for example. But they knew better in Yorkshire where, in fact, there was widespread intimidation, extending even to women clerical workers of the coal board who weren’t on strike. NACODs, the colliery overmen’s union, also weren’t on strike in Yorkshire or elsewhere.

One outcome of the failure to ballot was that the TUC, the Labour Party and other unions backed off supporting the strike. Crucially, movement of coal from stockpiles to power stations continued.

With the huge stocks of generating coal above ground, the continuing coal production of mining areas which didn’t strike – like Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire – and the use of oil in dual burning power stations, electricity cuts weren’t necessary. By the beginning of 1985, miners in Yorkershire were already trickling back to work regardless of the Yorkshire NUM. The mining strike failed and was seen to fail. Effectively, there is now only a vestigial mining industry left in Britain.

Arguably, there are several reasons for highlighting how Mrs Thatcher’s governments changed the course of decline on which Britain was set by the end of the 1970s when it was widely regarded as the sick economy of western Europe.

Exhange controls were swept away in 1979. With the Single European Act of 1985, the notion of a genuine European common market became more than just a vague statement of aspiration. The Big Bang of 1986 in the Stock Exchange removed a host of restrictive practices and opened up a new era of greater competition in financial services markets. Much of the industrial relations legislation of her governments remains on the statute book unchanged now. New Labour governments continued to privatise state-owned business assets – indeed, until the financial crisis broke in November 2007, New Labour gave up on the very idea of public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

If we want to pick on notable failures of Thatcher governments, macroeoconomic policies were the most conspicuous failing.

Monetarism was formally abandoned in the autumn of 1985 and what followed it through to putting the Pound into the ERM was a thorough muddle, one consequence of which was a house-price bubble at the end of the 1980s; another was revived inflation.Dropping out of the ERM in September 1990, was a heavily disguised blessing – by the final quarter of 1995, the standardised unemployment rate had – at last – fallen below that in France, Germany and Italy and the employment of working age people in Britain was higher. Norman Lamont, as Chancellor, with the advice of Alan Budd, had set us off on the course of installing inflation targeting as the focused objective of monetary policy.

her own revolution was the ‘Big Bang’ that deregulated the City of London and helped lay the basis for the US-UK finance-led boom of the last thirty years. Today’s recession and economic crisis, however, was caused not by the wage inflation and low domestic productivity of her time but by the very forces that Thatcher herself unleashed…

Can you explain please why the abolition of the distinction between stock-jobbers and stock-brokers caused the credit crisis? Or was it perhaps the introduction of electronic trading? People throw around the phrase ‘Big Bang’ without the first idea of what the reforms were or what they meant. A far more important reform in terms of increasing risk in the financial sector was the removal of supervisory powers from the Bank of England.

16
Just to put the record straight, you can take it on good authoirity from this ex-Yorkshire miner that no one was intimidated to strike. Sure there was a very tiny minority who did not want to strike (mainly for personal financial reasons) and might probably have felt intimidated but this is quite different from positive action to create intimidation.

19
Ditto

As a working class boy from a very working class family, I’ll tell you what Thatcher meant to me.

Freedom.

No more Jag driving shop stewards door-stepping my dad for more dues to fund another pointless strike.

The encouragement to go out there, do something and have ambition. I didn’t have to work in a factory, I could go to university.

Lower taxation, more money in our pocket.

A lot of us were delighted she beat Scargill and were delighted the NUM got the bloody nose it richly deserved. The miners were lions led by donkeys and with union leaders like Jack Jones taking KGB money, it was not before time.

You also convieniently forget that up until 1984, the Conservative government poured £12bn (£30bn in today’s money) of public money into subsidies for car manufacturing.

As for blaming her deregulation of the City for our present malaise. I remember ‘her’ regulation of the City worked very well as the structure of SIBs and Super-SIBs dealt with three bank failures during the 1980s and 90s without the contagion spreading.

Rather it was Gordon Brown’s tri-partite arrangement instituted by the 1997 Bank of England Act that left the regulators unable to deal with a crisis.

And it wasn’t helped by Bill Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Stegall or the new Communities Re-investment Act that created the toxic financial cool-aid that poisoned the well.

Labour drank it up because Labour’s Third Way encouraged financial services to generate the tax revenues to spend, it had no industrial policy and as a result we have the imbalanced economy we have now.

Labour let massive firms like MG Rover go bust, it allowed 2m manufacturing jobs to disappear.

Still, don’t let that stop another 2 minute hate, you should be ashamed that yet again, Labour have left the dole queues longer and the country deeper in debt.

Tim J:- why was it a “Big” Bang if it was only a some small, technical rule changes?

23 – because it was the first deregulation of Stock rules since the war. However, if you’re going to blame the current recession on Big Bang, more than 20 years after the fact, you’re going to have to point to specific causes.

It’s double junk for another reason of course: Big Bang was a deregulation of the Stock Exchange. The abolition of fixed commission introduced a proper market into trading, the end of the jobbing/broker division put paid to the old school tie employment structure and the introduction of electronic trading (and the end of open-cry trading) increased efficiency and productivity. Absolutely none of this had any effect on risk-management and lending policies in investment banks 20 years later.

The removal of pointless regulation (why, for instance should every trade between brokers have to mediated by a jobber? What benefit would that have?) and the introduction of technological advances was an unalloyed good for the City.

22
Just to put the record straight I have not supported the LP for years, the lack of support for the miners indicated to me that labour were not a socialist party or at least they lost their bottle in the so-called progression to socialism. And that’s one thing which is not generally understood about Arthur Scargill compared to other uniion leaders – he was a marxist and the strike was more political than economic.
I’m happy that you have succeeded in your personal goals, are you still working-class or are you middle-class? The NUM funded several of its members to go to university, education is the real weapon of socialists
‘Lower taxation and money in our pocket’ – exactly who is this ‘our’ you refer to?

“yet again, Labour have left the dole queues longer ”

This is just pure factual inaccuracy. Unemployment was lower throughout labour’s period than the conservative period, and rose to the levels of 1997 again following the financial crises. Meaning that unemployment levels during recessions under labour were about the same as unemployment levels during tory booms. (ILO rates, NOMIS). This gets even worse for the tories if you break things down to regional levels, with pretty much every region except the south east generally worse under tory rule. It’s also worth noting you need to compare like with like, so look at unemployment levels under tory rule and labour rule during recessions, during recovery and at the peaks of booms. Then there is a clear conclusion. Unemployment goes up under tory rule.

The fact is that unemployment as a percentage of the workforce was higher when Labour left office in 2010 than in 1997.

And you are going to argue that it wasn’t.

Were you helping out Ol’ Al this morning?

@21: “Just to put the record straight, you can take it on good authoirity from this ex-Yorkshire miner that no one was intimidated to strike”

That’s simply untrue. I witnessed intimidation there at the time. Mass picketing – widely shown in media news broadcasts – was and was intended to be intimidating. The picketing and harassment of coal board women clerical workers, who weren’t on strike, was witnessed and reported. Families broke up and communities split when some went on strike and others didn’t or went back to work early.

There are well-founded, substantive reasons for criticising Mrs Thatcher and the policies of her governments and there are plainly daft reasons. The mining strike comes at or near the top of the plainly daft reasons. The Big Bang at the Stock Exchange in 1986 is another daft reason. The deregulation of financial markets and the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 boosted the international standing of London financial services markets and that generated all those extra taxable incomes with tax revenues thst the Blair-Brown government spent on healthcare and education – and Blair’s wars.

Even from its own benighted perspective, the strike was stupidly timed because of the massive coal stocks which had been piling up to the extent where there were increasing and well-publicised problems before the strike on where to put all the mined coal that was surplus to current generating requirements. Ridley’s strategy for dealing with mining industry industrial relations wasn’t secret – it had been published in that article in The Economist in 1978 – see the link @15. Arthur’s friend, Vic Allen, an economics prof at Leeds Uni must have read it.

The TUC and other unions – as well as the Labour Party in opposition to the government – didn’t support the strike. A crucial consequence was that coal continued to be transported from the stockpiles and the working pits to the power stations. Oil was transported to oil fired and dual fuel power stations.

From the autumn of 1984 onwards, it was plainly obvious to non-partisan observers that the strike was doomed to fail and fail it did. The halving of world oil prices during 1985/6 further reduced the financial viability of many more pits. Even so, the Thatcher and Major government continued to pour billions of taxpayers’ money into propping up the coal board, money which could have been spent on new hospitals and schools.

@22: “Rather it was Gordon Brown’s tri-partite arrangement instituted by the 1997 Bank of England Act that left the regulators unable to deal with a crisis.”

I don’t accept that Brown’s tri-partite structure, announced in 1997 for regulating financial markets was inherently flawed.

The Financial Services Authority (FAS) has admitted regulatory failings of financial institutions and the extent of the failings were analysed at length in the Turner Review:
http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pages/Library/Communication/PR/2009/037.shtml

Turner was previously a Director General of the CBI. He has a first class economics degree from Cambridge where he was a leading light in the Conservative students association. Turner was NOT the original top honcho of the FSA – he was only appointed chairman of the FSA in September 2008, towards the end of the financial crisis.

I think the only extent to which it can be credibly argued that the regulatory failings of the FSA were attributable to the tri-partite structure is that the FSA had recruitment problems in trying to hire quality staff in competition against private sector financial institutions paying all those fat bonuses. My view is not an eccentric one:

Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI employers’ group, told the Financial Times: “I never thought that the structure was the critical issue here in terms of regulation. There is no evidence in the banking crisis that one system was better than another.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/44832732-7a01-11df-9871-00144feabdc0.html

Note the seminal significance of Alan Greenspan’s testimony on 24 October 2008 to the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122476545437862295.html

In short, bankers and their managers were ripping off their own shareholders.

The telling argument against handing financial services regulation back to the Bank of England – and also making it responsible for deciding the future course of financial policy by creating a new committee, in parallel with the existing Monetary Policy Committee – is that all this confers too much power on the Bank and the person of its Governor.

Suppose the government – any government – disagrees with the course that the Bank sets? And BTW it’s not altogether clear what happens if the respective views of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee and its new Financial Policy Committee diverge.

27 troll “The fact is that unemployment as a percentage of the workforce was higher when Labour left office in 2010 than in 1997.”

Well of course it was troll because New Labour continued the Thatcherism policies of deregulation, and letting the city do what the fuck they wanted.

That is the trouble with the idiot tory trolls. The more they attack New Labour the more they attack themselves.

Better tory trolls please, these ones are not very good.

I think the only extent to which it can be credibly argued that the regulatory failings of the FSA were attributable to the tri-partite structure is that the FSA had recruitment problems in trying to hire quality staff in competition against private sector financial institutions paying all those fat bonuses.

I think it’s at least arguable that the replacement of a reputation-based regulatory system with a strict rules-based system greatly facilitated banks in playing that system. Playing within the letter, but outside the spirit of FSMA is pretty easy, but the old ‘Governor’s eyebrows’ regime was harder to game.

Idiot tory troll 22: “Rather it was Gordon Brown’s tri-partite arrangement instituted by the 1997 Bank of England Act that left the regulators unable to deal with a crisis.”

Oh yes, that old chestnut. Could you explain how the American banking system blew up, Lehman brothers went bust, The Icelandic banking system went down the plug hole, and now the Irish banking system has gone tits up?

Think you will find that none of them had a tripartite arrangement, What of course they did have, like us was the great love of your life , deregulated market forces and a financial industry that is full of traitors.

Getting back to the OP:

‘Jackie Ashley in the Guardian predicts a new cult of Thatcher as right-wing conservatives assault Cameron’s supposed liberal-leaning concessions on Europe and human rights, a cult that will be reinforced annually as the archives are opened under the thirty years rule.’

If the archives are accurate and complete they are hardly going to enhance Thatcher’s reputation. What we’ve had so far is *her* story and the self-justifications of her cabinet. Uncensored access to records of cabinet meetings are more likely to reveal them all as even more reprehensible.

The release of Nixon’s taped conversations hardly contributed to the ‘cult of Nixon’, did it?

@31: “but the old ‘Governor’s eyebrows’ regime was harder to game”

I keep hearing about the Governor’s famous eyebrows but those operated effectively at a time when financial services markets were far less globalised and fast acting – because of computer communications – than they have since become.

The extent of (pre-programmed) computer trading is a live issue in the volatility of financial markets and the London has become the leading foreign exchange market by a fair margin. Before the financial crisis, London was trailed as being on the verge of overtaking New York as the leading global financial centre:

“The City of London is globalisation in action. It is, first of all, thoroughly international, handling more of the world’s deals in over-the-counter derivatives, global foreign equities, eurobonds and foreign exchange than any other financial centre (see chart 3). Second, its firms specialise in innovative, high-value-added products. Third, the City is living proof that clusters work in the way that economists claim. Capital can move like mercury. The main reason why international finance has made London its home is that everyone is there, making it easier to do complicated deals and to trade quickly in large quantities. The City offers a cluster of talent—financial whizz-kids, lawyers and due-diligence accountants—that is second to none, and self-renewing. It helps that English is a near-universal second language and that London’s time zone makes it possible to trade in a (long) working day with both Asia and America. Regulation is mainly deft but not lax, and the taxman takes a hospitable view of foreigners’ personal earnings.”
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8582323

For good or bad, the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 and the Big Bang in the Stock Exchange in 1986 made huge crucial contributions to the City’s increased international standing – which generated all those buoyant tax revenues that the Blair-Brown governments could spend on better public services.

27. Mike Thomas

he fact is that unemployment as a percentage of the workforce was higher when Labour left office in 2010 than in 1997.

That is a fact.

It also holds true for the Tories of course, where unemployment was higher in 1997 than it was in 1979.

More problematic for Thatch fans is the appalling record of unemployment throughout her enitre reign.

Which is emphatically not something Thatch fans can pin on the last Labour government.

@35: “More problematic for Thatch fans is the appalling record of unemployment throughout her enitre reign.”

I’m emphatically not a fan of the macroeconomic policies of the Thatcher governments but the controversy is more complicated than many spectators appreciate. To be reasonably objective, we need to make comparisons with what happened in other major west European economies to assess whether unemployment in Britain was unusually bad during a time when unemployment rose in both America and across western Europe. And we also need to take account of whether the prevailing inflation rate inherited in 1979 by the Thatcher government was significantly worse than in other advanced economies as that could account for the greater pain involved in squeezing inflation – and inflationary expectations – out of the economy.

Sally @ 30

Did the Canadian, Swedish and Spanish banks ‘blow up’?

They also believe in capitalist market forces too.

No, they did not because their regulators would not allow their banks to trade and speculate on CDO/CDS instruments.

What did the FSA do?

Nothing. Did you know that debt derivatives like CDO/CDS were not allowed under SIB regulations? You didn’t? Well you wouldn’t would you?

What did Brown have to say to the repeated OECD and IMF warnings of a speculative debt bubble within UK banks and consumers?

He said they were wrong, so did Ed Milliband.

Oh, how about debt? So Thatcher made Labour spend all that money?

Labour administrations also leave office with appalling levels of debt. You always forget, it is not your money, it is not government’s money. It is the money from the private sector, from a contract cleaner right up to a business owner.

So Sally, I suppose calling in the IMF was all the Tories fault too?

That the problem with Labour supporters, denialists, stupid or plain malicious.

steveb I left the LP when it dodn’t back the miners as it wasn’t a socialist party, Actually the Labour membership card has always said it was a Democratic socialist party,so Labour couldn’t back the miners strike as it was undemocratic ,not to ballot the members if they wanted to strike,

30
So you think that the miner’s strike wasn’t democratic when thousands of people walked-out and joined the strike? This is surely more substantial than putting a tick on a piece of paper. As an analogy, I consent to have an injection when I turn up at the clinic and roll my sleeve up and offer my arm to the practitioner.
So, the LP membership card states that it is a democratic socialist party, do you believe everything you read? The LP, I now realize has never been a socialist party, in fact their whiole impetus was a slow move towards socialism which clearly they never achieved.
The miner’s strike is. amongst other things, a great embarrassment to the LP, not least because it laid bare the fact that socialism wasn’t really on the agenda, as someone else has pointed-out, running around in Jags and lounging in the comfort of their positions was what the majority of the leaders were about
And just to put the record straight as I am answering your post, Bob B, legal picketting was indeed widely broadcast and probably seen most nights by the entire country. When I see someone write ‘ I have it on good authority that intimidation took place’ it does give the impression that they have some other information other than that which the whole country was privy to.

This reply was meant for @38

The bloke who said people were driving around in Jags was a Tory who said it was union bosses who were in those Jags ,not the labour leadership, Personally I feel Tony benn trying to justify the Num not balloting its mmebers and then saying the people who voted not to go on strike weren’t intimidated in having their enterance blocked, is the embaresment, Whats arthur scargill having a mansion after the strike finished got to do with Socialism, the Labour party is a sociliast party< I don't need a piece of Paper to tell me Labours a socialist party

41
You need to read the history of the LP with reference to socialism, and then perhaps reflect upon clause 4.
There has been a lot of disinformation surrounding the miner’s strike (not that it’s surprising) from both the tories and LP.

On ballots for the mining strike 1984/5: if there were area NUM ballots in other areas such as Wales, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, there is no technical reason why there couldn’t have been a strike ballot in the Yorkshire area as well.

Instead, the Yorkshire NUM relied on intimidation, such as mass picketing and harassing women clerical workers of the coal board who weren’t on strike.

Those facts were widely reported at the time and can’t be denied.

At the following general election in June 1987, the Thatcher government was returned with a comfortable majority. There was no popular support for the NUM strike among the general electorate. I recall that election well: the minining strike didn’t even feature significantly in the public debates at the election. The strike did untold damage to the local economies and prospects of mining areas, especially in Yorkshire, and it failed in all significant respects unless the real but undeclared intention was to ruin the local economies of mining areas.

There are far more important issues about Thtacher and her legacy to debate than the mining strike:

- the subsequent unresolved split in the Conservative Party between the Europhiles and the Eurosceptics

- the unfilled gaps left in the Single European Market

- was the Falklands war of 1982 really necessary or just an unforeseen opportunity seized on divert attention from domestic economic woes?

- why did Lawson’s chancellorship turn out so sour and lead to the house-price bubble of the late 1980s and revived inflation?

- was there any upside to the legacies from the economic and industrial policies of the Thatcher governments?

- why the surge in crime?

- London’s population had been in continous decline since before WW2 but it started to grow at the end of the 1980s and it has continued to grow since.

43
I rarely. if ever, discuss the miner’s strike, not least because it seems to have thrown-up so many experts who were never there and only observed it from a somewhat distorted reporting by the existing media.
There aren’t many people who believe that the outcome would have been any different had a ballot takien place and, as already been mentioned, it’s nonsensical to believe that the vast majority who worked in the South Yorkshire coalfied would have somehow been encouraged to strike against their will. They voted with their feet. And you may call legal picketting intimidation that’s your opinion,
And why did the LP not support those areas that did ballot?
You are quite right there are more important issues to debate about Thatcher than the mining strike, however, you commented about it long before I came into the debate.

I have to say, this is a remarkable pair of sentences:

“Thatcherism, like fascism is a disease, and once you have been infected there is no cure. Notice how The far Right always needs enemies, dragons to slay.”

Cognitive dissonance much?

view http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41746.html and add your name to get the truth about the BAE/Saudi/Thatcher Deal, Please Share it.

JoJo:
I fail to understand how the fact that Thatcher’s success was “most certainly bankrolled by north sea oil and the sell-off of state controlled industries” (which I agree it was) deducts from Thatcher’s economic liberalism and leadership style.
Did the state-controlled industries privatise themselves? No, well then, surely that is a credit to Thatcher. Does the fact that Thatcher used North Sea Oil to fund her policies mean her policies were any less valid? Of course not.

I think the main opposition to Thatcher was indeed her strength, not because it was totalitarian in nature, but because it clamped down on those who didn’t want to help themselves.The British Disease is not Thatcherism, but wanting something for nothing. As Thatcher herself said, “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of money”.