It's all Thatchers fault.

baileysbattlebus

What did Margaret Thatcher give us?

She gave us deregulated credit - up until 1982 hire purchase was strictly regulated - you normally had to put down a fairly hefty deposit if you wanted anything on HP - and often have a guarantor.

She gave us the right to buy council homes

She gave us banks that could enter the mortgage market,

She gave banks ability to remove the separation between commercial and clearing activities.

She gave us a financial sector who were advising people to move their company pension funds into private pensions, whose fees were undisclosed and were upto 25% (insider looting). Is it any wonder that the stakeholder pension scheme hasn't taken off - the fees were capped at 1%.

She gave us building societies who could borrow money from the money markets. She gave us building societies who could offer unsecured loans. She gave us building societies that could and did become banks.

She removed exchange controls.

She gave us assured shorthold tenancies in 1988. It was in 1996 that the AST became the standard agreement (Major not Thatcher). Lenders came up with a new type of residential mortgage for small landlords. BTL as we know it was born.

She gave us deregulated buses "Anyone who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 is a failure" - anyone remember the absolute shambles that ensued along with the "bus wars". Virtually anyone could set up a bus company and charge what they like. The only place that escaped was London. Since 1986 anyone has been able to operate a bus service with no regulation on time tables or fares. Obviously the less profitable, often rural routes often disappeared.

She gave us privatised utlities - then there were the streets being dug up by different companies as they all tried to lay cabling etc. The upshot is that some of the utilities ended up in foreign hands. EDF energy is a state owned French company. Eon, Rwe etc.

The only one she didn't and wouldn't do was British Rail and John Major did that for her. And what joy has that brought.

She gave us the post industrial age. An economy that relies on the financial sector and releasing equity on a fixed asset. Where a house in no longer just a place to bring up a family and improve as finances allow, but an asset with a line of credit.

We are reaping what was sowed in the 1980's.

StevieJ

Money_Grabber13579 wrote: »

The thing about Thatcher was that hard work was encouraged. Nowadays, the government encourages lazy slobs on benefits which have to be paid for the minority that now do work.

I thought she took all their jobs away leaving whole villages without jobs :eek: and paid their dole with North Sea Oil revenue, very encouraging

StevieJ

stephen163 wrote: »

I don't understand why a specific industry like coal should be protected from bankruptcy and competition when the rest of us have to adapt and evolve to the ever changing economic conditions of the time. In 1984, the UK taxpayer was subsidising UK coal to the tune of £900 million, that is an instant loss of welfare to each and every tax payer in the country.

I bet Adolf would have wished we had done it 50 years earlier

ukcarper

stephen163 wrote: »

I'm sorry, Britain doesn't live in a fairytale world. If we produce things inefficiently, we will be eaten alive by the rest of the world. No exposed element of the economy should be excluded. The overall aim is to increase welfare for everyone, not just minority pockets of workers.

Yes, it is unfortunate and unfair. But the miners have no god given right to their job or the continued existence of the industry. And remember this - Britain was the laughing stock of Europe before Thatcher, she saved us from becoming a welfare state like Germany and France (if you think we have problems, look at theirs!).

I don't understand why a specific industry like coal should be protected from bankruptcy and competition when the rest of us have to adapt and evolve to the ever changing economic conditions of the time. In 1984, the UK taxpayer was subsidising UK coal to the tune of £900 million, that is an instant loss of welfare to each and every tax payer in the country.

Because the overall cost of letting it go bust was greater, do you think farming isn’t subsidised.

Rochdale_Pioneers

stephen163 wrote: »

I don't understand why a specific industry like coal should be protected from bankruptcy and competition when the rest of us have to adapt and evolve to the ever changing economic conditions of the time. In 1984, the UK taxpayer was subsidising UK coal to the tune of £900 million, that is an instant loss of welfare to each and every tax payer in the country.

And apart from the NUM noone questions the need in 1984 to prune the coal industry so that the unprofitable pits went. The problem is that the entire industry went in the bin - efficient profitable pits with many decades of coal reserves were closed and the coal is now lost. On what planet can it be cheaper to buy coal from Brazil, ship it half way round the world to Scotland then drag it 200 miles in the UK to a power station when a closed profitable pit was a few miles away? Political dogma binned the whole industry and now that we're looking to develop coal power once again we're really going to regret this act of vandalism.

Why did this happen? We let the marketplace decide energy policy, and the privatised industry wanted a fast profit. So we saw the "dash for gas" - an explosion of gas fired power stations which have burned through North Sea reserves and left us reliant on imports. The market is now a cartel of foreign energy retailers all merrily profiteering as they fix prices. The power generators are also largely foreign owned and our options are limited by what they will invest in and where the fuel comes from (abroad).

Of all the damages wrecked on the country by Thatcherism the energy disaster is the biggest one.

kennyboy66_2

Generali wrote: »

Sorry old boy. Are you saying that the break Thatcher made with the disastrous policies persued by Lab and Con in the 1970s was a bad thing? Not a view I've heard expressed before but one I'd be happy to discuss.

No.

But just as she is a pantomime villain to some, she is deified by others who seem incapable of acknowledging that for the many positive changes she brought, she was also a hugely destructive and divisive figure who made many things worse.

Privatisation
Taxation reform
ant-Union legislation
right to buy

were the 4 best things to come out of 79-91.

(I think that using the changes allowing solictors etc to advertise (a process that actually begun in 1976 with competition commision reports and was done not through legislation but changes in each professional bodies code of conduct AFIU) was window dressing at best.

I don't think there has been any meaningful change is say Law or Medine 'corporatism'.
The best real competition changes would have affected conveyancing and maybe opticians.)

The way some people go on about her, you would think she was a cross between Mother Theresa, Churchill & Boudica

*MF*

Extracts from a piece in the Economist:

The 30th anniversary of the Iron Lady’s first general-election win in May 1979 has been marked by reports, often exultant, of the death of Thatcherism.

There are two strands to this diagnosis. One is that Margaret Thatcher’s deregulatory reforms, in particular the “Big Bang” of 1986, caused the financial crash; in this critique Mrs Thatcher (as she was in office) personally dispensed bankers’ bonuses from her handbag. The wider point is that the economic model she advocated, and which her apostate Labour successors embraced, has been discredited. Neo-liberal, Thatcherite economics, runs this argument, was fatally undermined by its own internal weaknesses, then interred after the crunch amid a mêl!e of Keynesian splurges and nationalisations. None of us is a Thatcherite now.

Thirty years ago, taming inflation and making the country governable were Mrs Thatcher’s first priorities. Now one pressing need is to fulfil an aspiration she never realised: a dramatic reduction in the proportion of national wealth consumed by the state. For all the excitable short-term neo-Keynesianism, the basic long-term solution is Thatcherite: stringent economic discipline.

Mr Cameron is being similarly cautious. He now lauds Mrs Thatcher where once he seemed to distance himself from her, using her name as a byword for political bravery—but without saying precisely what form his own bravery will take. His Tory colleagues talk about how loathed they expect to be after six months in government—but not exactly why. The outstanding question is this: for all the shortage of upfront details, Mrs Thatcher knew what she wanted to achieve. Do the Cameroons?

From here:

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13610705&source=hptextfeature

***********************

We all have our own views on Thatcher - but maybe what is more important, given the economic legacy he may inherit, is how we will come to judge Cameron?

baileysbattlebus

stephen163 wrote: »

I don't understand why a specific industry like coal should be protected from bankruptcy and competition when the rest of us have to adapt and evolve to the ever changing economic conditions of the time. In 1984, the UK taxpayer was subsidising UK coal to the tune of £900 million, that is an instant loss of welfare to each and every tax payer in the country.

And today you could say the same about the banks, why should a specific industry like banking be protected from bankruptcy and competition. It has cost the UK taxpayers billions of £'s.

Why should the government have to virtually nationalise the banks, because if they didn't we probably wouldn't have a banking industry - morally it was the right thing to do.

But not having a mining industry was different wasn't it? The deal at the end of the miners strike was for the government to set up a reveiw body, which they did, but they specifically denied the review body the right to look at the social implications of the closures.

In 2006 the Coal Authority estimated that there were 600 million tonnes of coal that was in established areas that would be accessible and economical to extract.

In 1992 it was estimated that there 190 billion tonnes of coal underneath the UK - 45 billion tonnes of which could be extracted using technology available in 1992. From 1853 to 2006 22.7 billion tonnes of coal has been extracted and used in the UK. That should give some idea of what is left.

She shouldn't have just closed the mines - money should have been invested in the industry to allow access to the billions of tonnes of untapped coal.

As Anuerin Bevan said: "This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could run out of coal and fish at the same time"

Those words are still relevant - why are we importing billions of tonnes of coal from abroad when we are sitting on island of coal. That coal should, and dare I say it, will be used to meet our energy needs of the future.

*MF*

baileysbattlebus wrote: »

<snip>

Those words are still relevant - why are we importing billions of tonnes of coal from abroad when we are sitting on island of coal. That coal should, and dare I say it, will be used to meet our energy needs of the future.

Agree with you on that belief, in part because we rightly fear being held hostage over our energy needs, in part because hopefully "clean coal" technology can be proved (our coal as opposed to imported coal has a noticeably greater level of pollutants - as I understand it), and lastly because we can develop carbon capture not least by using the pipelines we already have for oil extraction to reverse the flow and fill the holes left. There are also (again I believe) huge reserves of coal under the North Sea, where similar extraction and reverse capture can be developed.

Rochdale_Pioneers

The problem with coal now is that the costs of reopening pits to access these reserves would be prohibitive. For the money we'd have to spend we might as well import it from Brazil. THAT is the criminal part - the "free market" was rigged against UK industry. If you compare the price of subsidised foreign coal vs non-subsidised UK coal is it any wonder that the foreign coal looks cheaper at that moment? But even ignoring the blatant disparity between the two figures, didn't anyone consider what might happen to the import price once we're utterly reliant on it?