surprise: euro conservatives and pro-war journalists like thatcher

Almost as big of an upset as wizlah hating her

jerseyhoya wrote:Two people whom I generally do not agree with these days, and you all, the liberal hoards of BSG, may take them more seriously than the Economist

Andrew Sullivan - Thatcher, Liberator
David Ignatius - Margaret Thatcher's Revolution

Jerz, it's a good thing that neither you nor Andrew Sullivan were in the kitchen this morning when I clicked through and read his article, otherwise my children would have been witness to an exceptionally brutal piece of theatre. As it was I just kind of shook with anger and set down the phone. The lines in question which elevated from mere hagiography to outright blind adulation were these:

And so – to take the archetypal example – Britain’s coal-workers fought to make sure they could work unprofitable mines for years of literally lung-destroying existence and to pass it on to their sons for yet another generation of black lung. This “right to work” was actually paid for by anyone able to make a living in a country where socialism had effectively choked off all viable avenues for prosperity.

Last time I checked, from the 40s onwards, many of the parents who were working down the mines, worked as hard as they could to ensure their kids would get a decent education in order to get away from the mines. No one who worked in the mining community were under any illusion that it was something you wanted to hand down to your kids. But likewise, no one is going to refuse work when they've got families to feed.

What particularly amuses me about this lazy, lazy line of thinking is the suggestion that the welfare state is singularly responsible for choking off any and all entrepreneurial activity. Consider England at the end of WWII. Not only had their domestic infrastructure been badly hit by the war, they were about to lose India in 1947. So, two of the key pillars to the nation's economic strength for almost a century - industrial manufacturing and the revenues and resources made available through a large global trade network that they controlled - were gone. Seen within that context, Atlee's decision to implement the Beveridge report looks like lunatic bravery. On balance, however, it was probably the right one. By the time the 70s came around, a baby boomer generation had been able to rely on free at the point of use health care, free education, and a safety net which insured that in the event you lost your job, your state insurance contribution made while working would give you some kind of income. (Margaret Thatcher would have availed of some of this reform, as it happened, since she was a grammar school girl - that meant she went to a state primary school, passed what was called the 11+ and went on to a grammar school and thence to Oxford). You could make the argument that the welfare state productively fended off an overdue economic collapse by giving the UK an educated and innovative workforce.

What successive Labour and Conservative governments did not do, however, was build on the potential of that system. They didn't look at how to reinvent their economy. Furthermore, they treated the welfare structures and the NHS as just another instrument of the state, and in the UK, with its imperial background, as just another paternalist tool for dealing with the poor (Paternalism, the state and the conservatives go back aways. Benjamin Disraeli) . Case in point - when Grannywiz was living in Bradford in 1972, the council wrote to her because they wanted her to act as the guardian for a neighbour of hers. Said neighbour was a single parent after her husband had left her, struggling with kids. She'd been steadily making some payments to the local council with very limited income to repay a debt incurred, and surprisingly enough, they hadn't bothered to check she'd actually long since completed the payment. Bradford council, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the £63 that this woman had accrued (a very significant sum), couldn't possibly be given to her. Poor, y'know. Probably drink it away.

You could put that down to the attitude of a know better all-encompassing socialist state (which the UK most definitely was not at that point - compare and contrast with Holland or Norway at similar points in their history - or don't if you're andrew sullivan). Or the influence of a paternalist class system which stretched back to Victorian times. But let's not be distracted historical context: it was clearly the lefties who were being mean.

This is my biggest problem with this talk of Thatcher as a liberator. Baroness Thatcher, after all. A lifetime peer who was permitted to vote on matters of state in the house of lords long after she'd been ousted by her own party. Allegedly a reformer who gave stuck up tories a heave ho, and let the working man and woman get on their way with minimal state interference. And yet, happy to keep in place a political system which allowed unelected landed gentry, clergy and lifetime peers selected by the Queen to vote on acts of parliament, demanding their revision if the house of Lords deemed it necessary. A woman so opposed to vested interests that when the police horribly mishandled Hillsborough, she felt that of course they must be speaking the truth about what had happened, because it was only the working class liverpudlians who were dissenting. She was never stupid - if you looked around what was happening in the UK culturally in the 60s and 70s, you could see people pushing against the institutional structures of the UK, and it was never just the radicals. She knew who her constituency were.

A classic example of how she worked her appeal was the issue of council housing. In 1980, her government put through the Council Housing Act, giving tenants the right to buy their property at a 33% discount (44% in the case of a flat) from the local council. Freed them from a lifetime of paying rent. Gave them 'something to own'. Not a new tactic, mind - heath (the old stuffy etonian who she got rid of - him) had already pioneered this in the early 70s, and the council had the right to sell off stock with minesterial approval as far back as 1936. Still, thatcher did it with bells on, and everyone applauded. Helped fuel a property boom, which along with the city boom (assisted by deregulation of banks in the mid-80s) and the North Sea Oil did great guns for the economy. Of course, the stock was sold off on the cheap and she wasn't that fussed about replenishing the stock (state fiddling in property markets? NO!). Nice if you were renting, hadn't been able to buy a house because of the property boom, and suddenly found yourself at the mercy of a higher rent in the private renting sector because the demand for housing was so high (All those baby boomers. Having babies. Hrm). That's Thatcher's 'liberation' in a nutshell.

The UK was in a bad way when thatcher came along, but both of your columnists are incorrect in suggesting it was somehow culturally stifled. There had been a steady explosion of music, theatre and literature stretching back to the 50s off the back of the 1944 Education Act. Harold Pinter, a dramatist of some note - grammar school boy. Another grammar school graduate, Tony Wilson, had no trouble setting up Factory Records in 1978, off the back of seeing a band called the Sex Pistols, another DIY group, play at the Free Hall in Manchester. Factory did alright in the 80s, despite being run by Wilson. Likewise, an english-jamaican comprehensive school boy, Don Letts, was in a position to set up a clothes store called Acme Attractions in 1974, selling sharp clothes and playing dub music to white londoners at the Roxy. That's just a brief slice of the 70s. Doesn't include the Brixton school boy who failed his 11 plusand went to a technical school before getting a top five hit about space in 1969. Last I heard he's still going.

The idea that Britain was as stuffy locked down place where no one could get on is a fib. Education had done most of the heavy shifting work. A healthy, well-educated populace knew things needed changing. Thatcher was one of those who grabbed her opportunities first and ran with it. She hooked up the english economy to Friedman's horse, tore through through the economy in the most damaging way possible. She got rid of industries she didn't want to pay for, and tried to recover the ones she did (Westland helicopters, a military contractor come to mind). And when people didn't like it, she set the police on them. Happened at Orgreave, happened at the Poll Tax Riots, happened so many times in the Six Counties they must've lost track.

(As for Europe, Jerz, plenty on the left had problems with a single currency for much the same reasons. It was hardly rocket science. Thatcher, like any good politician, was all for Europe when it sorted her - she backed the single european act, and was happy enough signing up for the ERM. But she had a anti-euro faction to play too, and it fitted her image, so she opposed in when she wanted to.)

jerseyhoya wrote:Almost as big of an upset as wizlah hating her

no one noticed you were 1st in line to orally pleasure her necrotizing nether regions

breaking medical news - 14 US Senators declare they are entirely without testicles:




Jesus, Enzi, look around you - you sure you wandered into the right photo session?

Rubio should be a bit nervous too; if the spineless worm Reid actually manages round up enough votes to skewer this tribe of creeps, the shot of Rubio's smiling face in their midst will be part of any & every campaign broadside by his opponents in any election he plans on running in ever again

Responding to Wiz's post. Obviously from reading RAWK I've seen more of that perspective than a favorable one about her, though I don't think I much agree with it. Rather than quoting the whole thing, just gonna pick out one line that I think most of what you're writing is built off of/guided by.

Wizlah wrote:She hooked up the english economy to Friedman's horse, tore through through the economy in the most damaging way possible.

If that's your interpretation of what happened, then everything else you say follows from that. If you are of the mind (like some of the other folks) that she saved a state hampered by inefficient state owned industries, excessive trade union power and wrested the UK from its gradual decline on the world stage, negative developments under Thatcher are discounted as necessary or inevitable, and the many good points from Sullivan and others get emphasized.

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Almost as big of an upset as wizlah hating her

no one noticed you were 1st in line to orally pleasure her necrotizing nether regions

Yes I posted a favorable article in the aftermath of the death of one of the two most important right of center politicians in the western world of the past half century.

What was the point of this post?

jerseyhoya wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Almost as big of an upset as wizlah hating her

no one noticed you were 1st in line to orally pleasure her necrotizing nether regions

Yes I posted a favorable article in the aftermath of the death of one of the two most important right of center politicians in the western world of the past half century.

What was the point of this post?

your casually-informed cheerleading about a rose-colored magazine article on the (frankly surprisingly still) controversial dead person was less persuasive to me than Wizlah's more thoughtful original observations on that individual's public service

I sought to highlight the disparity between the two perspectives

I posted three articles from people (or in the case of The Economist, a magazine) who were in the UK for part or all of Thatcher's tenure. All three were written by those who supported Obama in the most recent presidential election. They provided a different perspective on the important, transformative, and largely positive impact Thatcher had on the UK and the rest of the world.

I think I'm a bit more than casually informed on the topic, and I've read cases against her more times than I would have cared to. You're doing a weird thing in this thread recently insulting anyone who disagrees with you (generally me) as not really knowing anything. I know a lot more about politics than pretty much anyone else who posts here. I don't go around telling people that in every post I make. It's obnoxious as fuck.

jerseyhoya wrote:I posted three articles from people (or in the case of The Economist, a magazine) who were in the UK for part or all of Thatcher's tenure. All three were written by those who supported Obama in the most recent presidential election. They provided a different perspective on the important, transformative, and largely positive impact Thatcher had on the UK and the rest of the world.
.

But to be fair, pretty much everyone with a brain supported Obama in the last election. The people who didn't would have most likely voted Republican even if God was running as the democrat and Atilla the Hun as the republican. They would have said God wasn't a US citizen and accused him of being the AntiChrist and a transvestite (he wears a robe!!).

Clever!

jerseyhoya wrote:I posted three articles from people (or in the case of The Economist, a magazine) who were in the UK for part or all of Thatcher's tenure. All three were written by those who supported Obama in the most recent presidential election. They provided a different perspective on the important, transformative, and largely positive impact Thatcher had on the UK and the rest of the world.

I think I'm a bit more than casually informed on the topic, and I've read cases against her more times than I would have cared to. You're doing a weird thing in this thread recently insulting anyone who disagrees with you (generally me) as not really knowing anything. I know a lot more about politics than pretty much anyone else who posts here. I don't go around telling people that in every post I make. It's obnoxious as fuck.

I bow to no one here in my admiration of your knowledge of electoral processes, the implications of campaign strategy, and the other stuff of 'real' politics. I've shown I'm less convinced of your grasp of world-historical events. There is really not much chance that you know significantly more about Thatcherism than I; you've proven you do not know all that much, and I know I don't know all that much about the reality of her time in office. Grow a skin.

I want to publicly acknowledge that I have heretofore utterly ignored the title of the current politics thread.

I don't go around telling people that in every post I make. It's obnoxious as fuck.

drsmooth wrote:There is really not much chance that you know significantly more about Thatcherism than I

LOL. You're the dumbest smart guy I know on the internet.

Werthless wrote:

I don't go around telling people that in every post I make. It's obnoxious as fuck.

drsmooth wrote:There is really not much chance that you know significantly more about Thatcherism than I

LOL. You're the dumbest smart guy I know on the internet.

thank you for your enlightening observation.

but consider; based on the evidence available to us, my remark is quite likely true. Is it obnoxious to point out that neither of us is a Thatcher authority?

(see what I did there?)

(see that I did it again?)

(know what else is obnoxious?)

drsmooth wrote:(know what else is obnoxious?)

This post?

aroooooooooooooooooogments

phatj wrote:

drsmooth wrote:(know what else is obnoxious?)

This post?

had a different else in mind, but the ersatz socratic method thing does annoy, doesn't it?

jerseyhoya wrote:Clever!

Not really. It's too true to be clever.