Why are some folk keen on making a point at the funeral?

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Rightly

FFS. You really are an oxygen thief.

[VectraMan]

Did it? I think you'll find that a lot of these areas have a high proportion of working age people who don't work. Effectively we stopped subsidising their jobs and started paying them directly. More importantly the culture and habit of working and taking pride in work has been replaced with something altogether less helpful, that if anything makes it harder for the free market to have a positive effect.

No matter how you look at it, pouring money into loss making industries to make the unemployment figures look better is no solution. Maybe those workers are too indoctrinated by the belief that they're victims they haven't made the necessary steps to improve the situation? Like, going somewhere else for example.

Easy to say I know, but common sense dictates that having a whole town based around a single employer is an extraordinarily bad idea, and anyone truly smart would have got out before the taxpayer funded gravy train ended. You can't blame Thatcher for that.

If that was her strategy it was very poorly implemented.

By definition, free market economy means the government shouldn't get involved. The only way a government could poorly implement a free market economy strategy is to try to implement a free market economy strategy.

You seem to be advocating some kind of tax-payer funded special help for those areas. Which apart from being unfair to the majority, and undemocratic, is exactly the sort of thinking that got the country into such a mess in the first place.

[VectraMan]

It did? Which country do you live in? Certainly not in the 3rd most indebted country in the world, the one without growth for 5 years, the one with a constant trade deficit because it imports much more than it exports, the one with 1.7 million people permanently on the sick books, the one with 25% youth unemployment, and dodgy free market banks which it had to bail out raising its debt GDP ratio from 40% to close to 90%, the one that squandered its North Sea oil to pay for unemplyment benefits?

Some of you live in cloud cuckoo land.

At the risk of sounding like a Thatcher fan-boy, had she remained in charge she would have been horrified at all that and steered us in a very different direction. You seem to have conveniently forgotten about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Now if people want to protest at their funerals...

[ZARDOZ]

No matter how you look at it, pouring money into loss making industries to make the unemployment figures look better is no solution. Maybe those workers are too indoctrinated by the belief that they're victims they haven't made the necessary steps to improve the situation? Like, going somewhere else for example.

Easy to say I know, but common sense dictates that having a whole town based around a single employer is an extraordinarily bad idea, and anyone truly smart would have got out before the taxpayer funded gravy train ended. You can't blame Thatcher for that.



By definition, free market economy means the government shouldn't get involved. The only way a government could poorly implement a free market economy strategy is to try to implement a free market economy strategy.

You seem to be advocating some kind of tax-payer funded special help for those areas. Which apart from being unfair to the majority, and undemocratic, is exactly the sort of thinking that got the country into such a mess in the first place.

But the UK failed on both counts, the market economy produced a smaller economy and we got a large unmovable block of unemployment. Prior to 1979 we were 5th biggest economy by GDP by 1990 we were 6th. In the time we dismantled our industrial base and put those workers on long term benefits, Germany encouraged their industrial base and went on to be the world's largest exporter. Last year their exports were greater than our 1 trillion debt. So please explain why what we did made more sense?

[minestrone]

One thing that people consistently forget is that the British, on the whole, are feckin tulipe at manufacturing.

[doodab]

No matter how you look at it, pouring money into loss making industries to make the unemployment figures look better is no solution. Maybe those workers are too indoctrinated by the belief that they're victims they haven't made the necessary steps to improve the situation? Like, going somewhere else for example.

Lets take the "what could she have done differently" argument and turn it around. Where should they have gone?

Easy to say I know, but common sense dictates that having a whole town based around a single employer is an extraordinarily bad idea, and anyone truly smart would have got out before the taxpayer funded gravy train ended. You can't blame Thatcher for that.

Surely it is the governments job to implement an economic strategy that ensures that whole towns aren't dependent on a single employer, especially when that government is about to pull the plug on said employer. Simply washing their hands of the situation and saying "it's the free market" isn't government. It's a cop out.

You seem to be advocating some kind of tax-payer funded special help for those areas. Which apart from being unfair to the majority, and undemocratic, is exactly the sort of thinking that got the country into such a mess in the first place.

It also happens to be exactly what we have. It's called a massive benefits bill.

I'm not sure why it would be "undemocratic" or "unfair to the majority" to take short term measures to transform or revitalise a failing local economy. If people vote for it then it's democratic, and if it saves the majority money in the long run (and a thriving local economy instead of a benefits bill certainly would) then it's more than fair to them.

[MarillionFan]

One thing that people consistently forget is that the British, on the whole, are feckin tulipe at manufacturing.

And the service industry. All the restaurants and waiters / waitresses are foreign.

All in all the UK are pretty much crap at work. Period.

[SueEllen]

And the service industry. All the restaurants and waiters / waitresses are foreign.

All in all the UK are pretty much crap at work. Period.

Craftsmans weren't/aren't cr*p at their jobs.

Then again anything that takes years to train, in like the number of people who can be an "entrepreneur" is only suitable for a minority of the population.

We need jobs for the people who would be cannon fodder in wars.

One of the main reasons we have loads of unemployed people is there is no massive war or epidemic that would kill them off.

[doodab]

One thing that people consistently forget is that the British, on the whole, are feckin tulipe at manufacturing.

I'm not sure this is true. Historically we led the world at mass production, and even today British high tech manufacturers are as good as any you'll find. Where we lost out was in semiconductor and electronics manufacture. We practically invented the computer and many of the early firms were British. That we don't have an IBM, HP, Intel or Samsung in the UK is, to my mind, the single greatest failure of industrial and economic policy since the war.

[doodab]

There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations

And if that isn't the foundation of society then I don't know what is.