Reply to: Thatcher

[Lucy]

Audience? This isn't a sitcom or stage play you know.

I thought with the amount fiction you come out with it must be!

[Bagpuss]

Audience? This isn't a sitcom or stage play you know.

[Lucy]

Is Ted Heath on your website?

My website?

(Dear Audience, pussbag has finally lost the plot)

[Bagpuss]

Because...

(don't let the facts get in the way of your wild and mis-used imagination)

Is Ted Heath on your website?

[Lucy]

Remember if the conservatives weren't in power we might have had another 3 day week and power cuts. Hang on, that was under the Conservatives

Because...

(don't let the facts get in the way of your wild and mis-used imagination)

[Bagpuss]

Remember if the conservatives weren't in power we might have had another 3 day week and power cuts. Hang on, that was under the Conservatives

[Peoplesoft bloke]

.........
And what people forget is that right at the start of Maggie's attack on the power of the unions and the state of the country's finances, she said quite plainly that it would hurt and that 3.5m people would lose their jobs while the recovery work was done, but that afterwards w would be able to compete again.:

Did she? I missed that bit - when was it?

[Lucy]

Or 1980s because I wasn't a multimillionaire buying knocked down UK assets. Or for example the son of a Prime Minister who was helping me deal arms.

Oh, that's right your degree is in Pol Sci isn't it

[Bagpuss]

What is it that you do again?

Not sure you would have been so sucessful in the 1970's

Or 1980s because I wasn't a multimillionaire buying knocked down UK assets. Or for example the son of a Prime Minister who was helping me deal arms.

[PAH]

What is it that you do again?

Not sure you would have been so sucessful in the 1970's

Good point. I'd love for other countries to be able to offer me the same sort of rates as we can get in the UK.

Even factoring for the more costly living expenses, moving to mainland europe or further away (Oz) is more a lifestyle choice than anything. Certainly for me as a developer, unless I'm misinformed.

[Lucy]

She embraced monetarism which has been proved to not work i.e. it facilitates boom and bust, we participated in that experiment and it almost bancrupted the country. So apart from crushing the unions, smashing UK industry and selling off the family silver she was a failure.

What is it that you do again?

Not sure you would have been so sucessful in the 1970's

[Bagpuss]

She embraced monetarism which has been proved to not work i.e. it facilitates boom and bust, we participated in that experiment and it almost bancrupted the country. So apart from crushing the unions, smashing UK industry and selling off the family silver she was a failure.

[Pinto]

So yes, it hurt but if she hadn't done it, we would be about as important as Portugal right now.

It's all relative. Britain is less important than Portugal to me.

[malvolio]

You youngsters, eh. Filled up on propaganda instead of history.... I'll tell you what Maggie did, Gawd bless 'er...

Consider - we won WW2 but were utterly bankrupt. Dragging ourselves off the ground took 20 years, by which time the unions were in control of UK Ltd. Any attempt to do anything to make us competive was blocked, usually by strike action. A succession of weak governments (Macmillan, Wilson and Heath, mostly - that clown Callaghan was way too late) failed to deal with the problem and most made it worse. We were at the point where we had to ask for a loan from the IMF to keep the country alive FFS. And this was all directly attributable to protectionist, narrow minded and selfish unions who had total control of the UK economy. What Maggie did was very simple - she brought through legislation that controlled the unions right to strike and made it much more realistic, and took out secondary picketing. That allowed the management to manage the compnay without constantly being shafted. Sadly, by then, we had no hope of getting back to a competeive level in manufacturing since that business had already gone abroad, so we had to switch to a service economy, which is where NL took over. And they, bless 'em, have royally screwed it up. Ho hum....

And what people forget is that right at the start of Maggie's attack on the power of the unions and the state of the country's finances, she said quite plainly that it would hurt and that 3.5m people would lose their jobs while the recovery work was done, but that afterwards w would be able to compete again. So yes, it hurt but if she hadn't done it, we would be about as important as Portugal right now.

It wasn't Maggie what did for UK Industry, it was a few dozen unelected, card-carrying communists at the top of the union movement.


Sorry - came over all serious for a moment.

[Bagpuss]

Whenever someone starts waxing lyrical about the good old days of Maggie I can't help but get this image in my head

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/image...ory_boy203.jpg