So the Iron Lady planned to slash the military budget, decommissioned many ships in the RN, withdrew HMS Endurance from the South Pacific leading to the Argentinians taking the Falklands which she had indicated she would not defend. Now she was down in the polls (lowest ever approval for a PM) and needed a nice quick war to prop herself up.Smitty-48 wrote:Well, the war did indeed save the military from massive cutbacks, Thatcher came in a fiscal hawk, but the war changed her direction on that at the last moment, and instead she went after Lefty sacred cow social programs, which is how it should be, defense of the realm is the principle purpose of a government, handing out milk is not.
And the victory in the war did indeed win the election for Thatcher, much to the Lefties chagrin, and then Thacher did indeed dispense with the nonsense that somehow Britain was going to be able to continue being a unionized protected manufacturing hub, after the Lefties had gotten rid of the British Empire and the world was globalizing by default, which, obviously not, so Thatcher was ahead of her time there.
So, all worked out in the end, what of it?
The truth? The truth is the Labour Party had simply run the country into the gound because they were so beholden to the unionized entrenched interests, and Thatcher had no choice but to come in and dispense the harsh medicine, this is how it always is with the Left, they run the country into the gorund, then when the people put the Right in charge to clean up the mess, the Lefties spend the next forty years claiming that it was "literally Hitler" or whatever.
How the Brexit is supposedly Thatcher's fault, I don't get, just mo Lefty blame Thacherism it seems, because Euroskeptic as she was, she wasn't that skeptic, she never would have held a referendum, nor go for any sort of hard Brexit, and she would crushed Nigel Farage like a bug, she wasn't anything like UKIP, that's not the result of Thatcher, that's John Major and Tony Blair who caused the UKIP backlash, and weak kneed David Cameron who couldn't stand up to it.
You wouldn't even have a UKIP and NIgel Farage if you had Thatcher, UKIP and Farage simply filled the void left by the post Thatcher Tories, when they basically turned themselves into a Liberal party, leaving the entire Right flank of the country wide open to whomever rabble rousers come along.
Reality was, Farage was mostly channeling Thatcher, the hard right populist vacuum had to be filled by someone eventually. Just wait if Jeremy Corbyn starts running things, good lord, after a few years of that, then you'll really see right wing populist backlash, could get UKIP style government out of that.
After her victory, which she would not have got had her plans to sell off a couple of aircraft carriers had time to be implemented, she decides to U-turn on military spending (b..b..but the Lady is not for turning right?) in order to pay back the forces for her re-election.
You won't get too much of an argument from me over mismanagement of the economy by the previous Lib Lab administration but that's not the whole story is it? The world had been plunged into a recession after the oil crisis of 1973 and the 2nd oil crisis of '79.
Was the oil crisis and the recession it caused Labour's fault or the USA's support of Isreal in the Yom Kippur War?
So, did Thatcher save the British economy purely through the brilliance of her policies? Well not entirely, she did have the bonus from selling off the Crown Jewels when she privatised everything from British gas to British Telecom thus depriving the treasury of the future massive profits these institutions would provide. Also there was the windfall from the discovery of North Sea oil. Did she use some of the money to make jobs for millions of people she had thrown on the scrapheap? Don't be silly, all she cared about was reducing inflation.
Did she benefit British society by investing these windfalls in public spending? No of course not, no such thing as society remember. Instead she did what Tories always did, tax cuts for the rich.
Then there was the great council house sell off, did she spend the money building more homes? No, in fact she stipulated that the income could not be spent on replacing social housing leading to today's housing crisis.
Unions? Did they need to be taken down a peg or two? Sure. Did they need to be smashed to the point where they became virtually powerless? Not if you care even a little bit about the British workforce.
Brexit? Not her fault, I never meant to imply it was. After all it was her government which ratified the Maastricht treaty and took us from the common market to the EEC and by extension the EU. However she did sour relations with our European partners with her Euroscepticism.
So was Thatcher all bad? No.
Was she a paragon of virtue who could do no wrong? Fuck no, not by a long shot.(unless you're a military obsessed right wing nut job of course)
