Andrew WhiteI remember the late 1970s and early 1980s in the UK. I was there. I won’t forget. For those of you that don’t remember, let me remind you of a few home truths:
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Labor unions were in the ascendancy; laws being passed favored the creation of unions in businesses even if the union members were in the minority. Union leaders, particularly the most left leaning, had instant access to the Prime Minister and largely set the agenda for the chaos that ensued
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The UK was often quoted as the “sick man of Europe”: it was uncompetitive with Europe and the rest of the world, and repeated Sterling devaluations allowed us life beyond our means, leading to a final bail out by the IMF
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Public and some parts of private industry was dying a slow death due to over priced labor (thanks mainly to the unions), uncompetitive regulations and high effective corporate tax rates. Whole swathes of industry had been nationalized in the name of the greater good, only to see all hope of competitiveness drain away under the industry-ignorant public leaders then setting business strategies
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Dead bodies lay in the streets in Liverpool and trash was pilled high in many cities as local government was arguing with unions; “annual pay rounds” were the norm, where employees assumed that they would get a pay increase independent of any economic condition
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There was no visibility to the Public Sector Borrowing Requirements (PSBR) and British governments repeatedly lived beyond their means. Government quangoes and committees were rampant, focusing on all manner of social re-engineering of society (as a fall out of the liberal views that were rampant during the 1970s)
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Education was being gutted as Grammar Schools were being challenged and the great Comprehensive experiment was ramping up. This was the beginning of the time when it became proper to not let children “fail” or even appear to “fail” even if they did or were doing or would. The world was already on the path from when scoring an “A” in an exam put you in the selective, special minority status (that meant you had a future) to a time, now well established, where for every exam we see more “A’s” than “B’s”, which are themselves in greater quantity dished out than the “C’s”. You won’t see a “D” now. Poor little Johnny cannot fail….
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The National Health Service was corrupting itself as bureaucracy was ramping up under the encouragement of the in power Labor party. Already forecasts for the future showed that the UK could not continue to find the model “as is” but there were not answers yet.
After the Labor Party, bereft of any IP, left office, the new leader of the Conservative Government was elected. From that point on, views on Britain’s direction diverged. The popular press will have you believe that the next 12+ years were painful and resulted in Britain losing out and becoming a bad place. Apparently the manufacturing base was destroyed. Those of us with a brain, and particularly a brain with an economics module, would argue the opposite. Manufacturing was terminally ill and as it was decaying, it was taking the rest of the country with it. Britain finally had a renaissance and joined the Western World again as a leader, even influencing the yet to be elected Ronald Reagan.
Thirty years ago Monday, the UK elected Margaret Thatcher.
As the anniversary of this historical event approaches, I spied two very different articles relating to the date. I thought that, of the two, the right wing Telegraph article was fairer and more representative. The FT however decided to confuse fact with fiction. As you will see, it is not the death of Thatcher’s legacy that the recent economic debacle recognized; if it were not for the monetarist campaign that dragged Britain, and then Europe, out of recession and short term, damaging, boom/bust cycles, we would be in a worse state today.
The current economic debacle is not because of Thatcher or her legacy; the legacy is that due to the human factor (greed), the crash was aggressive, and painful – the recovery will be equally devastating and dynamic. The economic model of today is superior to anything else tried by any other nation or governance, still in existence today. It was odd that the FT decided to go for political points, rather than good documentary.
You be the judge:
First, the Telegraph: You had to be there to grasp the scale of Margaret Thatcher’s revolution
Second, the Financial Times: The closing of the Thatcher era
3 responses so far ↓
1 Bob K May 1, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Bravo, Andrew.
2 Rapewaffle November 15, 2009 at 10:11 am
>when scoring an “A” in an exam put you in the selective, special minority status (that meant you had a future)
So you’re saying that back then only a “selective, special minority” of children had a future? And that this was somehow desirable?
Well if you wanted to convey the image of a delusional baby-eating tory, I have to congratulate you.
3 Andrew White November 15, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Waffle, thanks for the comment, but I think you misread the point. Back then, a small but growing number of do-gooders wanted everyone who scored “A” to feel bad; and everyone who scores “fail” to feel good. For some reason a natural order of things was not acceptable. I myself was not in the “A” camp – though I didn’t turn out that bad either. A being “A” was not the real issue. The real issue was that in the 70s, these do-gooders, who came into power, moved the country toward “equality of outcome”. I am a firm believer in “equality of opportunity”. You can see this tendency in much of the western world. Why is it that my three children all strive to get “A” or near A, every semester, as does 90% of all the other school children? We are setting our children up for failure and disappointment. Id much rather have a “C” and a clear plan of where and how work needs to be improved. By giving most kids “A’s” we hide their challenges. They will get exposed later in life, when it is too late to resolve.