Hard News by Russell Brown

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Hard News: Thatcher

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  • Kumara Republic, in reply to Angus Robertson,

    So its up to the left to do something. Since what Maggie did was awful and horrible and the almost worst possible thing in the world (just marginally less so than torture) we can pretty much assume it isn’t going to be – let the unprofitable banks go bust.

    Or go one step further and unbundle them, Sherman Act-style. That would probably be the mirror image of Thatcher handbagging the unions.

    The fundamental problem that Britain had (and largely still has) was a total lack of community of interest between employers and workers.

    The former (drawn in human terms from a public school educated, isolated caste) were concerned to achieve profits with minimal investment and thus maintain their dominant economic position.

    In the Anglophone New World, there's a similar class divide, only privatised (Wall St CEOs) instead of institutionalised (lords, barons & earls). The kind of pseudo-meritocracy written about by Chris Hayes in Twilight of the Elites.

    The southernmost capital … • Since Nov 2006 • 5446 posts Report Reply

  • Ross Mason,

    Has anyone discovered this gem? The Mention of Quantative Easing and a coworker showing me prompted this:

    The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble

    Upper Hutt • Since Jun 2007 • 1590 posts Report Reply

  • 81stcolumn,

    I don’t think I’m qualified to answer the question; could the Coal Industry have been saved? I do however a have a little insight into the survival of other industries. The assembly shop that I referred to belonged to a company that is still in business, still in private hands and until recently it was family owned. The company has a manufacturing base in the UK unlike many others with head offices in London and manufacturing wherever. As far as my limited understanding will allow, this company seems to have survived by not growing too quickly, not racing to raise shareholder capital and being measured with respect to overseas expansion/outsourcing. Moreover, even though I hated the work I remained fond of the company. I was treated well, offered overtime and allowed to learn from my mistakes. Such an approach is the product of good leadership as opposed to economics or straightforward management. My second cousin still owns Vollers corsets and I know how much they care for the people that work for them.

    It is tempting to suggest that the failings of greater British industry were inevitable or exclusively the responsibility of unions/workers. There were at the time some critical failures of leadership in the preceding period and an utter failure of vision. A strictly hierarchical model (as was common at the time) of leadership may be argued to be sustainable where wages compensate for a lack of ownership by and engagement with the workforce. Where wages were lower and more commitment was needed, some sense of ownership had to be extended to the workforce in lieu of hard cash. Cooperatives are one way of achieving this and they have strengths in that a clear line is drawn between the success of workers and the control of profits. But arguably other less extreme and indeed softer models of engagement may have been useful. Looking like you gave sh*t would have been a start in many cases – In the UK this was like talking to the taxman about poetry.

    On the other hand delivering weakened nationalised industries to privatisation undermined a whole chain of manufacturing. Related industries just didn’t have the time in which to diversify in order to avoid collapse alongside their shrinking partners. Many businesses just got bought and re-structured out of existence. With this went a lot of expertise nurtured in the 1970’s which is gone forever. It is worth remembering that Sheffield at the time of the closures was still one of the largest manufacturers of specialist steels in the world. So I guess part of the answer was in buying time for partners and some protections for recently rationalised industries. As I stated before, it is one thing to kick someone off the boat another altogether to do so without giving them a life-jacket. I suspect a lot of businesses gave up when they believed there was no hope and a lot of workers got very angry when they were left with no choices.

    Excuse me if this seems to naïve or misses the point.

    Nawthshaw • Since Nov 2006 • 790 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown, in reply to Rich of Observationz,

    For the print workers, was it rational? A printer now (unless elevated to management) probably works longer for less money than their counterpart in the 1970s. Journalists maybe had a few golden years as papers expanded to fill 200 page Sunday supplements, but that’s all gone now.

    What the print unions went to the wall for was a system in which journalists were expressly forbidden to touch keyboards connected to computers in their work. They could only use typewriters, and then have their copy retyped by members of the National Graphical Association, the only union whose members were permitted to use computers to enter and set type.

    In general, though, newspaper type wasn't set with computers, but with Linotype, a technology invented in 1884, and printed with Letterpress presses, because the unions had resisted attempts to move to computer setting and offset printing. It was a dirty, inefficient process, end-to-end.

    When I subbed at music publications in the mid-80s, I'd mark up copy on little sheets, which would be taken away by motorcycle courier, and come back as galleys, which I'd correct so they could be sent away again by motorcycle courier. I'd spend a couple of hours at a time waiting for something to happen. Once at Music Week I was warned not to make too many corrections to a galley because people wouldn't like it. I was flabbergasted.

    Could it have been done differently? As I noted in the original post , it was in New Zealand, where neither management or the unions were so confrontational (by comparison both sides spent six years arguing unreasonable positions before Wapping went down) and a relatively painless transition was achieved. It was great when we got a computer at Rip It Up -- it meant copy could be entered and edited more quickly, accurately and cheaply. (Although the first time we used it, we somehow lost everything right on deadline and I had to retype the entire magazine.)

    More to the point, it happened in Britain. While the Battle of Wapping was in full cry, The Independent and Today smoothly launched with all the technology the established papers were forbidden to use. It was not a sustainable situation for those established papers.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown, in reply to 81stcolumn,

    Excuse me if this seems to naïve or misses the point.

    Not at all. I think I agreed with pretty much all of it.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha, in reply to 81stcolumn,

    Seems highly relevant to our recent discussions about the Tiwai smelter. Thank you.

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

  • Rich Lock,

    back in the mother countr… • Since Feb 2007 • 2728 posts Report Reply

  • Katita,

    Just thinking back to my time in the UK. I was in London when we heard the news she'd resigned. I'd just started my first 'real' job for an Anglican child care charity. They were a fairly earnest lot, stopped for prayers at 11am each day (still puzzling how they managed to employ an antipodean atheist). Anyway someone listening to a radio announced "she's gone". Cheering broke out around the office. And bugger me, if we didn't down tools and open some seriously dodgy lambrusco to celebrate. Yes these people who dealt with the human cost of Thatcher's policies, the poverty, begging, homelessness and hopelessness she produced. They cheered she'd gone - like VJ day or something. It was wonderful - and I realised that these Christians might be alright afterall.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 67 posts Report Reply

  • Yamis, in reply to Stephen Judd,

    Cheers for that link Stephen. Was an interesting read for somebody who watched a fair amount of Thatcher on the NZ nightly news as a kid of about 10, but was a bit bewildered by it all.

    Since Nov 2006 • 903 posts Report Reply

  • Rob Stowell,

    Great stories- very interesting reading. Thanks Katita et al :)
    And Lange:

    “She addressed me as if I were at a Nuremberg rally”, he said after meeting Margaret Thatcher.

    Whakaraupo • Since Nov 2006 • 2120 posts Report Reply

  • Lilith __,

    Slight digression, I'm boggling at Bill English:

    He said it was understandable Kiwis did not save as much when they received interest-free student loans and healthcare.

    They saw their taxes as an “insurance premium” covering those things. But he said he was not signalling a move to more user-pays.

    He ruled out significant tax cuts in the near future, saying it would be “a wee while yet” before there was room for that.

    [ Source ]

    Taxes are an insurance premium ?? There’s a Thatcher legacy, right there.

    Dunedin • Since Jul 2010 • 3895 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown, in reply to Katita,

    Anyway someone listening to a radio announced “she’s gone”. Cheering broke out around the office. And bugger me, if we didn’t down tools and open some seriously dodgy lambrusco to celebrate.

    It's amazing how many of these stories there are.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown,

    The often-pilloried Josie Pagani has written a notably perceptive post on Thatcher and the Left for Pundit:

    Neil Kinnock was my kind of Labour leader, a caring, decent and responsible visionary. But he lost because he led a party that always sounded conservative, as if the past Thatcher was sweeping away was better than any future we could articulate. Even as I stood with coal miners, holding ‘coal not dole’ placards, I wondered why we weren’t articulating something more constructive. In Sweden the left adopted the slogan ‘protect the worker not the job’, and succeeded where the UK left failed.

    As she notes, the Left also in theory opposed some trends that were the justifiable aspirations of ordinary people -- particularly home ownership.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Craig Young,

    On Pinknews, Peter Tatchell has said this about Thatcher’s own connection to right-wing dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in the eighties:

    Throughout the 1980s, Thatcher colluded with the right-wing dictatorships in South Africa, Iraq, Pakistan, Chile, Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, Indonesia and the Philippines. She and her supporters have glossed over this less than seemly side of her freedom crusade.

    Ever the Cold War warrior, a country’s stance in the East versus West struggle for global hegemony was the principle basis of her foreign policy and diplomacy. She also indulged dictators if there was money to be made; hence her love of that bastion of freedom, the House of Saud. She sold them weapons and bought their oil. It was a necessity of realpolitik, she said by way of justification. There was not a jot of concern expressed by her about the plight of women or religious minorities under the iron-fisted rule of King Fahd. Freedom for Saudi women and Christians did not concern her.

    At a time when human rights organisations were condemning Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, her government sought to sell arms components to the Iraqi dictator in 1981. Ignoring his poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, which killed at least 3,000 people, she dispatched her envoy to offer Saddam £340 million in export credits; thereby helping sustain his brutal regime and arguably helping make it possible for him to attack Kuwait and ignite the first Gulf War.

    Thatcher was also one of the closest allies of the apartheid leaders in South Africa. Although not personally in favour of apartheid she defended their regime because she saw it as a bulwark against communism. To this end, she believed that black freedom in South Africa had to be sacrificed to what she saw as the more important goal of halting the spread of communism in Africa. She smeared Nelson Mandela as a terrorist when she denounced his liberation movement, the African National Congress, as “a typical terrorist organisation” and vetoed Commonwealth sanctions against the apartheid government. During the savage repression in South Africa in 1984, she hosted the apartheid leader, P W Botha, for tea at Chequers. Just a few years before the fall of apartheid, her spokesman scoffed that it was “cloud cuckoo-land” to suggest that Mr Mandela would ever win power. She was an apologist for the white minority regime, right to the end.

    Likewise, for the same anti-communist reasons, Thatcher backed the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, even after his military government was exposed for interning, torturing and killing liberals and democrats. More than 2,000 Chileans were murdered and over 30,000 tortured. She declined requests to speak out for freedom in Chile; preferring to heap praise on Pinochet’s adoption of her monetarist economic mantras.

    Even after the Cold War was over, in 1999, when Pinochet was detained in London on charges of human rights abuses, Thatcher denounced his arrest as “unjust and callous” and praised him for “bringing democracy to Chile.”

    Despite similar grave human rights abuses, General Suharto of Indonesia – who murdered 500,000 suspected communists following his 1965 military coup – won accolades from Margaret Thatcher. She hailed him as “one of our very best and most valuable friends” and never spoke out against his arrest and detention of journalists, students and human rights defenders. Far from objecting to the military occupation of unfree East Timor and West Papua, she sold Jakarta weapons that were used to suppress the people there. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 573 posts Report Reply

  • Martin Lindberg, in reply to Russell Brown,

    It’s amazing how many of these stories there are.

    What is also amazing is that there are people who appear not to have known about these stories. A friend of mine told her story about where she was when the news of Thatcher’s resignation spread. She described a similar story to the ones told here. However, a younger aquaintance who is a Young National member also heard the story but simply refused to believe that this could have happened. His view of Thatcher only came from reading about her and her policies and he thought that she must have been seen as some sort of hero to the people of Britain.

    Stockholm • Since Jul 2009 • 802 posts Report Reply

  • Rob Stowell, in reply to Martin Lindberg,

    he thought that she must have been seen as some sort of hero to the people of Britain

    In all the eulogising (from conservatives) it's not often mentioned she was ditched by the Conservatives not ousted by some resurgent 'Left". (And US commentary seems especially blind to how divisive- and hated- she was in parts of Britain.)

    Whakaraupo • Since Nov 2006 • 2120 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha, in reply to Lilith __,

    Taxes are an insurance premium ?? There’s a Thatcher legacy, right there.

    Verily. No society, etc.

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

  • Stewart,

    I don't have a clue what he's* going on about with that

    Taxes are an insurance premium

    line. Can anyone explain it to me?

    *English, not Sacha

    Te Ika A Maui - Whakatane… • Since Oct 2008 • 577 posts Report Reply

  • Lilith __, in reply to Stewart,

    I don’t have a clue what he’s* going on about with that

    Taxes are an insurance premium

    line. Can anyone explain it to me?

    I think he means that you pay your taxes in case you ever get sick, disabled, or need to borrow to get an education. We're all only doing it for our individual benefit.

    A wonderfully bizarre explanation for why NZers have a very low rate of savings - we pay taxes instead! Not that the cost of living, especially housing, is enormous and wages are low.

    Dunedin • Since Jul 2010 • 3895 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha, in reply to Stewart,

    *English, not Sacha

    Heh. that may end up on a teeshirt

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

  • Rich of Observationz, in reply to Rob Stowell,

    Reluctantly ditched, I think. It was fairly marginal and if the voting process had been as simple as in NZ or Australia, she may have survived the spill.

    What convinced them she was damaged goods was the huge level of opposition to the poll tax, including the biggest riot in central London since the 19th century.

    Back in Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 5550 posts Report Reply

  • Steve Withers,

    I suspect many of the things people now credit Thatcher with in hindsight may actually have been realised during Tony Blair’s time as PM. Thatcher did not govern “Cool Britannia”. Looking back, it can be difficult to peel back the layers of later memes.

    A local example would be the weeks it used to take the old Post Office to provide a new customer with a phone….all fixed by privatisation…..except it wasn’t. Peter Troughton fixed it pre-sale as CEO while Telecom was an SOE. Then it was sold. But revisionists like to claim that service improved after Telecom was sold.

    Auckland • Since Mar 2008 • 312 posts Report Reply

  • Ian Dalziel,

    Minister of mining and urban destruction...
    ...as a mark of proper respect I see NZ is sending our most apt politician to see her interred...

    Christchurch • Since Dec 2006 • 7953 posts Report Reply

  • Rich of Observationz, in reply to Ian Dalziel,

    One thing Thatcher never did was to introduce a Henry VIII law. I suspect the Lords wouldn't have worn it.

    Back in Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 5550 posts Report Reply

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