I visited my English cousin in, I guess it was '91. I mostly remember being envious of Lemmings and Silkworm on his Amiga, but also being scandalized by the “Fuck the Poll Tax” sticker on his VCR.
My feelings about Ms. Thatcher are definitely of the uninformed, “gushing maggie-love” variety, but RichVR et al are some sick fucks.
I don’t think anybody can beat Elvis Costello for taking it to Thatcher:
“When England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as the black tar macadam”
And:
“Because there’s one thing I know I’d like to live long enough to savor
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.”
I pity her. Few are the people who genuinely do make the world a better place by ceasing to be part of it. What a truly dire waste of such charisma, intelligence and extraordinary ambition.
In 1971 the top-rate of income tax on earned income was cut to 75%. A surcharge of 15% on investment income kept the top rate on that income at 90%. In 1974 this cut was partly reversed, and the top rate on earned income raised to 83%. With the investment income surcharge this raised the top rate on investment income to 98%, the highest permanent rate since the war. This applied to incomes over £20,000 (£155,247 as of 2013),[2]. In 1974, as many as 750,000 people were liable to pay the top-rate of income tax.[4] Margaret Thatcher, who favoured indirect taxation, reduced personal income tax rates during the 1980s.[5] In the first budget after her election victory in 1979, the top rate was reduced from 83% to 60% and the basic rate from 33% to 30%.[6] The basic rate was also cut for three successive budgets - to 29% in the 1986 budget, 27% in 1987 and to 25% in 1988.[7] The top rate of income tax was cut to 40% in the 1988 budget.The investment income surcharge was abolished in 1985.
As a kid, I was pretty much taught by my family to hate thatcher. But 98% marginal tax rates? You might as well just hold up a sign saying “will everyone with ambition please emigrate”. She was an understandable reaction to trade unions holding the country to ransom, and a taxation policy that was a joke.
She, more than any other person in history, was responsible for sending Marxism in the western world into the garbage heap of history. A lot of people have problems with that fact, a lot of people wish it wasn’t so, but Marxists have always have had a problem with reality and look for someone to blame and hate when reality does not match up with their theories.
Oh, piffle.
The things that sent Marxism to the garbage heap of history were 1) no one figured out to make it work as an actual economic system, and 2) the vast empire that was its biggest proponent collapsed suddenly and dramatically under its own lumbering weight, because of 1).
Given that Marxist theory predicted that capitalism must inevitably be the one lying on the mat, it’s hardly surprising Marxism lost most of its proponents when the Soviet Union bit the dust. Anything Thatcher (or Reagan) did while in office had a secondary influence, at best.
I don’t celebrate deaths. Neither will I mourn this one. To be fair, at least she HAD some principles, unlike the current UK Coalition. Thatcher saw welfare consuming 10% of GDP. This lot have it declining in a depression and below 7% and falling sharply, with what amounts to anti-poor hate propaganda going on.
HumanTon - Now now. It works just fine. Up to about 250-300 people.
Cliffski - And yet the period between WWII and the 1970’s saw workers gain very rapidly in wealth. The period afterwards…has seen that trend reverse.
Well, the economic basis for their jobs evaporated. Manufacturing just disappeared all accross the 1st world.
UK manufacturing at the time was actually quite healthy. It was under Thatcher…
Yes, Marxism is unworkable given human nature. But that doesn’t mean Thatcher/Reagan did little. This position is contradicted by those imprisoned by Marxism in the Eastern Bloc. It is clear from the actions of the Czechs, Baltic States, Poles etc that they believe that Reagan/Thatcher had an influence at the least on the timing on the collapse of Russia.
So I tend to go with people who lived it and how they feel on the subject of whether Thatcher/Reagan had an influence.
Gee who knew the England had partisans that vote a party ticket. :-). Isn’t a straight line party the normal way for people vote in the UK.
Prior to Lady Thatcher the Torries held power for only 4 of the previous 15 years. After her election the Conservatives held power for 17 years and hold it today. So obviously she transformed far more Labor members into Conservatives than vice versa.
More importantly, Tony Blair embrace of free market capitalism would have probably classified him as Conservative pre Thatcher.
There is No Alternative is my favorite book on one of the most remarkable leaders of the 21st Century.
I understand that a minority of people disagree vehemently with her policies, but the celebrations of her death are simply contemptible.
Actually, no, there’s basically no evidence of “transformation” between Labour and the Tories, pretty much since the late 1940’s. What matters is how many of the faithful they can get out to vote in marginals.
“Had an influence” is a long way from “more than any other person in history,” though, which is where this digression got started.
Ed Begley Jr Had An Influence on electric cars getting traction in the US, but that doesn’t mean he’s responsible for them. (Any more than Al Gore invented the Internet or Maggie Thatcher invented soft-serve ice cream.)
I drive a vintage Range Rover ;) I love it, but it’s hardly well engineered.
You know what really is contemptible?
Let me give one anecdote to which I can personally attest. In leaving office she became a “consultant” to US tobacco giant Phillip Morris. She immediately used her influence on behalf of Phillip Morris to persuade the FCO to lobby the Polish government to reduce the size of health warnings on Polish cigarette packets. Poland was applying to join the EU, and the Polish health warnings were larger than the EU stipulated size.
I was the official on whose desk the instruction landed to lobby for lower health warnings. I refused to do it. My then Ambassador, Michael Llewellyn Smith (for whom I had and have great respect) came up with the brilliant diplomatic solution of throwing the instruction in the bin, but telling London we had done it.
So as you drown in a sea of praise for Thatcher, remember this. She was prepared to promote lung cancer, for cash.
Margaret Thatcher ‘unabashedly racist’ - Australia FM
Her ‘Care in the Community’ scheme left vulnerable people to fend for themselves, resulting in increased homelessness, crime and suicide. (our local mental hospital closed and we were left with homeless and mentally ill people wandering the streets of the town even to this day)
Her ‘Right to Buy’ scheme was a massive sell-off of council housing to private landlords, including many Tory donors. (The knock on effects can be found today in the UK’s atrocious housing market.)
She was fully briefed on what happened when 96 people died at Hillsborough, but intentionally distorted the truth because the Police were responsible.
She supported apartheid and considered Nelson Mandela’s ANC a terrorist organisation. She spent £1bn of government money propping up Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. She praised and supported Pinochet long after it was known he was responsible for killing hundreds of dissidents. She aided the Khmer Rouge while they were killing millions of Cambodians. Her friend list was atrocious, even so far as to inviting Jimmy Savile to spend Christmas Day with the Thatchers on a number of occasions. What a great judge of character she was.
There is a point where that does happen, but that point is much higher than what the trickle-downers suggest. 75% like Hollande wants- that will cause it, but not 50%. The economic stuff I read about trickle down shows that you start getting a real impact at around 60.
That said, globalization has caused a race to the bottom, so all bets are off, esperically with the transnational nature of billionaires.
The woman who wrecked Great Britain
I was a child of the `80s and my dim recollection from this side of the Atlantic is Thatcher was an example where the cure was as bad or worse than the disease. So: yes, she lowered taxes & gov’t spending, but she immiserated millions of people doing so; yes, she & Reagan helped end communism, but she supported brutal dictators like Pinochet & Hussein and helped push an expensive arms race with the Soviets which could’ve lead to all-out war (nuclear or otherwise); yes, she broke the stranglehold of trade unions, but it lead to the collapse of the UK’s manufacturing sector without replacing it with something better; she pushed deregulations which created the conditions amenable to the current economic & housing crises; wealth inequality has gotten worse, much as it has here; etc.
Would the UK be better off now had Thatcher not be running things for so long? No clue, largely because I’ve no idea who would’ve run the country instead and how they would’ve done things differently. But I do believe she had a lot of blood on her hands and the suffering of millions to her account. And the notion she had “no alternative” is disingenuous at best; there are always other options - not necessarily better ones, but to claim otherwise is simply an attempt to preempt debate or disagreement with what she wanted to do.
As expected, there are loads of old 80s toe-rags coming out of the woodwork in the UK reliving their youthful glory days and spitting on her grave. Actually I was an 80s toe-rag myself, and hated Thatcher and Reagan at the time. Eventually I came off the dole …
To try to alter the perspective a little, has any American president put as large a chunk of the workforce out of work as Thatcher did? The figures I’ve heard for Thatcher are around 2.5-3 million into unemployment, which would’ve been about 5% of the total population of the UK. So an equivalent for the US would be around 15 million people. Can you imagine how an American president would be viewed if they made 15 million jobs disappear over the course of their government, not accidentally but as a matter of explicit government policy. I’m not sure that would even be possible given the way power is separated in the US system. But if they did…well maybe you can understand why she’s not well loved by many in the UK. I understand many of the jobs went because the government stopped subsidising industries that weren’t economical without subsidy, but the point is would you expect any president that did the same to not be absolutely villified by a big chunk of the population, no matter how good the overall economic case? It’d make Obama and Bush look mildly disliked.
The writer of “Yes, Minister” has an interesting opinion piece up on CNN. It’s easy to forget, now, just how horrible the abuses Thatcher was elected to fight had become.
Practically every trade union went on strike about practically anything. The unions were running the country and, it has to be said, making a pretty bad job of it. I had always voted Labour, but the last straw for me was when six baggage handlers at Heathrow were sacked after they were found guilty in a criminal court of stealing from passengers’ luggage. The Transport and General Workers’ Union called a national strike, claiming the thefts were “baggage handlers’ perks.” It was no surprise to me that Mrs. Thatcher won a big majority, and I was one of the many who voted for her.
Personally, I find both her supporters and her detractors to be far too unilateral, but that’s endemic to modern political discourse. She did things I like and things I deplore, particularly her support of dictators, a problem the US has also had for decades. Regardless, she was neither a mustache-twirling villain nor a saint, which is true of pretty much every major democratic political figure. I can even find a few issues on which I agreed with the Bush II presidency, and he’s the worst of the worst in modern times, at least in my eyes.