UKIP on the march in English council elections

Thatcher's victories were around 42 percent of the vote. Scargill was the proverbial donkey who led the lions to defeat.

It doesn't matter what you call a political system. It will always be about the rulers and the ruled. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.

 

Again, Thatcher never achieved a majority (and required a war to get elected after engineering a recession arguably worse than the Great Depression). Scargill was elected with overwhelming majorities, making a mockery of your original comment.

The problem here is that you're not referring to political economic reality. You're going for cliché and sound-bite. You truly are one of Mandelson's kids

 

And you truly are the kind of brainwashed drone the one-party state controlling this country would be proud of.

 

We'll add that to the vacuous statement list!

 

Typical non-answer. Socialism doesn't work and can't work simply because of human nature.

And speaking of recessions, by 1979 and 2010 a Labour government left us penniless (in the former case it was partly due to the disasterous Heath government but in 2010 it was due to the so-called socialist party carrying on Thatcher's policies and wasting untold billions on wars).

 

And then when the usual happens - the British people vote in a Tory government to clean up the economic mess left by Labour, as happened in 1979 and 2010 - the Left then blames the economic woes on those Tory governments, completely neglecting to mention that the mess started under Labour before the Tories were in power.

 

Rubbish. All three of Thatcher's election wins, in 1979, 1983 and 1987, were by massive landslides.

You obviously have no comprehension of the economic mess that Britain was in under Labour BEFORE Thatcher came to power. Remember, the Winter of Discontent happened under a Labour Government, not a Tory one.

Scargill was the guy who, you may remember, ordered miners to go on strike in 1984/85 even if they didn't want to. The miners had no say in the matter and were often intimidated to strike even if they didn't want to. It was very undemocratic and the miners' strike did not get the overwhelming support from miners that the Left now try to have us believe. Now, though, thanks to Thatcher (who didn't set out to destroy the unions but merely made them democratic), workers can only strike if their union members vote in favour of it in a ballot.

 

Did this bollocks come to you in a dream? The miners were the most powerful union, who had humbled Ted Heath's Tory government, and Thatcher set out to crush them.
"Margaret Thatcher branded Arthur Scargill and the other leaders of the 1984-5 miners' strike ;'the enemy within'. With the publication of this bestselling book a decade later, the full irony of that accusation became clear. There was an enemy within. But it was not the National Union of Mineworkers that was out to subvert liberty. It was the secret services of the British state - operating inside the NUM itself. Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destry the power of Britain's miners' union. Using phoney bank deposits, staged cash drops, forged documents, agents provocateurs and unrelenting surveillance, MI5 and police Special Branch set out to discredit Scargill and other miners' leaders. Planted tales of corruption were seized on by the media and both Tory and Labour politicians in what became an unprecedentedly savage smear campaign.... "
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Enemy-within-Thatchers-Secret-Against/dp/1844675084

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What share of the vote did she achieve? Try honesty!

Strike activity actually went up under Thatcher. And let's not forget that the engineering of the recession, worst than the Great Depression, was Thatcher's doing. It wasn't some supply-side shock. It was economic stupidity.

The Colonel already destroyed your naive comments on Scargill.

 

Scargill not only went against the wishes of his union members, he sent out his militants to stop the miners who wanted to go to work - by violent means if need be. Scargill not only held a mining strike in the middle of summer when the coal houses were well-stocked anyway but ignored the warnings that the mines would have to be closed anyway if they fell into disrepair through lack of use. The strikes were just playing straight into Thatcher's hands. By the mid-1980s the country was sick and tired of strikes and as a result Thatcher romped back to victory again in 1987.

A recession worse than the Great Depression? I suggest you read a bit about history.

 

Wrong again! Thatcher used divide & conquer techniques, deliberately attacking specific areas (despite higher productivity levels). How old are you?

And confirm the validity of what I said. Thatcher's recession destroyed the industrial base, quadrupling unemployment. You really have to try hard to be that kack!

 

Thanks for this. I got a copy for 99p on Ebay. Should make for interesting reading.

 

Obviously older than you, because I can still remember everything being on strike, power cuts all the time and London turning into a giant rubbish dump. The 'industrial base'? Our 'industrial base' was destroyed because we couldn't compete with cheaper goods from Japan and China. And I hate to say this but your heroes in the Labour (New Tory) party have made more people unemployed than Thatcher with their open-door immigration and cheap imported labour policies.

A lot of the people made unemployed in the 1980s were actually unproductive middle-men - the kind of people New Labour re-employed on gaining power (whilst driving small business out of the country - 5 million of the middle classes emigrated taking their businesses with them). Thatcher's recession? Were you born when the Wilson/Callaghan government were in power? The country was on the point of meltdown. And thanks to 13 years of New Labour it is now over a trillion in debt and a subsidary of the European Union (which Thatcher, despite her many faults, at least had the sense to be wary of).

 

Perhaps too old then? Strike activity increased under Thatcher. This of course reflected the deliberate assault on the labour movement.

More ignorance! The industrial base was destroyed following a failed monetarist experiment. Right wingers don't do economics!

Where have I said I support New Labour? They did some good things, like significantly reduce the child poverty created by Thatcherism. However, they aren't by chums.

You continue to make ludicrous statements. 4 million (plus) middle-men? Wowsers!

 

The unions wanted complete control of the country through undemocratic means. They brought down the Heath and Callaghan governments, and then they pulled out all the stops to try bringing down the Thatcher government because they couldn't control it the way they had controlled the Wilson/Callghan administration. The resulting battle between Thatcher and the unions was a major contributor to the destruction of industry. Neither side cared about the workers. The workers were just the pawns. Where are the great socialist leaders now? Either in the house of lords or in cushy jobs in Europe. Like Neil Kinnock, a man who was supposedly against the EU and on the side of the workers, until he realised he could make a packet out of a cushy EU job and then he was off before you can say "sell-out". Then there's Lord Hattersley, Lord Prescott, Lord Mandleson. The list just goes on.

And I said "a lot of the people" not all of them. As I said, Thatcher was determined to clip the union wings and was too pig-headed to see the damage she was doing to industry in the process. But the union barons must share the blame. They priced us out of the market, they held the country to ransom leading to the fiasco in the late 1970s, they turned public sympathy in Thatcher's direction, and they made the Labour party in the 1980s unelectable so we were stuck with her.

 

This is rant.

Voters bring down governments.

More drivel. There was an active assault on the worker movement. That included the idiotic policy of eliminating minimum wages and subsidising corporations with in-work benefit provision.

Union leaders are voted by their workers. To suggest that they don't care about workers is an idiotic statement. Can they lead to bad outcomes? Of course. However, that is often due to union member preferences. For example, compared to other countries, British unions have tended to shy away from the 'efficient bargain' (focusing on wages, rather than wages and employment)

Was Thatcher trying a "In place of strife"? Of course not. It was a concerted attack on unionisation. End result? We have a low skill equilibrium, with high working poverty rates and focus on goods with a low income income elasticity of demand. All because of right wing dogma!

 

Voters bring down governments? Yes, but if the government has no control over anything then nobody will vote for it. And let's not pretend the media doesn't influence a lot of voters.

Thatcher caused a lot of damage, but she hasn't been in power for 23 years. What have successive PMs done? They could have solved all the problems she caused but they simply carried on her policies. This is because PMs are told what to do by civil servants, who are themselves representing the big corporations who are the real masters. Thatcher and Blair are no different. They're good at spin and propaganda but really they're just actors speaking words written for them.

 

So you want the government to have control over workers? Sounds fascist to me.

What a pathetic underestimation.

Her regime created the low skilled equilibrium. Eliminating it, particularly if you are a consensus party pandering to English WI, isn't an easy business. Again, you only show that you're ignorant of the radical damage created by the Thatcher regime.

 

Workers have the absolute right to withdraw their labour. The government could not allow a union to control what was a vitally important industry (*and the union did call its members out on strike without balloting them, and in the spring after large stockpiles of coal had been built) any more than any government should allow a corporation to control a vitally important industry.

Eliminating the problems of decades of bad government would be a damn sight easier if our parliamentary parties (not least the Tories under Thatcher) hadn’t sold out to the corporatist and EU agenda. It really isn’t the “English WI” governments have sold out to. If you think it is you’re ignorant of the forces affecting politics now, but the left can rarely bring itself to criticise the EU and as a result appears blind to its anti-worker and pro-corporate policies. Just as bad as the idiots who call the EU the “EUSSR”.

I'm prepared to change my opinion after consider what's in the book though.

 

I'm actually what would be considered Europhobe. Not a flag waving twot mind you! Anybody bring the Daily Mail into my house and I'll kick them in the bollocks. I'm Europhobe as the EU has enabled neoliberalism at a supra-national level, ensuring that it warps world trade and the welfare of the developing world.

In terms of domestic workers? Those that whinge about Europe are talking bobbins

 

So you have an irrational fear of, or hatred towards europe? What traumatic experience involving european have you been involved in as a child?

 

More drivel from you. Get a grip

 

I'm not the one diagnosing myself with a very wierd anxiety disorder here, you are.

 

I'm not interested in your schoolyard prattle routines. Reply to the post made or jog on

 

alright then.

the EU isn't promoting neoliberalism. It's a huge mess of unnecessary laws and regulations, european protectionism, against free trade, corporatism etc. It's not laissez faire by any means.