It was 25 years ago today.... (Thatcher)

[Skunk]

Originally posted by shamrock_uk: I'll take issue with one of your examples though, BT has never been making money to the best of my knowledge.

BT was in profit right up to the point of sale. Granted it wasn't as profitable as it should have been and waste was high - but it made a profit nonetheless despite being run as a public service rather than a business. (I can still remember the heady days of free directory inquiries, phone-boxes on every corner and subsidies to the old and incapacitated). Furthermore, in those days it was a monopoly.

Thatcher's government took profitable industries like these, rationalised them and made them even more profitable before selling them at cut-price (BT shares at the time of flotation were under-priced by 60% - I know, I bought some of them at the time and sold them a few years later at a comfortable profit).

Non-profitable industries were simply shut down (ie British Leyland) and the assets sold off. I had no problem with that in itself - but when you lay off ten thousand workers in a small town, you ought to provide regional assistance to create new jobs and training programs - Thatcher didn't - and went on to cut social welfare programs instead.

Originally posted by shamrock_uk: The council housing shortage now stemmed largely from two factors I thought - the transfer of control to Housing Associations (done with the best intentions at the time, returning control to the people that used them, although they have proved to be fairly incompetent i would say) and also the demographic change, the fact that so many people are now living on their own who didn't used to be. The figures are suprisingly high for that. Also immigration and asylum does have a significant impact upon council housing, although admitedly not as much as the Daily Mail would have us believe.

Actually, some 2 million social need council houses were sold off during Thatcher's premiership - in a country of 57 million, that's an *enormous* number of dwellings. And they were sold off cheap with discounts of up to 40% of the value of the house (again, to buy votes).

The transfer of council housing to housing associations occured outside of that figure and was done to prevent their transfer from the needy to the greedy,. In many cases, desperate councils simply 'gifted' the properites to housing associations, reasoning that the finanical loss was better to swallow than the the social loss with regards to the housing stock.

[wellard]

Originally posted by Barry the Sprout: Thatcher letting the poor buy the council houses was a very calculated move on her part. Homeowners tend to vote conservative more, its as simple as that. And the side effects of this? We now don't have enough council houses... a great victory for the free market!

Having a mortgage also makes you think twice about going on strike which council from a coal mining town would throw people out onto the streets for not paying their rent?


Also I beg to differ on the "it was medicine we had to take" theory. Sure the winters of discontent with dead piled up waiting to be buried because of strikes and poor old people dying through cold, again because of strikes; was a problem that had to be addressed by any government. But the cold calculating destruction of whole towns (and countries --- Scotland) just to smash the power base of unions rather than a managed conciliatory approach to the countries problems was just evil at worse and uncaring at the best. Other European countries entered the new centaury just as strong as Britain without half the pain.