Thursday, May 10, 2007

Margaret Thatcher's Greatest Achievements

CCHQ has named all the rooms in the new offices on Millbank. This is the reasoning for the naming of the Margaret Thatcher room...
Margaret Thatcher gave the poorest in society a way to buy their own homes
and an opportunity to own shares; her 1988 Royal Society Speech put
environmentalism and global warming on the political agenda; and her Scarman
Enquiry began to engage Britain’s disaffected inner city youth.

So, let's get this straight. The Scarman Enquiry was one of Margaret Thatcher's three biggest achievements. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. Click HERE where ConservativeHome has the full list of rooms. What do you think Margaret Thatcer's three greatest social achievements were?

41 comments:

Anonymous said...

She made us hate the stupid poor.

She made us hate the stupid Europeans.

She made us hate the Tories.

Well done Maggie, don't stick around xx

Anonymous said...

Credit where credits
due- I hated Thatch, but she did champion fighting against climate change!

Tom said...

Xerxes:

Do not presume to speak for anyone but yourself, if those are your opinions, fine, that is your business but I do suggest an anger management course or even medication for your problems.

The Hitch said...

Smashing the unions and the public sectors grip
The falklands
creating the right environment for entrepreneurial people to thrive

The polar opposite to Blair

A ROOM?
She should have the whole building named in her honour and a battleship

David Lindsay said...

Take your pick: the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, and the destruction of paternal authority within working-class families and communities through the destruction of that authority’s economic basis in the stockades of working-class male employment.

No Prime Minister, ever, has done more in any one, never mind all, of the causes of European federalism, Irish Republicanism, sheer economic incompetence, Police inefficiency and ineffectiveness, collapsing educational standards, and everything that underlies or follows from the destruction of paternal authority.

Meanwhile (indeed, thereby), the middle classes were transformed from people like her father into people like her son. She told us that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Correspondingly, she misdefined liberty as the “freedom” to behave in absolutely any way that one saw fit.

All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said it was, even though, before her, it never actually had been.

Specifically, she sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector (forty per cent of the economy) to an unprecedented level of central government 'dirigisme' (and not in the goodw ay used on my blog, before anypone chips in with that one).

She presided over the rise of Political Correctness, that most 1980s of phenomena, and so much of piece with that decade’s massively increased welfare dependency and its moral chaos, both fully sponsored by the government, and especially by the Prime Minister, of the day.

Hers was the war against the unions, which cannot have had anything to do with monetarism, since the unions have never controlled the money supply.

For good or ill, but against all her stated principles, hers was the refusal (thank goodness, but then I am no “Thatcherite”) to privatise the Post Office, as her ostensible ideology would have required.

And hers were the continuing public subsidies to fee-paying schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three (then as now) would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then.

The issue is not whether these are good or bad things in themselves. It is whether “Thatcherism”, as ordinarily and noisily proclaimed (or derided), was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, as it simply is not.

Hers was the ludicrous pretence to have brought down the Soviet Union merely because she happened to be in office when that Union happened to collapse, as it would have done anyway, in accordance with the predictions of (among other people) Enoch Powell.

But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, precisely by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa. I condemn the former as I condemn Castro, and I condemn the latter as I condemn Mugabe (or Ian Smith, for that matter). No doubt you do, too. But she did not, as she still does not.

And hers was what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the (starved) Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day.

There are many other aspects of any “Thatcherism” properly so called, and they all present her in about as positive a light. None of them, nor any of the above, was unwitting, forced on her by any sort of bullying, or whatever else her apologists might insist was the case. Rather, they were exactly what she intended.

But then again, who cares these days? Or, rather, who really ought to care? When the next General Election is upon us, people will have the vote who were not born when she was removed from office in order to restore the public order that had broken down because of what, in her allegedly paradigmatic United States, would have been her unconstitutional Poll Tax.

And by the time of the Election after that ... well, you can finish that sentence for yourself.

Get over her!

Old BE said...

1. Crushed socialism

2. Crushed socialism

3. Crushed socialism

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Tony Benn said today:

"I think it is not surprising that Mrs Thatcher, when asked her greatest achievement, said New Labour."

Anonymous said...

She had one achievement: she quite simply saved the country, turning it from a basket case at the bottom of the pile to to a trail blazer at the top, thereby making it once again a place worth working and living in.

And most of what few positive things Blair & Co have been able to do have been based on her foundations.

As for David Lindsay's post - like Blair's goodbye: too long, and nobody's listening any more.

Anonymous said...

david lindsay, do you have that saved for pasting into every story referencing Maggie. Like the rubbish piling up in the streets in pre-Thatcher Britain, it should be dumped.

SamuelCoates said...

To be fair, that paragraph is justifying her being billed as a "social reformer" rather than being an overall summary of her achievements.

David Lindsay said...

Ed and Londoner, then what is the point of the Conservative Party (or, indeed, of a Conservative Party as you conceive it, even if not the present Cameroon Party) any more? That, from your own perspective, you can still see the need for such a party proves my point, and disproves your own.

It is interesting that you do not, and nor does Anonymous, engage with any of my specific points, because you know that I am right: these are the things that she actually did, rather than those which you would like her to have done.

She also, when Education Secretary, closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled. After becoming PM, she used to affect to have attended a state grammar school without ever actually saying so in so many words, since that would have been a lie. It was part of her general affectation of far humbler origins than were in fact the case.

Anonymous said...

I'm presuming they named the Gents after her...?

Anonymous said...

Um, is this not an oxymoron?

How can someone who said there was no such thing as society possibly be responsible for any sort of social achievement?

Do tell.

[2br02b]

Old BE said...

Then what is the point of the Conservative Party

Or indeed any political party or democratic process? Why have politics when we can just have 990 more golden Labour years?

The Tories stand for evolution, Labour stands for revolution.

Anonymous said...

The quote in context for once:

Margaret Thatcher was being critical of people who looked to the state to solve every difficulty. She said: 'They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'

Sir-C4' said...

She saved the world from socialism

She saved Britain from becoming a third-world satellite state of the Soviet Union

She saved the world from nuclear armageddon.

Anonymous said...

1. introduced section 28
2. the poll tax
3. froze child benefit

Anonymous said...

I see that one room has been called after RA Butler.

What a curious choice, notwithstanding the 1944 Education Act!

Butler was closely associated with the craven policy of appeasement under Chamberlain being a trusty Lieutenant of Lord Halifax and an enthusiast for Munich. In 1940, after Dunkirk, his master was forced to rebuke him after he was caught conducting 'peace-feeler' discussions with the Swedes.

Later he was closely identified with the consensus politics of the 1950s/60s which did so much damage to this country: hence the name "BUTskellism" for a policy that has lately been resurrected by "Dave" (a policy which will do as much if not more harm than it did then and return us to the 1970s all over again).

In addition, when faced twice with the chance to grasp the leadership of his party, he muffed it both times. Not a great example and hardly an inspiring choice for one of CCHQ's rooms.

But given the Pinko-Liberal Tendency that has now captured the curiously named 'Conservative' Party, perhaps we should not be surprised by this development.

Anonymous said...

Smashed the Labour Party
Smashed the Unions
Smashed the Argies

Anonymous said...

Which one is the "Call me Dave" room?

Anonymous said...

Anon @ 4.31:

"How can someone who said there was no such thing as society possibly be responsible for any sort of social achievement?"

Be fair, now. Alfred Sherman wrote the speech for her.

Anonymous said...

Mr Lindsay, in response to my statement that Mrs Thatcher saved the country says "...Londoner, then what is the point of the Conservative Party any more? That, from your own perspective, you can still see the need for such a party proves my point, and disproves your own."

There's still lots to do, even when the country is saved. I think Cameron can do quite a lot of it. But, yes, the country does not need to be saved any more in quite the same way that it did in 1979 (although there has been a certain amount of backsliding in some areas, albeit improvements in others, over the last 10 years). Nor did Mrs T do everything, or do everything right.

I cannot see how what I am saying proves your point (so far as I understand it, as I made clear your original post was too long and boring to read, let alone refute point by point) that everything she did was wrong, hypocritical etc.

I should have added that, together with Reagan as her principal partner, she hastened the end of the Soviet Empire without starting any wars.

Well done to the Anon who quotes the "no such thing as society" speech in context. I am going to copy and paste that out so I have it handy.

David Lindsay said...

"I should have added that, together with Reagan as her principal partner, she hastened the end of the Soviet Empire without starting any wars."

It would have collapsed anyway. Enoch Powell said so. American paleocons said so (and still do). Peter Hitchens says so today. The "brought down the Soviet Union" fantasy is a key staging-post on the road to neoconservative ruin.

Anonymous said...

Trying to stick to three social achievements...

I find it quite hard to describe my first choice, it would probably end up rather to TBs message about

I think the greatest social achievement is hard to describe succinctly, as it was not the result of a specific policy, but an amalgam of the by-products of her economic achievements. I was in my final term of junior school when she came to power. In a lesson talking about the upcoming election, I asked the regulation issue CND badged Leeds teacher some anodyne question. He did answer it but went on to add “…not that it matters to you. You’ll sod off to America as soon as you’re out of university like all the intelligent ones and get out of this (particular mild expletive forgotten) country”. By 1990 when I did graduate I stayed, the country and its attitudes were transformed, while I don’t try to claim it was universal, there was generally a justified feeling of optimism and self-confidence (the one that Blair has been trying to take credit for today. It’s actually the return of the intrusive state under Blair that has me reaching for my US contact list.

After that, I think I’d have to put the reintroduction of reward, and respect for hard work, enterprise and risk. It’s true that in some respects it didn’t go far enough, and for a very limited number of people it took on an unappealing ‘loadsamoney’ side, but overall a pretty good step was taken in pretty much the right direction.

Third, and third because it was very much an incomplete work in even 1997 the changes to the welfare state. What was achieved was a fair degree of changing of public attitudes towards what people should, and should not expect the state to support. Unfortunately, as even other countries whose political centre of gravity tends to be somewhat to the right of their neighbours found, the actual reengineering work proved somewhat harder. Frankly though, compared to the golden opportunity to get to grips with the welfare state that NuLab have p***** up the wall, she really did do as much as the political context she was working in would allow.

Ted said...

The problem with many in the blogosphere is they are so keen to regurgitate bile or preconceptions that they don't read and comprehend the point.
I am pleased that the Party has recognised Thatcher as a social reformer - the leftist bile she receives often overshadows the good reforms she made in housing, union reforms, economic freedoms. Her administration changed the social fabric irrevocably as did those of the other Tories who have had rooms named after them.
On her other achievements I commend her resolute stand with Reagan against the USSR, while being open to dialogue, hastened the fall of the USSR & Warsaw Pact.

Anonymous said...

1. Right to buy council homes
2. Smashing the NUM strike and Arthur Scargill
3. The Falklands War.

But there's so much to choose from. I'd also mention the 1981 budget, delaying though unfortunately not defeating our entry into the ERM, privatisation, income tax reductions and simplifications, trade union reform, various acts of deregulation, dragging America into opposing Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait, etc. etc. etc.

Anonymous said...

Either CCHQ are performing immaculately their part in the most effective covert operation since WWII or we are all in serious trouble.

Anonymous said...

Being an old con and thinking Thatcher was the worst prime minister we had ,she got us in this muck , but I know saying that on this board would be blasphemous.

Raedwald said...

Naming rooms after actual persons seems a bit 'toilet' to me. An ex-earl of my acquaintance had his guest bedroom doors discreetly engraved on the card-slot with his ancestors' battles; Oudenarde, Ramillies, Fontenoy and so on. So how about naming the HQ rooms, f'rinstance

- Orgreave
- Wapping
- Port Stanley
- Brussels

Anonymous said...

Forthhurst
I think and hope they are. However we are in very serious trouble anyway.

Sometimes/all of the time, I really wonder why someone like David cameron would want the job. He is rich good looking, has a lovely young wife and children to worry about.

I would not want his future job for all the free limos in the entire world.

Good luck David, you really will need it. I think you must be completely mad but someone has got to do the gig. Thank god its you, not me.

Anonymous said...

Thatchers greatest legacy.

She did not try to run Britain she let the British people have a go again.

Thus prooving what all sane/right wing libertarians take for granted. That it is people that make a country rich and keep it free and tolerent, not governments and least of all socialist governments of any type.

Anonymous said...

It was a Labour idea to sell council houses to tenants.

Thatcher made Britain riot.

She is responsible for global warming.

She sold the family silver and it's now wrecked.

Old BE said...

It was a Labour idea to sell council houses to tenants.

Why then have the Blair years been spent restricting the Right To Buy?

Anonymous said...

It's very important that we point out to people some of the less obvious things that Maggie did, things that people don't immediately think of.

In this case, Maude's chosen topics are chosen since they are areas that people would automatically associate with Labour. But in fact, Maggie achieved much more in much shorter time, but people forget it.

All credit to him for pointing it out.

(Whether this was the right context to do it in is a separate discussion.)

Drew said...

Actually, I don't know which political party came up with the idea to sell council houses, but it was definitely up and running in the early 1970s. It was more dependent on the local authority in those days - Thatcher just made it the right of all.

Anonymous said...

"How can someone who said there was no such thing as society possibly be responsible for any sort of social achievement?"

----

Anon 4:50:

"The quote in context for once:

Margaret Thatcher was being critical of people who looked to the state to solve every difficulty. She said: 'They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'

So? That changes nothing. She did not at any point in that quote say there was such as thing as society after all.

----

Anon 5:36:

"Be fair, now. Alfred Sherman wrote the speech for her."

So? That's irrelevant. She did not have to say it if she did not agree.

==========

BTW, while recognising the need for what she did, one by-product was the effective decimation of the Conservative Party membership in many Associations throughout the country--and it's difficult to fight a war without troops on the ground.=

It's worth noting that Blair seems to have had a similar effect on the national Labour Party.

[2br02b]

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 5:26 PM said:

I see that one room has been called after RA Butler. What a curious choice...Butler was closely associated with the craven policy of appeasement under Chamberlain...the consensus politics of the 1950s/60s which did so much damage to this country: hence the name "BUTskellism" ...faced twice with the chance to grasp the leadership of his party, he muffed it both times...hardly an inspiring choice for one of CCHQ's rooms.

Visiting the hostages' church at Broxted last week, I met two local people who told me that RAB had lived in the house next door to the church. They said that RAB, who was MP for Saffron Walden, was greatly loved and 'the finest PM we never had'.

So greatly loved was RAB that, following his death, the crowds of people who attended his funeral spilled outside of the church and filled the graveyard. So many people from all over the country visited the church and graveyard to pay their respects over the months following his death that a part of the church was set aside for RAB.

Not all Conservatives share your view of RAB, anon.

Auntie Flo'

Anonymous said...

John McCarthy, Beruit hostage for 5 years, and his parents lived in RAB's old house, next door to Broxted church and were members of the congregation that's why Broxted became known as the hostages' church.

Along with McCarthy's partner, Jill Morrell, the church and village of Broxted mounted a wonderfully inventive and successful 5 year campaign to keep John McCarthy's captivity in the public eye/press/TV and to secure the release of all the Beruit hostages.

A 'Days Campaign' placed posters all over the country and in newspapers - many updated every day to graphically illustrate the length of McCarthy's captivity. A candlelight 'freedom vigil' was held in the church when John had been a hostage for 1000 days. Every tree, and just about everything else, in the village and churchyard was festooned with yellow ribbons. One of McCarthy's friends was blindfolded and chained up in a cage for days, giving interviews to the press.

Wonderfully graphic campaign images.

On McCarthy's release, the euphoric Broxted vicar held a large bottle of champagne aloft in the pulpit, announced a 'champagne service' and vicar and congregation staggered around the church, filled with as much alcoholic as holy spirit.

Auntie Flo'

Anonymous said...

1)Creation of mass unemployment with consequent ruin of millions of lives.
2)Squandering of north sea oil revenues, squandering one-off opportunity to re-equip British industry, thereby turning England into a land of shop assistants.
3)Hyperinflation of house prices resulting in Tory party being taken over by estate agents causing permanent end to Tory pretensions to be better than everyone else.

Anonymous said...

Francis Maude is an idiot.