Goodbye Maggie

A lot of this particular article is at best mean spirited, and a last stand on the soap box for the willfully blind before the muse of history puts it all back in balance.

The vast majority of the population see their narrow personal interests as the ‘national interest’ when in fact the national interest often demands personal sacrifice. Ask any Soldier.

The outrageous behavior of the union movement throughout the twentieth century strangled the national interest just as surely as had the traditional landholders throughout much of history.  Neither are pleasant to look at and they are worse to rationalize.

We have still not reached a complete solution and perhaps we never will.   However, Maggie did one thing right.  She remembered who ruled and that it was for all the people.  She then broke those who thought otherwise.

Do we really regret that the coal industry died several years earlier than it would have naturally?  It still had to go then.  Best is that their children are no longer in those mines.  The deindustrialization experienced in North America, and Europe was the price paid to expand the global market with the assistance of China and India.  That is now reversing, and we will see a rapid rebuilding taking place and a natural rise in quality employment and yes effective unions.  This will not be a victory for socialist principles, but common economic principles as worked out in Germany after Hitler’s War.

It all does not matter.  Maggie broke egregious monopolies of both labour and business and redistributed wealth and power to the middle class in particular and to anyone who could grasp it.  I value her place in history on that basis alone.  In fact, it is my shortcut for determining the importance and success of a leader.  Was money and real power distributed downward against the normal inclination to collect both upward?

By that simple measure, she was a stunning success, though she made plenty of mistakes and even blunders of no particular consequence.  Her economic agenda has given us a strong healthy England to grace Europe.

Clearing up the mess that Margaret Thatcher left

Only when we have democracy in the boardroom will we have broken Thatcher's kind of capitalism

Frances O'Grady

The Guardian, Tuesday 9 April 2013

Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. Some say she revolutionised British politics – certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman – but it served a reactionary end. The seismic shift from industry to financial-based capitalism that Thatcherism ushered in rattled the establishment. But, as the prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard says: "For things to remain the same, everything must change."

Thatcher's unwavering belief in the invisible hand of the market meant that she did not believe it was part of her job description to put anything in its place. A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. What was different in Britain was that she assumed no responsibility to minimise social disruption or to create new jobs and industries.

Instead state assets and a huge income stream from North sea oil were used to fund a populist programme of tax cuts, privatisation and council house sales. The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy.

There is a paradox. Thatcher's social instincts were always nostalgic conservative. The great contradiction in her politics was that someone who yearned for the certainties of small-town shopkeeper economics helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance that is still an ironic positive legacy of her time in power. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project.

And for all the tributes being paid by ministers this week, the issues at the top of the government's agenda are all to do with clearing up the mess she created. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market.

The 70s was Britain's most equal decade. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. Demonising unions and stripping the great mass of private-sector workers of a voice and power in the workplace is still the root of the great living standards crisis that saw the share of wealth going to wages slide long before Lehman Brothers failed.

Even the nasty politics of "welfare reform" is driven by the high cost of subsidising low pay through in-work benefits, and indifference to the plight of jobless communities who have never recovered from de-industrialisation.

The financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. The dominance of finance in the economy and the failure of bank regulation flowed from her belief that markets should always be left to themselves. The credit boom – both here and in the USA – may have gone against her Grantham roots but was an equally inevitable result of deregulation and the temptation of easy loans for people hungry to improve living standards.

There is now, however, an opportunity to commit to a new politics that learns lessons from her ambition yet undoes the damage and focuses on reconstruction. A massive programme of social housing would be a good place to start, stimulating the economy. Arguably, it was not the sale of council houses that was the problem, but the failure to replace the stock and maintain a sufficient supply of affordable homes. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners – one form of inflation she encouraged – but disastrous for future generations.

Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word. At its heart must be an active programme to create good jobs and raise living standards. We must reduce the inequality that has seen a super-rich elite, openly contemptuous of the flag and family values Thatcher proclaimed, float free from the rest of us.

Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. She preferred markets, and a strong but minimal central state that backed their rule. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices.

This is the area where we need to make progress – not just in restoring strong local government, but in understanding that democracy means more than a Westminster vote. I will know that we have finally broken from the kind of capitalism that she championed and which died in 2008 when we see workers elected on to company boards.